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Inside Higher Education
What Do We Know About This Spring's Remote Learning?
What should we try to find out? And how might what we learn influence how colleges educate their students this fall and beyond?
By Doug Lederman
June 10, 2020
This spring COVID-19 forced hundreds of thousands of college
instructors and millions of students to take their teaching and
learning into a virtual realm most of them had not chosen and with
which many of them were unfamiliar.
So how'd it go?
First, it’s important to say, it went. In other words, most faculty
members made the switch adequately enough that most students were able
to continue their educations rather than wash out. Given how
consistently people love to say that higher education is stuck in its
ways and can’t adapt, that alone might be considered a minor miracle.
Professors adapted; colleges adapted. Most educations were not derailed.
Second, students and parents, as well as college leaders and
professors, overwhelmingly believe that the learning experience was
subpar. That would hardly be surprising, given the aforementioned lack
of faculty and student experience and the fact that the pivot of
in-person to remote teaching occurred with instructors having as little
as a weekend and at most a week or 10 days to make the move.
It also recognizes that all parties involved have struggled through the
last three months with varying degrees of personal and professional
precariousness. Some have had trauma from coronavirus-related physical
or mental health concerns or recession-driven economic woes.
But what do we really know about how it went?
Did less learning happen than it would have if students had remained in
the physical classroom, as is widely asserted? Were students less
engaged in their learning, and if so, was that because of more
distractions in their lives or because the experience was less, well,
engaging? Does the spring's experience give us meaningful insight into
whether virtual forms of education can be effective?
And perhaps more importantly: What should we seek to learn about how it
went, through surveys, data analysis or other means? And how should
what we glean inform how colleges and universities educate their
students this fall and beyond, given the likelihood that
technology-enabled learning will remain central to the higher ed
landscape in the COVID-19 era, and probably beyond?
***
Many critiques of the education colleges provided this spring
(including one published elsewhere on this site today) referred to the
instruction students received as online learning, rather than as
emergency remote instruction, which is more accurate. The distinction
may seem like hairsplitting to some, but I agree with others who say
it's not.
While "online learning" can mean many different things, it has been
practiced for more than two decades by many thousands of educators who
have built up a large body of expertise and evidence that, done right,
it can be effective.
By and large, what happened this spring wasn't that: it was legions of
dedicated instructors doing their best to figure out how to deliver
courses they had built for a physical classroom to a group of
now-dispersed students, using whatever technology and often rudimentary
pedagogical practices they (with help from their colleges'
instructional designers and faculty development staff members) could
master in a matter of days.
Faculty members and students alike were not well suited to thrive in
that environment. A majority of faculty members had never taught an
online course before this spring, and many had not had any training or
preparation beyond what institutions were able to give them over spring
break.
In normal times, students who've chosen to study online "know what
they're signing up for," says Natasha Jankowski, executive director of
the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment. "If it's a
synchronous class, you've committed to showing up at the same time each
week and built time into your schedule so you can dedicate your
attention and time to it."
That wasn't the case for most students thrust into remote learning this
spring. "There was no guarantee they'd be available at the same time,"
Jankowski says. "Whether it was watching their kids, or picking up some
extra work hours to pay bills, or caring for a loved one, education
just may not have been the priority on their survival scale."
Even a course designed to be asynchronous may not have worked as
intended for some students, says Jankowski, who is also a research
associate professor in the department of education policy, organization
and leadership at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
"Requiring people to create really cool videos of an oral presentation
depends on people having good Wi-Fi access or technology," when some
students' best Wi-Fi access was in a nearby parking lot. And many
instructors put time limits on proctored exams, when there was "no
guarantee I have three undisturbed hours in my house … We went into
protection mode, security mode, instead of thinking about how we enable
learning in a global pandemic."
For that reason, says Jillian Kinzie, associate director of Indiana
University's Center for Postsecondary Research, "now is not a time to
be judging anything about our effectiveness with online learning" based
on this spring's crisis transition. It's also not a time to judge
individual professors' efficacy in teaching, which is why many colleges
have decided not to consider this spring's student evaluations of
teaching in future decisions about tenure and promotion.
