Zoom is a vile teaching tool
This is superfluous and hyperbolic rant about Zoom and other video chat software used for teaching. If you’re in to that kind of thing, read on, and commiserate with me! If not, go read about more important things, like the abysmal conditions in which U.S. K-12 educators are teaching during this pandemic, and why its on all of us to fix them.
Prior to this academic year, the only experience I had with online courses was a developmental psychology course I took in college in 2001. My wife and I were new parents, and the online option was a godsend, freeing us from commuting to campus, and giving us immense flexibility to study between naps and feedings. The instructor kept it simple: we read, then wrote, and then he wrote back. Repeat. It felt like I was in a little book club with just me and the professor. Its intimacy was its best feature: I’d never felt closer to an instructor and their ideas, as isolating as it was. I have no idea how the instructor found the time to interact so closely with 70 students, but he did, and it was pleasant. As a highly motivated and curious student, it worked well for me.
Seven years later, I was a professor myself, and in a school that had been teaching masters students online in its Masters in Library and Information Science for years. This was a school and a degree that had adopted the internet early, and tinkered with online teaching pedagogy for years, finding ways of making the most of asynchronous media like email, discussion forums, and learning management systems. While I don’t think our online masters students ever felt like they had full parity with our residential program, they did seem to learn and build community just as well, just differently. A carefully grown set of practices over a decade had ensured it. I had never taught in our online degree, largely due to lack of expertise in library and information science, but I was always curious how my colleagues teaching had moved beyond the intimate correspondence of my psychology course.
So when lockdown came last winter 2020, I was confident online teaching could be good, but also trepidatious: I hadn’t spent a decade developing practices, nor had a really thought very carefully about what made my pedagogy work. In fact, as I started to reflect on my teaching over the summer in preparation for my first online course this past Autumn, I started to realize just how much I depended on being situated in the same physical space as my students. I could think of the obvious things that would be missing—seeing students faces, walking the room—but I feared all of the things that I had no idea were missing until the moment I was teaching.
Well, I’ve taught online for six months now, and know what’s missing, and I think it’s mostly Zoom’s fault. Before I start listing what I dislike about Zoom, some context: both courses I’ve taught have been relatively small (at least for a big research university), with just 35 undergraduate or graduate students. I’ve used a combination of Zoom for larger groups and screen sharing and Discord for smaller groups and persistent messaging, and of course a lot of email and learning management systems (Canvas) for asynchronous interactions. I use many active learning methods, including various forms of large and small group discussions, small group activities, lectures and polls, and an abundance of small group conversations between me and a few students. The particular courses and topics aren’t particularly relevant for this reflection, but for context, they were a team-based software engineering course and a survey course on user interface software and technology. Students are usually pretty engaged and curious about the material.
One more caveat: much of what’s made online teaching hard is the pandemic itself, and all of the social inequality that it has amplified. So many students are exhausted, demotivated, or in crisis, even for those who are doing fine, there’s a constant sense of dread, sadness, and grief. These would be difficult times to teach even if we were in person. So many of the challenges teachers have faced aren’t really Zoom’s fault; some of the crisis underlying student lives is due to the virus, but also due to our country’s longstanding disinterest in educational equity. Perhaps if there weren’t a pandemic, I wouldn’t be so dissatisfied with video chat.
All of those other factors aside, I think Zoom is a vile, horrendous, deeply flawed interface that makes it incredibly hard to meaningfully teach synchronous classes. Here’s what’s missing:
- Gaze. Great teaching requires a constant monitoring of attention, and eye gaze is our greatest social indicator of attention. In person, I can scan a room in a few seconds and get a rapid sampling of degrees of student engagement, noticing who is looking at me, who is not, where they’re looking instead, and more often, what they’re looking at instead. With Zoom, even with videos on, gaze is gone.
- Confusion. While facial expressions are rarely strong signals of most emotions, there is one often recognizable state: confusion. When students look at me with furled brows, it either means they’re processing what I’m saying very deeply, or they’re deeply confused by it. When I see such brows at scale in a room, I can begin a negotiation, tossing out a formative assessment to judge understanding, or re-explaining something to see if the brows subside. With Zoom, if video is even on, furled brows could mean the above, or it could mean that a confusing pop-up appeared. What used to be a reasonable signal of thought has turned to noise.
- Conversation. A crucial part of many active learning methods is conversation. Students need to be able to talk to each other, and me to them, and engage in all of the building of common ground that requires. In person, we use non-verbal cues with our hands, mouths, and posture to negotiate this grounding, quickly and rapidly moving conversations forward. As with all video chat, latency completely breaks conversational turns, creating immense friction in shared understanding, and thus learning.
