I am no expert on online learning. Before the pandemic and social distancing, I was about as old school a teacher as one could be. True, I required students to type essays in MLA format and even used a PPT to teach them proper formatting on Microsoft Word. But that’s about it. My main technologies in the classroom were whiteboard, marker, books, pen and paper.
If that weren’t enough, I have criticized and countenanced criticism of online classes and courses, including those prominent classical education ones. Years ago, when my former head of school told me his grand plan for launching an online education platform to expand the reach of our classical Christian school, I argued against it and effectively buried it in the dust.
But times have changed…. And I found myself several weeks ago developing an online learning plan with my colleagues that would aim to preserve our educational philosophy and methods during mandated social distancing. In a way, I had been prepared for this moment through using online communications tools, like Zoom meetings, more than ever before in the last couple years. I had enough experience and understanding that, when the need hit in early March, I knew exactly what I thought we should do.
And so, whether my luddite past or my tech-savvy present appeals to you, perhaps you will be intrigued to hear my thoughts on the benefits and the drawbacks of online learning. Parents, teachers and school leaders need to think through the transformations that are involved in an online education.
As Marshall McLuhan famously quipped,
“The medium is the message.”
How is the educational experience being transformed by the online platforms we are using during social distancing?
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Only if we are aware of the shifts and spend focused attention on understanding the differences, can we make the most of the benefits and mitigate the downsides. And again, while I can’t claim expertise in online learning after a few weeks, perhaps I can make some suggestions that will spark a broader conversation. To that end I offer 3 Benefits to online learning, 3 Drawbacks, and 6 Hacks to Mitigate the Drawbacks.
3 Benefits of Online Learning
#1 Flexibility of Time and Place
I start with the most obvious. Online platforms provide incredible flexibility in both the time and place that learning can occur. Gathering together is a deeply engrained and normative aspect of the human experience. But a global pandemic illustrates one of the more extreme reasons why it might not be ideal.
While viruses do infect our computers, they are of a very different kind (so they tell me…) than the virus that is causing Covid-19. Schools are turning to online learning because it enables us to continue our education in ways that would not have been possible in earlier generations.
A test case for this is Isaac Newton, who was sent home from Cambridge when the school was temporarily closed because of a plague. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi recounts in his book Flow,
“Newton had to spend two years in the safety and boredom of a country retreat, and he filled the time playing with his ideas about a universal theory of gravitation.” (137)
While Isaac Newton was able to carry on his studies individually and these studies ended up being immensely profitable, still he couldn’t attend lectures from teachers, discuss with fellow students, or receive and turn in assignments from his professors.
Since Newton was already a lover of wisdom and had the resources he needed to continue learning, this wasn’t debilitating for him. But there were, no doubt, other Cambridge students, who would have profited more from online lessons.
#2 Organization and Grading
The second benefit to many online learning platforms is how the organization and grading features are built right in. Whether it’s Google Classrooms, Microsoft Teams or something else, these tools make it even easier for teachers to organize, turn in, receive and grade assignments than in-person methods.
How much time is wasted by teachers searching through papers and hounding students to turn in assignments? When students are able to turn in the document they were working on the moment they are finished by simply uploading it into the online platform, our memories are unburdened and the logistics of managing assignments are streamlined.
I have to admit that my old school stacks of papers from students are less convenient to organize and grade than the list of assignments turned in from students through Microsoft Teams. They are already happily in alphabetical order, allowing me to easily record the grades in my excel file with a minimum of effort. When I have typed in feedback and a score, I simply click return and the student has received it back again. The wheels of this modern educational process have been thoroughly greased.
#3 Screen Sharing a Text
The final feature that I find incredibly beneficial is the ability to screen share a text with students. When using a Zoom meeting for online learning, screen share enables me to direct student’s attention clearly at text that I have scanned without making copies, wasting paper, or needing every student to have the book in front of them.
