Why Emergency Online Learning Got Low Grades From Many College Students

The following is an edited excerpt from Staying Online: How to Navigate Digital Higher Education, published by Routledge.

Almost all higher education went online at the start of the pandemic. For longtime advocates of online education like me, you’d think it would be an accomplishment. Apart from the fact that many students were angry, took digital courses only by compulsion, and the lessons they received did not always match the medium.

In a large-scale survey of around a thousand students and faculty, only eight percent of online workers during the crisis said their experiences were very effective. A previous study supported these results, with seven out of ten students studying online in an emergency saying that distance learning is not as good as teaching on campus, with most finding online courses less appealing.

In order to avoid feelings of alienation on the Internet, qualified digital lecturers encourage the active participation of the students. Some even argue that online students can exit a virtual course and feel closer to their online classmates than they would to their on-campus classmates.

We should have focused on creating great virtual teaching samples in high enrollment courses to give most students the most positive online learning experience. It was a missed opportunity. “
—Ilan Jacobsohn, former senior director of distributed education at the New School.

Many faculty members on campus offer face-to-face lectures like seasoned stage performers who take advantage of tension, timing, and humor for dramatic impact. The lecturers’ stand-up routines, which have been refined over many years of practice, have little effect online, as experienced lecturers – as is now the case with all online faculties – are mostly invisible or can be seen on the screen in a chessboard image.

Many institutions wasted the summer discussing the opening, investigating various security measures, considering hybrid or flex options, and unfortunately failed to update the faculty for high quality digital teaching.

Higher education has always preferred research to teaching. For most faculties, education is intended for K-12 schools and is inappropriate for colleges. It’s no wonder that when distance learning flooded our universities in the pandemic – with the exception of a handful of colleges that take teaching seriously – few high-level academic officials realized that faculty education would be crucial. Instead, they moved on, hooked up with Zoom, trusting that technology alone would do the job.

“By the time we decided to go a third of the summer had passed,” lamented Ilan Jacobsohn, former executive director of Distributed Education at the New School. “We should have focused on creating excellent virtual teaching samples in high enrollment courses to give most students the most positive online learning experience. It was a missed opportunity. ”

Zoom – and its videoconferencing cousins ​​- were a breakout tool at colleges during the crisis, not because it’s a perfect online learning tool, but because it tries to replicate the conventional classroom. Colleges adopted it because it was very similar to the campus experience. It was a convenient step to switch from physical to virtual space without re-imagining what it takes to teach effectively online. Most faculties just kept zooming in online as they always taught on campus. If hours of lectures on campus were deadly, they were even more deadly on Zoom.

The impulse to imitate conventional classrooms online as possible was followed earlier by MOOCs, massive online learning courses. In both cases, the original goal was to capture existing lectures on video without changing much. The fundamental flaw in both cases is the conceptual flaw that the classroom is the ideal place to learn, which leads to a parallel flaw that the virtual reproduction comes as close as possible to an authentic educational experience.

In the early days of the film, viewers in cinemas saw the screen in the foreground when a black and white curtain appeared to part, recreating the opening of a stage performance. But it wasn’t long before Hollywood realized that the moving image audience was not seeing a conventional play, but something new and exciting – an entirely new mode, not a play at all.

When professors finally realize that their conventional classroom performance doesn’t quite fit online, they will realize that zoom and other digital arts often function effectively as support services for high quality online teaching, not as a substitute. Zoom is a pretty inventive piece of digital wizardry, but it’s no substitute for thinking carefully about how students learn. For online to be most effective, students must do the bulk of the discovery work while the faculty and film directors are behind the screen.

A pre-pandemic survey of senior academic leaders found that most institutions were unwilling to simply flip a switch to move teaching to an online environment.

Widely considered by far the most advanced in the world, online learning in the US is admired and pursued everywhere. Oddly enough, experts weren’t always hired to lead the transition from in-person to virtual education in the pandemic. Some colleges and universities have turned to experienced teaching and learning centers, such as Duke, units on campus that are often at the forefront of the transformation to digital learning and have accompanied the university on its way through the crisis. At other institutions, digital learning agencies – many who had run virtual education programs for years – were not always consulted, and switching to the internet was entrusted to others with little or no experience. Amazingly, although universities are widely regarded as having a great respect for knowledge, they often behave no differently from other bureaucracies and turn carelessly to trusted colleagues rather than the most capable and competent.

To be fair, when colleges faced their most devastating crisis in history, faced steep enrollments and financial ruin – and the health and safety of faculty, staff, and students at terrifying risk – it’s no wonder that academic executives fumbled to bring teachers up to speed with digital engagement. On campus, education was never the most pressing goal of the country’s presidents and probes. As a result, even in a pandemic, digital teaching has rarely made it to the top, as the fate of the university depended on the threat of the coronavirus, perilously.

Online teaching requires faculty to find new ways to captivate students they often cannot see or hear, a radical departure from centuries of conventional teaching. Virtual teaching does not depend on an expressive face, spirited movements or a poignant speaking voice, but on entirely new pedagogies that were introduced in the last century and practiced by inventive early adopters in this century. In order to recover from the stumbling emergency semester, the first item on the higher agenda was certainly to guide the teachers in best practices for digital teaching.

Few college students were exposed to the radical practices of digital education during the pandemic. Most emergency training courses – with the exception of online courses taught by senior digital faculties who practically taught well before the crisis – zoomed in with little or no experience and mainly taught online, as they did all the time on the Campus had done, and was largely ignorant of a quarter of a century of online practice, which is moving students away from passive video and live zoom lectures to student active participation in project-based peer-to-peer engagements.

From the beginning, online adopters realized that talking heads were ineffective and that new educational practices were needed to motivate students who were far from campus. After months of emergency distance learning during the pandemic, there is greater awareness of this truth.

source https://collegeeducationnewsllc.com/why-emergency-online-learning-got-low-grades-from-many-college-students/