What Will The Classroom Look Like Post-COVID-19?
Will Kobos explores the College of William and Mary’s descent into online-only classes from the point of view of professors and education specialists. Learn how professors adapted their curricula to adapt to remote formats and how they plan to continue to use Zoom as an educational tool post-pandemic.
ZACHARY LUTZKY // FLAT HAT MAGAZINE
College students across the country remember the moment in March 2020 when they realised that normal, face-to-face classes would be put on hold — not just for one or two weeks, but for the long haul. More than a year later, students at the College of William and Mary and other universities across the nation are looking to next fall as the much-awaited return to pre-pandemic normalcy. Assuming that students this fall will be able to throng the Sunken Garden once again while passing between seminars and packed lecture halls, in doing so, they will mark the end of an 18-month experiment in unconventional learning. During that time, the situation challenged professors across the country to find ways to teach courses in ways they never imagined.
Last spring, as colleges sent students home and professors were busy jury-rigging their classes to be conducted virtually, professor Mark Hofer, who specialises in education technology and directs the College’s Studio for Teaching and Learning Innovation, took the initial steps to teach other professors how to adapt to remote learning. Hofer and his colleagues developed a website in the spring that presented a crash course on remote teaching methods as well as additional accompanying resources for professors over the summer.
“In essence, the instructors were now the students and they got to see first-hand what it was like being a student in a Blackboard course,” Hofer wrote in a statement. “More than 450 faculty completed that course, in which they explored the different instructional options for Fall courses and the supporting teaching strategies and technologies.”
Hofer says he was impressed with how the teaching faculty fought through the hardship and uncertainty in the early days of the pandemic and adjusted to the new normal.
“A significant proportion of the faculty attended our online courses and workshops, visited our online tutorials websites, made appointments to meet with us one-on-one, sought support from colleagues and other resources, and just kept going, no matter what,” he said.
Professor Patricia Habersham was only in her first year teaching at the College when the pandemic began. In the spring and summer of 2020, when nobody seemed to know how long the pandemic would last, Habersham started preparing for the task of teaching first-semester Introductory Biology, which, at an enrollment of 470 students, was the single largest class at the College that semester.
“I was looking forward to teaching, and I was hoping that we would have been back face-to-face after the pandemic started in March,” Habersham said. “But when I came to know that this was going to be a remote learning experience, I embraced the challenge.”
She ultimately taught the course as a remote asynchronous class with recorded lectures. Conscious of the limitations that remote delivery would place on the class in terms of instructor-student and peer-to-peer contact, Habersham said she tried to mitigate concerns by adapting the curriculum.
“My number one goal was to facilitate learning by creating community in this asynchronous environment that we found ourselves in, and I inserted some activities into the course where students would have an opportunity to work together,” Habersham noted.
Still, by the end of the fall semester, Habersham realised that she still missed having direct contact with students.
“I missed the touch of having my students at my fingertips, so I can get a pulse on their learning, a pulse on their understanding,” she remarked. “I think students thrive when they have their professor there, where they can really talk to them and ask questions in a live platform. As an instructor, I thrive when I can have my students here receiving my instruction, and I can watch their reactions.”
Professor of physics Tricia Vahle decided to teach her fall semester lecture course in person. However, even then, the pandemic-induced distancing requirements meant that the class would look very different from one held in a typical year.
ZACHARY LUTZKY // FLAT HAT MAGAZINE
“I was pretty stressed about the room limit during registration,” Vahle said. “I usually give overrides on the class size, figuring that we can make space, but I had to keep a pretty careful count with a waiting list last fall.”
In her experience teaching a face-to-face lecture-based class, Vahle found that even physical proximity could not fully remove the barriers that COVID-19 precautions have placed between instructors and students.
“Using the bigger room and everyone wearing masks meant I couldn’t see people’s reactions as well,” she said. “I didn’t get as much feedback as usual, so it was difficult to tell if people were interested in what I was saying, or if they were struggling with the material. I also like to encourage more student participation, but it was really difficult to sustain.”
Vahle also said that safety measures made it difficult to teach reactively based on student behaviour.
“I can usually change my pace, or say something in a different way, or do more or different examples based on questions, or just the level of whispered chatter between students sitting next to each other,” Vahle observed.
Despite the inherent limitations of pandemic-era classroom instruction, the return of some classes has been well-received by students.
“[The school] did a good job of trying to welcome us back in person and to make it safe to meet for some classes in a safe setting,” Sam Joyner ’24 said. “I’m glad we have at least some classes that are here and in-person.”
