Welcome to Online Learning

By Zainab Cheema

This blog post casts a backward glance at the challenges and victories of distance teaching and learning in 2020-2021. Both in Fall 2020 and Spring 2021, I taught an online literature class called “Race and Justice in Global Othellos” for American University. The Zoom class of 2020 was all about novelty. While my colleagues and I came armed with trainings from American University’s Center for Teaching, Research and Learning, we felt nervous about dipping our toes into the psychedelic pool of online learning. We entered a brave new world of online tools, technologies and new buzz words in Fall 2020—quite honestly, “instructional design” was a new one for me.

At first, our students also seemed to be intrigued by the online classroom. In our first few classes in Fall 2020, my students and I enthused about the ease of pressing a button and joining a class where the participants were logging in from cities, towns and suburbs across the United States. Giving or attending class in yoga pants and PJ bottoms was a guilty pleasure. However, by February 2021, fatigue had set in. Student video cams were turned off more frequently. Sometimes, getting students to participate in discussion felt like a rope pulling match. Discovering that students weren’t doing enough of the reading, I began to set up pop quiz ambushes. In her April 2020 article for Inside Higher Ed, Susan Blum voiced what so many instructors came to feel during our year of Zoom—it drains rather than energizes as an in-person class can. “When I see that technological platforms such as Zoom provide some imitations of face-to-face interaction, what I notice the most is that I miss the three-dimensional faces and the bodies and the eyes and the breaths,” notes Blum.

Friends and colleagues at American University were experienced similar situations in their classrooms. Zoom fatigue was real. In COVID-19 lockdown, some students battled unsupportive home environments or weak internet connections. Students were stressed by having to juggle multiple instructional platforms and modalities. Some professors preferred Canvas, others Blackboard; some held class asynchronously, others held live Zoom sessions, and still others crafted mixed live- and asynch models. Student engagement levels dropped. It can be harder to pick up cues, track homework assignments, and build peer-to-peer and teacher-to-peer relationships online. The challenges of online teaching and learning registered in nationwide trends. A Brookings Institution study found that in Fall 2020, there was a sharp decline in math scores data for 4 million students while in the San Francisco Bay area, students with a failing grade increased by 37%.

Yet, my final class of the semester proved to be a triumph. In one of my final assessments, I ask students to write a reflective journal on what they’ve learned over the semester and their stakes in their progress. I was surprised and touched by some of their responses. One student wrote, “I learned to love what I write.” Another freshman wrote, “I didn’t hate this class as much as I hated my other classes this semester”—a Gen-Z compliment if there ever was one. One student sent me a prose poem: “My analysis of fiction literature has gotten tremendously better and dense. I do not focus on just the language being spoken by the characters in a play or book, I look at their meaning, the setting in which it is being said it, the power dynamics involved, and what aspects of intersectionality apply to that specific part of the text. This has allowed me to understand any text on a much denser level.” Another observed: “Right now, I am trying to publish a paper on COVID-19 and this course by far uplifted my confidence and ability to write so for what it is worth thank you.” While students were also exhausted by the online format of their 15+ credits this Spring, their final group projects in my class showed that they did successfully build relationships in the classroom. They were able to do teamwork online, and they delivered thoughtful projects that showcased them as bright, young, emerging world citizens. Other friends and colleagues have had similar end-of-the-semester experiences.

The semester’s end showed me another side of online learning—it is a platform with power, one that is here to stay. Having tentatively returned to the optimism with which I started the year, I’ve made peace with the Zoom class. Biden’s push to re-open schools and colleges by Fall 2021 leaves distance education in somewhat of a limbo, as the contingency plan for when conditions impede in-person learning. Yet, schools, colleges and universities have discovered the possibilities of online learning, so it’s never going to be the step-sister banished to the broom closet. The question is, how will in-person learning integrate and make nice with online education?