A Tale of Two Zooms: Online Learning Then Vs. Now

My title references Dickens, of course: “It was the best of Zoom; it was the worst of Zoom.” But I could have referenced Judy Collins: “I’ve looked at Zoom from both sides now…I really don’t know Zoom at all.”

Last week I came across an article, “The Nightmare of Online Learning: Here's What I've Learned as a Teacher. It's Not Pretty,” by Larry Strauss — a high school English teacher, a contributor to USA TODAY, and an accomplished author. He has a very negative opinion of online learning: “I have yet to encounter any educators who believe that even our best, most innovative, efforts with distance learning did much more than lessen a catastrophe.” For example, he writes that his students like the “flexibility and control” of distance learning, but have difficulty getting motivated.

Last fall, I definitely would have disagreed with the extent of Strauss’s negativity — at least as applied to the college level. I had heard that there were definite advantages to online teaching and learning, including improved access to education for those who could not make it to campus and more ways for students to contribute to discussions and other aspects of courses. At the time, my only experience with distance learning was a graduate course and a half taught “remotely” —having us all (fewer than 10 students) meet via Zoom. I was just finishing my first-year seminar, in which the 25 of us were doing well! Attendance was great, most students kept their cameras on, we had good discussions, and students seemed to appreciate that they didn’t have to commute to campus.

Second Year of Online Learning

Strauss’s article rings more true when I think about my experience this semester: My first-year seminar class is quieter than last year’s group. Most students have kept their cameras off, attendance is down, and some students are not completing their assignments with the promptness or the enthusiasm of last year. From my discussions with other instructors, I get the impression that my experience is not unique. This year is more stressful and potentially less effective than last year — for both students and faculty.

What accounts for the change? Of course, it’s not just one thing that is responsible for such complex phenomena (that’s what I’m helping my students to realize). So let’s look at some factors.

It is possible that Strauss is entirely correct — that distance learning is simply not as good as face-to-face learning overall — at the high-school and college levels. Perhaps, therefore, last year was an outlier — a positive blip on the screen. Why might it have been so good last year? Perhaps my students and I shared a “we’re-all-in-this-together,” crisis mentality. We knew we weren’t allowed on campus, so we sucked it up and got our jobs done. After all, we’ll be back in the classroom before you know it!

I’m not entirely convinced of the “distance-learning-pretty-much-sucks” theory for higher education. After all, before the pandemic, we were moving toward more online options for teaching and learning, and the landscape wasn’t as bleak as it is now. Thus, there are other factors at play. One of them is the context in which this second year of remote teaching is occurring. For example, our society seems to be gaslighting itself with contradictory messages, including “We’re back, just like before!” and “We’re still in the middle of a pandemic!” We’re facing more complex and, therefore, more stressful choices than we had last year. I chose to stay totally remote, but some of my colleagues have chosen all kinds of schedules from completely on campus to some combination. Many students, therefore, are partly remote, partly asynchronous, and partly on campus. The usual array of skill sets necessary to master college — both teaching and learning here — seems to have expanded exponentially.

Burnout

On the teaching side, burnout is always a problem, but the pandemic seems to have exacerbated the rate and severity of burnout for lots of instructors (see the references below). I’m still excited about teaching and meeting the challenges of these new formats — my videos have way more animations than they did last year! But the personal and professional stresses of an ongoing health crisis are taking their toll. Burnout seems to raise its head with every hiccup we face in “getting back to normal.”

Students are facing their own struggles with burnout, stress, and mental health concerns — which predate the pandemic and are getting worse. My first-year students are now in their second year of remote learning. They’ve missed out on much of what makes senior year in high school what it could be, and now they’re missing lots of the first-year college experiences that kept lots of us coming back for our sophomore years.

Another factor is context: We know what a classroom is for. Even when we have refreshments, guest speakers, fire drills, and smartphones, the expectation when we’re on campus — in that physical space — includes at least some significant degree of learning. Houses do not elicit that “learning mindset” to the same degree. For example, as Strauss stated, “Many [students] were suddenly in charge of younger siblings and cousins all day or inheriting other family responsibilities that left them little or no time for school work.” As our Zoom bandwidth increased, our emotional and academic bandwidths may have decreased.

Zoom Itself

Zoom itself is another factor. Once we’ve gotten used to the rectangles with cats prancing across desks and dogs barking just as students are making their best points, there’s not much gluing us to the screen. Humans are not wired for Zoom: Zoom fatigue, as they say, is a thing.

Was last year uncharacteristically good? Is this year just a setback we endure before things get to a new normal? We need to know because the new options borne of the pandemic will not go away. (The pandemic may or may not go away.) Administrators, educators, and others were already moving toward at least some forms of distance learning, and the trend will accelerate and expand. Here’s some of the reasoning I’ve heard, boiled down for a blog: “We should do it because we can do it.”

Education Essential Reads

Which Trendy Teaching Techniques Actually Work?

Why Students Should Resist Using ChatGPT

It could be that remote teaching and learning have benefits that we haven’t optimized yet (although Strauss seems to be skeptical about this). But one of the lessons we may be learning is that the implementations of new teaching and learning technologies are not good (or bad) because they are technological; rather, we must pay careful attention to how we implement them, in what proportions, with whom, and toward what ends.