A Techno-skeptical Approach to Suddenly Online Courses

I see a lot of professors struggling with video lectures for our sudden conversion to online classes, so here's a bit of heresy on my part: video lectures aren't really required in online classes. You don't have to do them. They're maybe not the best use of everyone's time right now (especially ours). 

In my experience teaching online, which admittedly was years ago (2011-2014 or so), I found interacting with students regularly on the discussion boards to be far more important than spending hours making videos of myself talking into the camera. Some of this is my personal aversion to unnecessarily complicated technology (what’s sometimes called techno-skepticism: more on that soon), but I really think interacting with students is more important right now, especially since many students may now have internet access issues with streaming long videos. 

Also, we're just not going to make good, well-conceived online classes in a week. That's just not going to happen. We're trying to salvage the rest of the term in an unprecedented situation. If you like videos and your students like them or you're the next YouTube star or whatever, go ahead. Maybe I'm wrong, and I'm not telling other people what to do. 

Maybe the latest online pedagogy disagrees with me about the inherent value of videos, and I will listen to that when I actually have time to make well-thought-out courses with good online content. But I figure my classes right now don't really require lots of videos, so I will let students save their tech resources for courses that do require videos and fancier tech (studio art, lab sciences, media production, etc.). But above all, let's remember to be kind to our students and ourselves. We're all trying to muddle through this the best we can.

My particular trouble is that I spent most of the last few years deliberately weaning myself off of the tech (no online quizzes, no online paper submissions, etc.). Now I have to go backwards, or forward depending on how you look at it.

Educational Techno-Skepticism: Just Because We Can Doesn’t Mean We Should

My attitude toward technology could be called techno-skepticism. I’m not a complete Luddite. I use my laptop all the time. I have a blog. I’m on social media. Vaccines are technology, and I’m in favor of those (especially when we have one for COVID-19).

My techno-skepticism is more the attitude that technology is not always a good thing. To paraphrase Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

There’s an app for everything these days, but … do we really need all those apps? Navigation can be handy if you’re lost, but do you really need to use navigation to go to work or the grocery store? (Not that many of us are going many new places these days.)

But my greatest techno-skepticism in the last few years has been with regard to education. I use a learning management system (I’ve used Blackboard, D2L, and now Canvas). I haven’t taught online since the summer of 2014, but up until late 2016, I was using my LMS for accepting papers (with auto-plagiarism check) and for online quizzes (which are handy because they can be graded automatically if they’re multiple choice).

My Technological Regression

But in spring 2017, I had a change of heart. I noticed that while my intention was to use the online quizzes to get students to do the readings and come to class ready to discuss them, students usually looked as such quizzes as perfunctory hoops to jump through, scanning the text for the answers while taking the quiz, and then immediately forgetting everything. What I want is for my students to read philosophy, and this requires sitting down with a text and thinking. I want them to synthesize and analyze ideas that they can take with them both inside and outside the classroom. You have to do philosophy to read philosophy. And I’m not convinced that even the most well-designed online quizzes usually help students do that.

So I switched back to paper quizzes in class. Paper quizzes aren’t perfect, either, but I figured what a paper quiz does measure is much closer to what I want. When you sit down in class to do a closed-book quiz in person, you have to have at least synthetized enough of the ideas in your mind to be able to answer a few questions with a writing utensil. This requires at least a little bit of thought on the student’s part, or at any rate a little more than mechanistically poking through a text scanning for keywords and matching them to what’s on the screen.

I also realized that I personally prefer grading hard copies of writing assignments. I can sit anywhere with a pen without worrying about wifi. I grew distrustful of the imperfect plagiarism software itself, but mostly I grew to dislike the “guilty before proven innocent” attitude that such software projects to our students. (I can spot suspicious passages and Google them myself if need be.) But the real benefit of hard copy papers is that you can build an activity around them in class, and it’s much easier for students to talk about their papers or share them with others if they have them on paper right in front of them than if they have to log into a device.

But my deeper reason for doing all this is that I wanted my face-to-face classes (yes, that’s what normal classes are now called) to have an experience that was definitely NOT the experience of an online class. And if you’re doing half the work of the class online, I think it’s harder for students to see the value of being in class. I really do think there is no substitute for in-person discussion and interaction, especially in a discussion-heavy discipline like philosophy. Philosophers have been discussing things for thousands of years! It’s kind of our thing.

So, since 2017 I have been on a steady march away from educational technology. (I still use Canvas for announcements, the grade book, various links, and sometimes lecture notes, but I see those as supplemental to what I’m trying to do in the classroom rather than replacing it, and lecture notes are only posted after class). This semester I slid back even further in one of my upper-level classes by giving students time to write … with a pen! … on paper! … in class! Then they use these assignments to work in small groups and come up with discussion questions for the whole class. Or rather, they did. Past tense. Before we went online.

