Transfer, or Transform? What the early weeks of remote instruction can teach us about undergraduate online learning

March and April 2020 was a rushed effort to get students learning remotely. What changed — and what didn’t — explains why students struggled to pivot to online instruction. This five-part series on students’ perspectives provide crucial lessons for how to develop more effective online coursework going forward.

Introduction: The Problem With Our Conservative Education System

While much is made of technology’s potential to transform learning, 3,000 undergraduates who completed a survey during the early weeks of the pandemic reveal that the shift to remote learning was structured more by technology’s constraints than its possibilities.

Educational systems hold fast to tradition. Even when the pivot to remote learning in March 2020 forced major changes to course structure and content delivery, surveyed students’ perspectives reveal that learners and educators alike held onto in-person practices that were incompatible with optimal online learning.

The rush to move coursework online in a matter of days left little room for innovation. Educators who had never intended to teach online were asked to adapt their materials to unfamiliar formats and platforms. Students’ reports suggest that most faculty reacted by simply transferring offline lectures, assignment requirements, and exams into digital environments. This conservative approach not only failed to leverage the opportunities of a digital learning environment; it also created considerable challenges for students.

And yet, even as students expressed frustration about faculty failing to transform their coursework, our data suggest that students also resorted to conservative tactics. They relied on in-person learning practices that felt familiar, even when those practices were ill-suited to remote learning. For example, they continued to rely on their instructors to provide them with a sense of routine and structure, even when asynchronous instruction made it improbable that faculty could fill that role.

Between the rush to transition to remote learning and instructors’ and students’ conservative tendencies, Spring 2020 was a time of transferring classes from offline to online, not transforming classes to suit the new instructional medium. Those missed opportunities surfaced three main challenges for students in their earliest weeks of remote learning, according to survey responses from 3,000 undergraduates from universities across the United States in April and May 2020:

• The first article explains the “strange/familiar” dynamic in the survey findings: students wrote about how familiar learning behaviors and practices felt strange online, and why behaviors that became familiar to students online would be strange in-person. Faculty and students tried holding onto practices ill-suited to remote learning, simply because they were familiar, rather than embracing practices better suited to online learning.
• The second article explains novelty overload: students found that using novel platforms while developing novel practices for remote learning was overwhelming. Instructors held fast to conservative tendencies by trying to replicate prior practices online, and students relied solely on their instructors for guidance through this developing situation, even when their instructors were on unfamiliar ground themselves.
• The third article examines why students felt betrayed by changes to their classes during the remote transition — those changes felt like breaches of the syllabus as a social contract. Students were frustrated by course changes that created confusion, additional work, and threatened their course performance and grades in ways that they felt they had not signed up for.

This series is intended to help make sense of the learning challenges students experienced during the pandemic. Instructors and students alike can utilize the above three themes to target practices that were only transferred during the transition of Spring 2020. The final article in this series takes an evidence-based look at how instructors and students can prioritize transforming practices so that they take full advantage of the benefits of online learning, regardless if classes are in-person with some online functions, hybrid, or fully remote.

Catch the next part of this series, The Strange and the Familiar

This 5-part series on transferring and transforming learning online is the product of an independent study project by Luna Laliberte. She analyzed open-ended answers from 3,000 students surveyed between April 21 and May 14, 2020, from 31 universities across the U.S., about their remote learning experiences. The survey was conducted by Vikki Katz and Amy Jordan, professors in the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University.