Due to the Coronavirus pandemic that has been ripping around the world in recent months, Sonoma State University has transitioned from in-class, face-to-face instruction to completely remote instruction. This disaster has provided students and university faculty with the opportunity to experience a new learning technique that many have not experienced before now. With this comes a variety of challenges that primarily focus on the transition between learning platforms and the maintenance of the high levels of instruction we had been receiving prior to this transition. We will discuss some of the goods and the bads of this learning shift and dive into some of the observations that I have made about my personal work habits in this new environment.
Before this transition to completely remote instruction, I had already taken two online courses offered by Sonoma State University. One spanned the duration of a full semester while the other was limited to a two week period during the school’s winter break. The course that lasted a full semester was done asynchronously, meaning that students could watch pre-recorded lectures on their own time and assignments were due at the end of the week and could be completed at any time before the due date. I found myself to be very disconnected from the course, having never directly interacted with any of my classmates or my teacher. I slacked on the reading and got lucky on the quizzes. The class did not feel like a class but rather a quick 20-minute task I had to complete every week. In retrospect, although I was happy to pick up an easy grade and easy general education units, I wish that the course had been more interactive. I know that I certainly would have gotten more out of it.
This past winter intersession I took a two-week course that provided a stark contrast to the course I just discussed. This instructor held online meetings Monday through Friday and required each student to use their webcam. They prompted students to participate and held individual presentations and speaking periods for each participant. I found that I was far more invested in what I was learning in that course and was able to maintain my attention during class sessions much like I am able to in face-to-face environments. From these two experiences, I do not think that I can stress the importance of webcams and encouraged participation more. Although remote instruction can prove to be challenging for both teachers and students alike, I think that it is important for participants to mimic normalcy as best as possible. Of course, differences are omnipresent, but if participants approach this experience with a similar mindset to how they would face-to-face instruction, the experiences of participants will be maintained and our learning environments will retain legitimacy.
The differences between student participation and interaction in a face-to-face environment versus a remote software environment is quite profound. In my experience, face-to-face interaction keeps students accountable and requires more from them in terms of attention and participation. It is easier to ask questions and non-verbal social cues go a long way for maintaining students attention and keeping them honest. This accountability can be maintained in a remote environment when participants are required to have their webcams on at all times. I can tell you from personal experience that when those face cams go down, my attention and engagement levels follow suit. In general, offering ideas and asking clarifying questions are far more difficult in a remote environment than in a face-to-face one. Without webcams, participants, myself included, have less of an incentive to actually devote their attention to the material being presented in the remote environment, and the effectiveness of the learning environment diminishes.
The course material covered in most of my classes has remained the same for the most part. Although I would assume that that may not be the case for general education classes and other lower-division courses. With that being said, although specific concepts are still being taught as they otherwise would have been, the workload of several of my classes has declined significantly. Midterms and final projects have been canceled and have been replaced by smaller projects and quizzes. Although the same material is being taught, the remote environment that we are now utilizing can only support so much, resulting in the omittance of a good chunk of the work we would have had to complete in a face-to-face learning environment.
Steve Harrison and Paul Dourish’s seminal work of media spaces “highlights[s] the critical distinction between ‘space’ and ‘place’”(Harrison, Dourish). They describe the importance of “place” as a notion that supports interactive behavior. The aspects of a place and the behavioral patterns of individuals in those places can be translated into a virtual environment by designing these novel environments “around the same affordances for action and interaction that the everyday world exhibits”(Harrison, Dourish). Harrison and Dourish go on to say that it is not so much about an individual’s physical surroundings but rather the sense of a place and the feelings and interactions that accompany that that make all the difference. This directly relates to the observations I made above in both the negative and positive cases I outlined.
In an environment that prompts intellectual growth, resources certainly hold their fair share of importance, but the space that is forged between teacher and student is arguably more beneficial to an educational setting. Even away from the standard face-to-face classroom, a “place” can be formed remotely that promotes educational growth and student success. In contrast, without the right attitude and approach, that “place” could be unreachable. As I outlined above, tactics like encouraging participation and constant webcam usage can be useful tools in the motivation of class participation and student engagement. The key, as Harrison and Dourish mention, is to treat virtual environments as physical ones in the sense that there are real interactions between real people occurring in these spaces and therefore, although virtual, these “places” force very real interactions.
Harrison, Steve, and Paul Dourish. “Re-place-ing space: the roles of place and space in collaborative systems.” Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. 1996.
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