It’s not really clear how my institution is going to proceed for the fall semester and nor is it clear that I’ll be teaching in the fall. (One of the options that has been floated is to treat AY 20-21 as if it has three semesters rather than two semester plus a summer session, with faculty teaching in two of three; I volunteered to teach in the summer instead of the fall if we go that route.) But of course the possibilities for online instruction are at least simmering on my mental back burner and proceeding at a rolling boil on #pedagogytwitter.
One of the recent controversies has been over whether it is permissible to require students to turn on their cameras in Zoom seminar or whether that’s an invasion of privacy. Having taught my lecture class this semester to a whole screen full of blank boxes, I am definitely going to require that cameras be on. I can’t imagine an entire semester in which I don’t have the visual cues to tell tell how my teaching is landing, whether students are with me, or whether they understand what’s going on — especially when it’s a new group of students I won’t have at least had some face-time with at the beginning of the term. For seminars, there’s no way to even try to build rapport among the students if they only know each other as small gray rectangles . And in terms of accessibility, cameras-off is a challenge for students who read lips; I had a lip-reading student this semester and almost every time a student asked a question, I had to stop and remind them to put on their camera because even though I made a general announcement at the start of online instruction, it didn’t seem to stick. I understand that some students might not want other people to see their homes, be it for self-consciousness about socio-economic class, general concern for privacy, or any other number of reasons.
So in my syllabus language that requires cameras to be on, I’m going to explicitly state that they can use a background if they have privacy concerns relating to their classmates or me seeing into their homes. And I’m going to feature it, both so that students with privacy concerns don’t feel singled out and to make instructional use of the tools available. I haven’t quite worked out the details, but I’m planning to make an extra credit assignment to choose a background that somehow relates to the week’s reading or theme and keep a short record of the rationale for each choice. I hope it’ll be a way for students to engage while making the most of a sub-optimal situation.
