Fuck Teaching College Online
Back around the turn of the century, when I first started teaching full time, there was a big push to move college fully online. Grifter venture capitalists touted this as the future of education, commoditizing and leveraging professors, getting rid of all that expensive real estate, and--along the way--all the meaningful human interaction.Thankfully, that broader trend fell by the wayside, and let's hope 2020 is the end of the thought that widespread, fully-online college education is a good idea.
Some subjects work better than others online. We’ve had a few fully-online classes for years (and will continue to do so), but only as part of a larger in-person curriculum. I’ve taken fully online college classes myself, but only when I’m highly motivated and want to get in and out and get the information, and not have the broader college experience. But I came to the conclusion 20 years ago that the highly technical information I teach needs hands-on work to be fully comprehended. Simulating that experience online is of course possible, but creating effective material to do that would be an immense amount of work that no one is paying for in my institution, which was broke before COVID. It would be possible to build lab kits for home hands on work, but our students have neither the money nor space for that.
I do leverage technology wherever possible; when I started self-publishing my book a decade or so ago, I put all my lectures online and restructured the associated classes to be in-person Q&A sessions and hands-on labs. That hybrid online structure has worked very well, maximizing both resources and in-person interaction. Motivated students have told me that they like the lecture on video because they can start and stop, and even do the reading simultaneously.
But I think beyond the basic idea of whether you can get across the course material online, the larger loss of moving everything online is the human connection and experience. No matter how many Slack channels or Discord servers you implement, there’s no running into a student in the hallway before class; little learning about their families or their experiences; no saying hello to a group of students having lunch together. It’s partly the nature of what we do in our field, but in 20 years teaching all my most memorable student interactions have been outside the classroom.
Now we only have the classroom, and a poor semblance of that, since I can’t watch the students to see if they are engaged, since 95% of our students have their cameras off. I always latch onto the images of one or two students who have their cameras on amidst the sea of black squares. And it’s all weird for students anyway; in a conventional classroom setup, the students are facing the front of the room and I’m facing all of them; Zoom is a weird flat circle with everyone looking at each other. Last semester I gave an anonymous survey as to why they weren’t turning their cameras on, and my students have very good reasons: few of them have adequate wifi; some are doing all their work on phones because they can’t afford a computer and can not use our closed labs at school; one said their grandmother feels her privacy is being violated with the camera on; another has their younger brother in an online class right next to them. This semester I was teaching a sound class where we are asking students to do critical listening of work; for a few students the din you could hear when they unmuted was unbearable. That said, our students never fail to inspire me: I observed one class this year where a student kept his camera on and we could see him driving an airport shuttle bus (his eyes were on the road!); he was one of the most motivated in the class.
My classes ended this week, and I filed my grades today. At the end of a typical semester I'm tired and sometimes burned out, but feel satisfied that I got to work with a bunch of great and diverse students who will go on to great things in the industry I love so much. But after 40 semesters or so teaching, I've never been more burned out, exhausted, depleted and depressed than I am this year, after teaching an entire semester from home. Having that camera in my face while sitting for sometimes full 8 hour days, and all this unnatural, mediated, delayed, interaction is extraordinarily draining in a way completely opposite from being in a room with students, which is energizing. And I now have 30 or so new students this semester who I know by only by a screen name and maybe some Mets screen icon on their Zoom screen; if I passed them on the street or ran into them on a job site I would have no idea.
Our business is intensely collaborative and social; and yet another tragedy for our students is they are not meeting lifelong friends and colleagues in classes, or learning to collaborate on the shows we were not able to do. Being in a Zoom breakout room just isn’t the same. It’s going to take us years to build back up the sense of community that has been lost during this time, although I think we’ve done about as well as we could with the minuscule resources and support we have as a publicly (chronically under) funded university.
And yet I know how fortunate I am; unlike almost everyone else in my industry, I still have a job. I can work through this awful time at home, and I only have a cat interrupting classes and not children. And I have spent hundreds and hundreds of extra hours trying to make meaningful experiences for my students, building setups out of gear at home that they can access remotely (see my remote cat feeder from last spring), loaning and delivering my personal mobile hot spot to student who had no internet at home, and going to our empty building to cobble together remote labs.
We had to do this fully online to get safely through this awful pandemic, but my students and I all really, really are looking forward to getting back to teaching and learning in person. Next semester, COVID allowing, I have one class that should, CUNY allowing, hold some safely socially distanced labs in person. I can’t wait. Fuck 2020.