While in many cases students do have their own copies of our books, getting everyone to the right page sometimes takes time, and even with brilliant and attentive students, occasionally they find themselves lost, not knowing where we are now in the book. That’s because I like moving quickly, as many other teachers do. When there is a lot to share in a limited time, screen sharing a text and having a number of resources up and ready to jump to on my computer means that I can guide students through a textual journey with almost no friction, as long as they are looking at the screen in front of them.
No moments get wasted when a student calls out, “Wait, where are we again? What page are we on?” Because of screen sharing technology, I can, with proper planning, execute much more intricate and detailed lessons than would otherwise be convenient.
3 Drawbacks of Online Learning
#1 Loss of Personal Connection
You knew it was coming. And this is the main thrust of the argument against online learning that I have used in the past. Online learning necessarily involves a loss of personal connection. We are embodied creatures and while video is incredibly more powerful than a simple phone call, physical presence and proximity do make a difference. Even if it’s hard to articulate the psychological experiences involved, I can feel the loss as a teacher.
Interactions with students are less personal. Rhetorical appeals are less effective. Jokes get fewer laughs and timing is slightly obstructed. Students interact together in more mechanical and artificial ways. Some things may be more efficient, but, when the personal connection is diminished, classical learning aims like mentoring and modelling are perhaps similarly hampered.
I don’t mean to paint the drawback too bleak. They can still see my face and hear my voice and vice versa, and that is not something to take for granted. We can still interact personally in real time. But flesh and blood connections are real. We are rational animals, not incorporeal intelligences and virtual reality will never be reality.
#2 Less Amenable to Improvisation
One drawback that I think extends from the last is how live video conferences seem less amenable to improvisation than in-person classes. I know that some teachers plan out their lessons to a tee. But others of us work with what we’re getting from students. When I lead discussions, I may plan out some discussion questions to ask in advance, but I also improvise based on student response. I watch for where the play of words is taking us and follow the question where it leads. I don’t often have a set of answers we need to get to. In the humanities especially, the lesson evolves as we go, and it does so in response to students’ interaction with me, the text and each other.
This improvisatory teaching method feels harder online. Transitions are more clunky, students are more reticent, and the mood and atmosphere are harder to sense. I can put the students on Gallery Mode and scan their faces in the video screen, but it’s just not the same. It may be that we will all adapt with more hours of practice in this medium, but maybe not. It’s possible that some of the awkwardness, at least, is part and parcel of staring at a screen rather than sitting in the same room with flesh and blood people.
It’s not like video conferencing is the only avenue with this problem. I find that phone calls are always more awkward than face-to-face conversations. That doesn’t mean they’re not worthwhile. I’ve talked on the phone with my wife for hours and hours on end, especially during the years we were dating. But just because something is better than nothing, doesn’t make it equal to everything. Just as talking on the phone in real time is more personal and improvisatory than writing a letter, so video conferencing is a real blessing. I hope that you will not think me ungrateful for these reflections. But the medium does seem to privilege over-planning because of the loss of in-person feedback.
#3 Distractibility
The final drawback to online learning is a greater distractibility in the participants. This is something I noticed in myself long before experiencing it with students. When I’m on a Zoom meeting on the internet, all the distractions of the internet, my email inbox, and other work I could do at this very moment on this computer call to me in a way that is simply not true when I’m sitting in a room with a person or persons for a meeting.
In Nicholas Carr’s masterful book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains he explains the research behind how our brains are being hardwired to be more distractible. The click-bait and links, the endless scrolling and scanning, the bright lights and colors are all carefully designed to draw our attention and habituate us to the endless wading through the shallows.
It doesn’t seem to be too far of a leap to imagine how this default mode is turned on in ours and our students’ brains more when we’re in a video conference, than if we were present in a room together with all our phones and other devices safely stowed away. The fact of the matter is, I’m tempted to check my email when a notification pops up during an online learning session, when I never would have been while standing in front of a class of students. And if that’s true for me, then it’s definitely true for our students—a fact that might explain the loss of personal connection that I feel, as well as the clunkiness of complex interactions like discussions.