But just because it's unwise to judge the quality or potential of
online learning by the rushed version of it most students encountered
this spring doesn't mean we can't learn from the just-completed term,
says Kinzie, whose Indiana center is home to the National Survey of
Student Engagement, which gauges the perceptions of four-year-college
students.
Early results from administrations of NSSE this spring show that next
fall's incoming freshmen -- having had more experience with virtual
learning than they otherwise would have had -- "realize how
self-directed they need to be" to thrive in that setting, she says.
"That's not a bad outcome from a slapdash approach to online
instruction in K-12."
Those students "also have been tasked with inventorying their own
capacity -- everything from software and hardware to their attention
and personal capacities," Kinzie says. "How long can I sit and do this
-- what's my attention span? Do I know how to access resources if I'm
in a solely online experience? They've had to ask themselves all these
questions."
Colleges should tap in to that as they consider how their own students
fared this spring, Kinzie says. "Institutions could ask students to
really inventory their skills, what they learned about themselves as
learners, try to capture some of that," she says. "They could identify
if a student had trouble paying attention because her house was noisy,
because little brothers and sisters were bugging them so they couldn't
get things done. Whether a student was able to find relevant resources
when they couldn't walk to talk to a librarian or nudge a classmate in
the next row. That is all valuable information for institutions and for
individual learners."
To the widespread assertion that students "learned less" this spring, Kinzie asks a metaphorical "how would we know?"
"The professor's answer shouldn't be, because students scored lower on
the final exam I produced for them that was the same exam I've been
delivering for 30 years," she says. "There are just too many factors
that could affect that -- taking on more hours at the local grocery
store [to make up for a lost on-campus work-study job], caring for
dependents."
"This semester has asterisks all the way down the list," Jankowski
agrees. "Add the words 'in a global pandemic' to any question you might
ask."
Kinzie hopes institutions will try to build off some of the creative
new approaches to assessing student learning that emerged as professors
had to experiment. "I know faculty who were really surprised,
pleasantly surprised, by what students were able to produce in
difficult circumstances because they still wanted to get something out
if it," she says. "Let's look at what we did to allow students to
demonstrate their learning in new ways, or more crafted by the
connections they made with the content than the ones we were forcing
them to demonstrate.
"Let's surface examples from faculty who had to resort to different
forms of having students demonstrate a particular learning outcome, to
show that students can be responsive when they're given a little
freedom," she adds. "In the end, this could really help shift and
reorient assessment practice to be much more about what the student is
owning in the experience, rather than responding to the standard ways
of expressing their learning."
***
Elsewhere on the Indiana University campus, Ben Motz, a research
scientist in its department of psychological and brain sciences, is
also on a quest to learn about this spring's learning.
As director of the university's e-learning research and practice lab,
Motz is principal investigator on a new "Mega-Study of COVID-19 Impact
in Higher Education." In conjunction with researchers at Ohio State
University, Motz and his peers are surveying faculty members and
students and analyzing learning analytics data from institutions in the
Unizin Consortium of research universities with a goal described this
way:
As our full nation's instructional faculty are suddenly forced to
explore the contemporary online learning toolkit, and students are
assigned to learn from whatever faculty cobble together, we have the
obligation to understand the gaps that they discover, and how this
impact is felt.
"There's a great deal of hunger for evidence of what the problems were
so we can at least do due diligence of how we can fix them for the
fall," Motz says. While many students and parents may have bemoaned the
quality of the learning experience this spring, most also understand
the crisis conditions under which it occurred. The expectations for
virtual learning this fall will be higher, Motz says.
"It's as if faculty got a 'You pass Go and collect $200' card," he
says, a Monopoly reference that might be lost on many of today's
students. "The likelihood we'll get another favorable draw out of the
community chest is low."
The study's goal is not to "evaluate online learning," Motz says,
because "a large majority of faculty members and students didn't know
what they were doing."
But the existence of a "field test" in which "100 percent of the target
population" of students and faculty members "give it all a shot"
created what Motz calls a "massive user study" both of the technology
instructors and students used and the educational practices they
employed.