Professor Habersham is not teaching a lecture course this spring, but for the two sections of her COLL 100 class, she tried to structure them in a way that allowed for more teacher-student interaction. She is currently teaching one section face-to-face in a classroom and the other in a remote synchronous format. Even with the improved contact that a remote synchronous system brings compared to remote asynchronous, Habersham still misses the real thing.
“With my virtual class, I think it’s going well, but I’m still not feeling that pulse, that feeling, that touch,” she said. “I see that in their eyes sometimes.”
Habersham has continually adapted her courses to engage more directly with students in both her in-person and remote sections.
“There is a time for [students] to meet with me in small groups,” said Habersham. “We do that with the breakout rooms, as well as in the face-to-face class where I can just put them in small groups and then rotate around in the classroom while we’re still maintaining social distancing.”
Upon reflecting on her teaching experience in the fall, Vahle says she would use small-group interactions and breakout rooms to have more direct contact with students if she had to do it all again.
“I would still do most of the lectures in person, but perhaps do the ‘problem session’ class remotely,” she said. “Using breakout rooms and splitting the class up into smaller working groups, I could hope to interact with more students more directly, solving the lack of feedback problem.”
Professor Hofer sees the benefit of breakout sessions as well.
“One of the biggest successes [of remote teaching] overall has been the use of Zoom breakout rooms,” noted Hofer. “While everyone has probably been in an awkward breakout room environment, when done correctly, it can help stimulate ideas and build community.”
As Hofer pointed out, the remote nature of some classes gives them access to resources they would not have had in a traditional, in-person setting, like guest speakers.
Remote classes have their share of unique advantages, and Habersham has been trying to take advantage of the medium for her remote synchronous class.
“They’re learning how to give engaging presentations and interact with their audience, even in a virtual environment,” she said of her students. “So they’re learning some new things that my face-to-face COLL 100 isn’t learning. But that’s great, because I can see the balance, and I can appreciate that. It helps me to focus on, ‘Okay, you know, if I’m in a virtual environment, then I need to focus on this set of tools versus if I’m in a face-to-face environment.’’
ZACHARY LUTZKY // FLAT HAT MAGAZINE
The realisation that different modes of instruction work best through different course delivery methods may be the concluding step of the arduous process of learning and discovery that the pandemic has thrust upon professors, students, and administrators alike.
“There have been challenges of every sort,” said Hofer, “from the technological abilities of instructors and students, to the need to ramp up our infrastructure, to the psychological toll moving to remote instruction has had on all of us.”
Students are more than ready to move on from Zoom-based activities. When Habersham gave her in-person class the choice between small-group discussions through breakout rooms or physical conversations, they immediately shut down the Zoom option. And yes, if anyone needed further corroboration, researchers at Stanford showed last month that Zoom fatigue is, in fact, a dilemma.
It may take some time until researchers can gauge the overall effect of the pandemic’s disruption of college life; few would argue that the changes in the environment have not made an impact on the student learning experience. A 2017 study looking at hundreds of classes at a large university offered both in-person and fully-remote found that, while they followed the same syllabi and took the same exams, in-person students outperformed their remote counterparts by a significant margin. The difference was most pronounced among students with lower GPAs.
With the administration announcing its intention to resume a fully in-person operation next fall, it seems as though COVID-restricted classes, with their masks, duct-tape marks on tables, and muted Zoom windows with virtual backgrounds, are almost in the rearview mirror. Still, Zoom’s presence in the classroom may be felt long after the last vaccine has been administered and the last positive case has been recorded.
Habersham will continue to have Zoom office hours even after the pandemic.
“I want students to feel like they can reach me even if they can’t come across campus, or if they can’t be in two places at one time, but they need to speak with me,” she noted. “And I’m also probably going to add a Zoom review session that can be recorded [and] that can be posted for students who can’t make it. I think having that feature would be helpful, especially in large lecture classes.”
While the College as a whole will be pivoting back to traditional instruction, Hofer says he is glad that professors have learned so much about unconventional approaches to teaching.
“I’m excited about the possibilities in front of us for designing engaging, flexible, and innovative approaches to course design and delivery,” he said.
This academic year has been full of new challenges and lessons for everyone involved in ways that apply to more than just teaching, as Habersham notes.
“That’s something I really want my students to grab hold of, especially during the pandemic — life isn’t always going to go the way that we want it to go,” Habersham noted. “But let’s make the best of the time that we have, doing whatever it is that we have to do.”
ZACHARY LUTZKY // FLAT HAT MAGAZINE