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On Tuesday, Mar. 10, 2020, SU sent an email that said in-person classes were suspended and classes would be delivered online after Friday of that week. The move online lasted the semester, and the transition to virtual learning was a rollercoaster for many students.

Prior to the pandemic, most students had probably never taken a full course load entirely online. When classes went remote, professors had to convert their courses to the online modality on short notice. The Daily Orange spoke with three professors who shared their experiences of working remotely then transitioning back to in-person classes this semester.

For Walter Freeman, a professor of astronomy and physics, the courses that he teaches are about “developing a class.”

“My challenge is that I don’t need to see what I am writing on the chalkboard,” Freeman said. “I need to see what the students are doing.”

Lois Agnew, associate dean of Curriculum Innovation and Pedagogy, interim chair of African American Studies and professor of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition, said there are a lot of personal aspects to teaching that are lost when classes move online.

“There’s a level of interpersonal connection that you can’t get on Zoom — people are not able to make eye contact and give each other visual cues that are a natural part of communication,” she said.

Agnew said she noticed many students experienced Zoom fatigue — such as eye-strain due to sitting in front of computers for long stretches of time and anxiety from constantly looking at themselves on the monitor.

Shannon M. Sweeney, a professor of psychology, said that students find it easier to disengage when class is remote partially because they do not feel like they have a relationship with the professor that is teaching the course.

“One of the cons comes back to not having that same energy and responsiveness,” Sweeney said. “(With) pre-recorded videos, (it) is much harder for me to know when students are missing out on the content … because I am not having that kind of feedback that I would otherwise have.”

However, there are a multitude of advantages to remote classes for both students and professors. Agnew said she found it easier to incorporate external media and have people work in groups, and that students seemed to feel more at ease asking her to meet outside of class on Zoom than they did face-to-face.

It was also simpler to open and close breakout rooms than to ask people to choose who they wanted to work with and to attempt to get everyone’s attention once the allotted time for discussion was over, Agnew said. Additionally, she said, she was pleased with students’ commitment.

“The students were taking classes from all over the globe,” she said. “It really impressed me that people were working hard, continuing to enjoy the class even when there was a challenge with time, with connections, with health.”
Although in-person learning is still preferable for Agnew, Sweeney and Freeman, the professors learned some lessons from remote teaching that they are now bringing into their in-person classrooms, they said.

Agnew said she learned to be more explicit with students to allow them to navigate the course “more independently.” Sweeney said she took the opportunity to try out a different teaching method called the “flip classroom” model. With this routine, students learned the content on their own through videos and class time was devoted to the application of what they learned.

Another benefit to remote learning is that professors have become more wary of the possibility of students getting sick, Freeman said. For a lot of professors, virtual learning made their classes more inclusive and accessible for all students.

Sweeney said that students may be more comfortable contributing their thoughts in a live chat or Blackboard threads than raising their hands in the classroom. Also, students that have English as a second language can pause the videos to look up words that they don’t understand, she said.

“For disability accommodations, I had to repeat what the students said to me and then answer,” Freeman said. “The students could speak to each other and to me in real time. It was great.”

Freeman said he enjoyed having students’ comments in the chat in real-time, giving them the opportunity to interact with each other. He highlights the friendships that were formed and the willingness of students to help one another.
“That community is not something I built, it’s something that the students built,” Freeman said.

Published on September 16, 2021 at 12:01 am