On the technology side, it will be instructive to see how professors
used various tools and how quickly they were able to adapt how they
used them. "It almost doesn't matter whether a professor gets it right
on the first try," Motz says of an instructor's interaction with a
learning management system or videoconferencing platform or other
technology. "Technology development is more of a sociological problem
than a good use problem. If it takes you two years to become a power
user [of a piece of technology], your product is broken."
Much more important is what researchers can glean about professors'
interactions with students, and students' with course material and each
other, Motz says.
While data from the faculty and student surveys are still being
processed, very preliminary results reveal that students spent much of
their time this spring reading textbooks and watching videos of
instructors "giving the lecture he would otherwise have given," says
Motz.
"It was spectacularly isolating," he adds. "The thing that was totally
forgotten in this is any kind of contact among students or between
students and faculty members. The faculty member seemed to feel the
need to be a firehose of knowledge. The street was one way."
It isn't surprising that in the rush to transform courses in a hurry
for a different mode of delivery that "the common response was to
ignore those more interactive aspects of what online learning could be
-- they just needed to survive," says Motz.
The good news about that is that's a fixable problem; for courses that
remain virtual this fall (or that build virtual components into a
hybrid model, as many institutions are considering), faculty members
have more time to build in community-building elements that will make
for a more engaging learning experience.
One other preliminary finding from the Unizin study suggests that
instructors are game to try to improve their virtual teaching. Students
who've responded to the survey say they are less likely to take online
courses in the future, based on their experience this spring. But
faculty members? "They're much more willing to teach online courses
after the spring," Motz reports.
***
Jankowski of NILOA sees several key takeaways from the spring that she
hopes will influence the faculty's approach to learning going forward.
First, early results of the association's own survey of
assessment-related changes this spring shows that many instructors did
not put student needs or issues of equity into account in their rush to
transform their face-to-face courses for remote instruction. "A lot of
people made quick decisions, then later asked, 'Did that work for you?'"
Very quickly, though, the diversity in students' needs and situations
became "starkly raised" for instructors, Jankowski says. In normal
times on a campus, students turn to various student affairs offices to
deal with problems or difficult situations.
But in the pivot to remote learning, "the main touch point that
students had with the institution was with faculty, and they were
getting bombarded with questions about mental health, medical things."
On campus, a professor might have referred a student to student
affairs, says Jankowski, but with urgent requests, many instructors
"ended up having to get support from student affairs professionals for
what they do holistically for students."
"I'd like to think professors came away from this spring with a better
understanding of the whole student -- not just for the time they show
up in my class, but the fact that they have layers of things that are
going on. They're not just a student, but a caregiver, or a foster
youth … I would like to see us not be surprised about our students."
Jankowski also, unsurprisingly, sees opportunity for instructors to
emerge from their experience this spring with a heightened sense of the
importance of how they assess students' learning.
She says her anecdotal sense is that faculty members who had built
their in-person courses very specifically around a set of learning
outcomes "understood the value of that when they made the pivot" to
remote learning, when many of them reconsidered their expectations for
the amount of work students could do given everything else they were
juggling.
"It gave them an ability to home in on the most important learning for
the end of that term," Jankowski says. As professors considered what
assignments to keep and which to ditch, those with a clear sense of the
course's goals had an easier time deciding "what do I need to have my
students focus on, what are the most important parts of what students
need to learn."
"One question for future is whether the importance of learning outcomes
and assessment as a design tool carries over and permeates how we build
courses," she adds.
Jankowski says she saw professors adapt in another way that heartens
her -- by shaping their assignments in response to what students were
encountering day to day.
A math professor who asked students to graph their internet speed over
time, to gauge how it might affect their learning. A history instructor
who incorporated the 1918 flu into the course plan. Psychology faculty
members who asked students to watch a movie with the family members
they were holed up with to understand the differing prisms through
which they viewed it.
To the widespread assumption that students learned less during this
time, Jankowski acknowledges that that's a possibility. But maybe it
was just a different kind of learning, she says -- "maybe it became
more poignant because it was relevant to how I was living."
She cites another example of music students who used video platforms
like YouTube or Flipgrid for group recitals. "That wasn't the faculty
that figured it out -- it was the students. It could benefit us to keep
in mind that they can be co-creators, and they might have really good
ideas if we make clear the outcomes we're trying to get to."
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