We’re not going to be served well by pretending that the higher distractibility isn’t the case. Yes, it may be harder for some construction going on outside our window to distract the whole class in the same way that we may have experienced at the school building. But we have to reckon with the fact that we are dealing with a higher threshold level of constant distraction, and temptations to distraction, with all our students every moment of a video conference.
And the real problem is that many of the teacher’s best defensive weapons against distraction involve personal face-to-face and one-on-one interventions that are functionally invalidated by the online medium. Moving in closer proximity to a student who is distracted or distracting others and offering a slight tap on the desk to remind him of your expectations is just no longer possible.
So how can we mitigate the drawbacks of decreased personal connection, less effective improvisation and increased distractibility?
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6 Hacks to Mitigate the Drawbacks
#1 Schedule Personal Meetings with Students to Check In
The loss of personal connection can be addressed, at least in part, by scheduling some one-on-one or smaller group video conferences. This may seem like an extra burden to bear for teachers already stressed out by the new and strange situation. But think of it like this: the efficiencies in travel, assignments, and communication have probably freed up some of your time, not to mention all the little pit stops and chatting in the hall interactions that have disappeared from your day. You can probably afford to add to your schedule some systematic check in meetings with students. If you work at a public school, obviously follow whatever regulations and procedures are necessary, and consider small groups of 2-4 students to avoid overload or the appearance of anything out-of-bounds. Consider calling them advising meetings or small group check-ins.
Think of these smaller group meetings as a way to overcome the obstacles of students’ motivation and engagement. For the type of challenging work and deliberate practice learning we’re expecting of our students, personal coaching is necessary.
Also, use the time as an opportunity to field questions and actively seek feedback from the students about the online learning process. You’re new at teaching online, just like they are new at learning online. Actively seeking out what they find most helpful and what they feel is ineffective provides you with a powerful source of insight that allows you to improve your skill in this medium much more quickly. It is also motivating for them to know that you care and value their perspective enough to ask.
This might also be a good time, if you are a homeroom teacher, charged with guiding students spiritually, to ask for prayer requests or provide some wise counsel and advice. We want to find ways to encourage and model the life of faith for our students and this crisis provides just such an opportunity.
#2 Make the Most of the Opening and Closing Minutes
Another way to address the loss of personal connection is to magnify those minutes at the beginning of a video conference when students start showing up, but not enough are there to really begin. Like in a physical classroom, these transitional minutes are a prime opportunity to establish a relational atmosphere. Greet students as they “arrive,” ask them about their day, and find topics to chat about informally.
Especially after the first few online meetings have gone by, it may be tempting to get into a routine and be checking your notes or engaging in some last-minute lesson planning. Instead, savor the personal connections and set goals for making them. It’s important to remember that our relationships and authority as teachers, our ethos, has a powerful effect on how students receive our instruction.
If you’re looking to “optimize” the effectiveness of your teaching, focusing on forming relational connections with students is ironically one of the best investments. Students are eager to learn from a teacher they trust and admire; even the best students struggle to learn well from a cold and distant instructor.
#3 Set Up Discussions Well Ahead of Time
If you’re at all an improvisational teacher like me, or you’re in the habit of using discussions in class to attain learning objectives and promote comprehension and higher order thinking, then you’ll want to adjust your strategy slightly. While our experience and training might incline us to “wing” our discussions, or attempt to execute our standard method of calling out pre-planned questions from the “front” of the class, the clunkiness of the medium will make such discussions hit or miss.
One of the tactics I’ve found most effective in the humanities is to have students read and answer some of my discussion questions ahead of time in writing. Then I send them into breakout rooms (a feature in Zoom that allows you to subdivide your meeting into smaller groups) to discuss and share their answers to those questions. Since they are all required to share and everyone has prepared their thoughts, AND they are in smaller groups, the discussion goes much more smoothly and profitably.
#4 Plan the Tangents
The other way to mimic the experience of the improvisational experience is, paradoxically, to plan more. Tangents and sidetracks can be an exercise in irrelevant trivia or teacher gab in the classroom. But they can also be incredible learning moments, in which students work out the implications for life and relevance of Great Books or make unlikely and creative connections that issue in long-term learning.