Our Suddenly Online Courses

When the announcement came down on March 11 that we were switching our classes to online… I knew I had a lot of work to do. I basically had to take courses that I had deliberately designed to have a lot of in-person interaction (discussion, small group work, student presentations, lots of stuff on paper, etc.) and turn them into 100% online courses in a week.

My #1 priority was my students. They were going to be dealing with a great deal of upheaval with work, family, living situation, etc. I knew my online classes would be a triage situation at best, trying to salvage the rest of the semester. My goal is to help each of my students get through this semester.

So this is how I decided to keep my classes as simple as possible. My lower level class has one discussion post and one quiz per week, with a short final project at the end of the term. My upper level class will be posting their writing assignments on a discussion board each week with some discussion, and starting research for their final papers. Both classes have lecture notes from me. 

Will any of this replace the in-person interaction that I had planned for the rest of this semester? Of course not. Those plans disappeared as soon as I got the email we were switching to online. Online classes do not simply replace in-person classes. They never have. It’s a totally different mode of pedagogy.

Am I sad about this? Of course! So are some of my students. I’m really, really going to miss interacting with them in person. And they’re going to miss each other. I’m making a big effort to be present in the online discussion boards, especially this week, which is our first week of online instruction. I’m making a point to tell each student that I am glad to hear from them and I hope they are staying safe and healthy. I love teaching because I care about human beings, and I think it really makes a difference to students if you communicate that we are not cogs in some soul-crushing educational machine.

Questioning the Outcomes

At a deeper level there’s something else that worries me not just about the emphasis on teaching online, but a lot of the business of education these days. It’s this: in our rush to see everything as outcomes and goals, data and standards, means and ends, we’re losing something important about education. Education is always a human endeavor. Even in STEM fields, where such talk may be seen as my fluffy humanities affectation, teachers and students are human beings. Human beings cannot be reduced to outcomes assessment, best practices, data analytics, and learning algorithms.

[As for where this drive is coming from, some might say it’s capitalism and/or neoliberalism. I think that’s a big part of it, but honestly I find a lot of Marxist, or Marxist-ish, explanations tend to be just as reductive as their capitalist competitors. There may be a deeper impulse behind it: deeper than Modernism or Western metaphysics or the other boogey-theories of leftist academics. Call me a Buddhist or a Zhuangzian, but there is a type of desire (for control, for more) endemic to many human psyches, a desire that is dangerously exacerbated by neoliberal capitalism but which is not necessarily itself produced by capitalism. Not that I’m a huge fan of capitalism: look how badly it handles a global pandemic.]

I’m not saying thinking about educational outcomes is always bad any more than I think technology is always bad. But it’s not always good, either. Keeping your outcomes in mind as you design a course is a good thing. But how many digressions in discussion would you miss if you were solely focused on outcomes at every moment of class? And how many of these digressions, much to your surprise, turn out to be pretty relevant after all, even if they seemed initially far from removed from course outcomes? How much education takes place, not when you’re chasing standards or assessing outcomes, but when you loosen up a bit and think creatively and deeply about an issue? 

And what about the emotional and social needs of our students? A classroom or an online discussion board are learning communities, and human communities have to be nourished and sustained. This is why I sometimes bring candy or snacks to my students: food creates community. Communities don’t happen by accident. They need support from their leaders and members. They need structure. But most of all they need care. They need people who give a shit.

Am I hopeful that such communities can form in online classes? I actually think it’s easier in the present situation where each class already had an in-person dynamic. The students I’ve heard from already are anxious and scared about the world (we all are), but they’re anxious about their suddenly online courses, too. Contrary to what us oldsters seem to think about “the kids these days,” most of them don’t actually like online classes. But I think bonding over this anxiety—being honest that we as professors feel it, too—might itself be a way to form community.

Muddling Through to the Future

I worry that in the near future administrators and legislators (in states like mine where a sometimes hostile state legislature has a lot of control over public education) will use this crisis as an impetus to make universities even more online, even more subject to the tyranny of outcomes and standardization, which has the effect of making academic labor even more casual and expendable. But I think there will be pushback from students and professors. I think those of us in the trenches of going suddenly online will come to realize all the more deeply how valuable face-to-face courses are.

Again, I’m not totally against online courses. They can be handy in some circumstances for teachers and students alike. When I taught online I had a lot of pregnant people on bedrest, students studying abroad or doing internships, people caring for family members, etc. When done thoughtfully and properly (in a way that is impossible in the present circumstances), online courses can be pretty good. We are lucky to have this option amidst a global pandemic. But online courses will never and should never totally replace traditional in-person classes in the long term.

For professors right now (I won’t speak for K-12 teachers, but I suspect some issues are similar), I think the most important thing is to let our students know that we care. (This is especially true, I think, for professors who are men, because our students generally do not have the automatic expectation that we care, an expectation often unfairly burdened on our colleagues). We should let students know that we’re all in this together. That we don’t like any of this any more than they do. But if we nurture the communities we already started building earlier in the term, we will get through this together. And that’s all we can ask of ourselves in these terrible times.