- Grouping. Another key feature of active learning in person is the ability to quickly and flexibly group students. In some classes, I’ll have students self-organize into small groups, then quickly rotate, then use social signals to create matched pairs, or rotate groups speed dating style. With Zoom, the only grouping mechanism available is the breakout, which is slow and isolating, with no meaningful or noticeable broadcasting mechanisms between groups, or even to all groups, aside from a small pastel ephemeral text note. Teachers can’t even see the groups; it’s like they’ve teleported to another planet, and are just waiting to be teleported back without their consent.
- Distraction. In person, smartphones and laptops are a constant distraction. I usually try to mitigate this by having laptop users on the edge of the room to avoid distracting students behind them, and I call out smartphone users who think I can’t see them texting under their desk. I create an expectation of engagement, and most students follow my lead. Even when they don’t, I can walk the room, and use my physical presence to re-engage them without saying anything. With Zoom, students are always at risk of distraction, since they’re on a device that can interrupt them at any time, and I have no ability to stop or mitigate it.
- Environment. In person, I can design and structure the room and its arrangement to facilitate learning. I might move tables closer to facilitate students overhearing conversations, or distance them to create privacy. I can close the door to reduce noise, control the lights to ask for students’ attention, enable and disable projectors to redirect attention. In Zoom, I can’t control anything about a student’s environment to ensure it’s conducive to learning. I can’t even control the Zoom interface to manage attention: that’s something students control.
- Appearance. In person, students can control so much of how they appear to each other and to me, giving them some degree of confidence over their social presence. Clothing, posture, hair, makeup, shoes, accessories, and so much more give us agency over how students are seen in spaces that are largely shaped by teachers and institutions. In Zoom, however, the best case scenario is a well-positioned fixed camera and some reasonable lighting. More likely, students appear pixelated, in poor lighting, face only, and in a space that’s usually private. The result is that most students desperately and justifiably want to keep their cameras off, exacerbating all of the problems above that rely on non-verbal visual cues.
- Provisionality. In person, so much about communication is tentative: students can slightly raise their hands to see indicate a potential question and I can make eye contact and signal that I’ll answer. Someone can hold up a finger to request an interruption. A group can nudge themselves further from other groups or whisper if they want a semi-private conversation temporarily. All of this fluid provisionality affords agency in active learning. In Zoom, however, only one person can reasonably talk a time, the social cues for turn taking are binary (e.g, hand up, hand down, muted, not muted, in a breakout, not in a breakout). There is no useful halfway in anything.
- Disembodiment. In person, if we can speak and want to speak, we just speak. If we can hear and want to hear, we just hear. If we can move and want to move, we just move. Embodiment is such an essential part of our existence, we rarely think of it as a crucial ingredient for learning. But in Zoom, everything is disembodied. We have to attach speakers to our ears, affix our eyes to a screen, keep mics close to our mouths, and stay within view of our computer’s spying eyes. If being in a body is freedom, being in Zoom is prison.
I could go on. The bottom line is that Zoom, and any other comparable video chat software for synchronous teaching, is a tragically flawed, intrinsically inferior, and hopelessly disruptive medium for active learning. When we someday return to classrooms, and the capitalists call for lower costs of education through online learning, none of us should settle for such a brittle patchwork of audio/video facsimiles. There is inherent value to maintaining our crumbling campuses and their aging classrooms, if not upgrading them considerably.
And this is true under ideal conditions, with great hardware, strong bandwidth, and students that have everything they need to thrive like food, safety, and wellbeing. During this pandemic, students are lacking many of these resources, and in our least well-resourced communities, students are lacking all of them. When this pandemic is over, most of these resources will still be missing. All of these limitations only amplify all of these inequities further, translating what might have been a small inequity in the classroom to categorical exclusion in a Zoom room.
All of the failures of video chat make me think back to my first online course, which was nothing more than email correspondence with a helpful and patient expert. That was isolating in some ways, but it worked for me: I got to know my professor quite well, and I learned. But it also required a lot of motivation and self-regulation for me to stay on schedule and the instructor really wasn’t in a position to inspire that motivation. I was there to learn, and motivated to graduate. Even asynchronous learning, as good as it might be for self-regulating learners, still fumbles for students who need co-presence to stay engaged. And what are we doing if we choose models that only work for our most capable and well-resourced students?
Where does that leave us? There’s certainly a lot more experimenting to do. I’m curious about asynchronous mastery learning models that are higher touch. For example, I’m teaching a class of 250 next quarter about foundations of information. Could I devise a scheme with my 10 TAs and I where we facilitate 50 small groups of 5, checking in twice a week, answering questions about reading and homeworks, and providing asychronous feedback? In the 5 hours of class time, we could give an hour to each group a week, and potentially have some rich conversations with each other about information and society. Would that be better than 5 hours on Zoom in large groups? I’m beginning to think unequivocally yes.