It may sound strange to plan these tangents, but an experienced teacher may be able to anticipate where we would have gone (profitably) off the beaten track in our discussion of this or that text. If you do, you can have on the top of your mind a discussion question or high engagement technique (like taking a poll, chat box response, etc.; see #6 below) for turning that tangent into a meaningful moment, in which distractible students are revived with new interest.
#5 Call on Students Frequently
For many teachers, discussions happen like this: teacher asks question, pause, a couple students slowly begin to raise their hand, pause, teacher calls on one of them to respond, and repeat. There are downsides to this approach even in a physical classroom, but in a video conference it is almost unbearably slow, especially since the heightened distractibility will likely slow down the rate and frequency of “hand raises.” It’s much better to adopt the practice of cold calling students.
Cold calling is when the teacher calls on a student by name to respond to a question. It creates a higher standard of accountability for the whole class, because everyone is expected to be able to respond. It also greases the wheels of the discussion process, because it eliminates the pauses, the uncertainty and the engagement decision going on in every student’s mind. If you think about it, there’s a lot of wasted mental space when students are continually questioning within their mind whether or not they should raise their hand to respond. They’re not thinking only about the question, they’re thinking about the social implications of the decision to raise their hand as well.
The best way to cold call in an online meeting is to state the question clearly, perhaps even repeating it once or rephrasing it, then call on a student to respond. Once that student has finished, call on another student by name to respond, perhaps even saying whether they agree or disagree and why. It’s best to keep track of who you’ve called on in some way, whether by name cards or tallies on a list. If you can embed calling on students in as many places as possible in your online teaching, then you can go some way to disincentivize the distractibility of the medium.
#6 Embed Engagement Techniques (like Chat, Polls, Whiteboard, etc.)
Another way to disarm the distractibility of video conference lessons is to embed a variety of engagement techniques. Aside from having a clear lesson plan, equipped with reviving tangents, and screen sharing of texts, some of the great tools for doing this are features I’ve toyed with in Zoom like the Chat boxes, Polls and the Whiteboard. I’m sure there are equivalents on whatever platform you may be using.
The chat box can be helpful for increasing engagement with low stakes or simple to answer questions. When you ask a question that you know is relatively simple, but are feeling low engagement or some reticence from students, it might be the time to require a chat box answer from everyone. It can be as simple as asking every student to type out a single sentence response to your question. Sometimes I then read them out as they are coming in and I cajole late students into giving a response verbally if they are slow in the uptake. The chat box is also a helpful way for you to give information to students, like the discussion questions they should use in their breakout groups.
The poll feature can serve a similar purpose, except that you can limit them to a range of possible answers that you have predetermined. The point to be aware of here is that a poll requires prior planning, so a chat box response can be something you resort to on the fly, whereas a poll is idea for multiple choice questions that function either as a planned tangent or as a spring board for the next activity. Also, if you are aware of the importance of retrieval practice, you could use the poll feature to give students a little bit of low stakes quizzing or formative assessment on their ongoing learning.
Lastly, the whiteboard feature is incredibly helpful for brainstorming content as a class. It can thus function as a basis for video conference narration, where you, say, brainstorm the main plot points, events or topics from a reading all together, listing them on the whiteboard, then call on students individually to elaborate on each in turn. Since the task is clear and the process is straightforward, this makes it easy to avoid distraction and focus intently on the content. The emerging record on the whiteboard draws students’ attention, just like the screen share feature, and directs it, with all the power of the flashing lights and colors of the screen, right where you want it to go.
Helping students focus on this way is thus more likely to push them into the flow state and out of the bored distractibility that is so common online.
Those are my 3 benefits, 3 drawbacks, and 6 hacks to mitigate the drawbacks of online learning. What struck a cord with you? Are there other benefits, drawbacks or hacks you’ve come up with through these weeks of online learning? Share your ideas in the comments!
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