Transfer, or Transform? What the early weeks of remote instruction can teach us about undergraduate online learning
#2: The Strange and the Familiar
Survey responses from 3,000 undergraduate students nationwide suggest that both faculty and students attempted to preserve as many of the characteristics of in-person learning as possible during the early weeks of remote instruction. While that approach may have reduced some uncertainty, surveyed students soon realized that many familiar practices felt strange in an online learning environment — and that other practices that felt strange in-person, actually felt comfortable online.
Familiar learning practices became strange online, and test-taking practices in particular caused students unease. Students were accustomed to specific rituals during exams, such as instructors patrolling their classrooms to prevent cheating, and being able to ask faculty for clarification if a question was confusing. These familiar practices could not be adequately transferred online.
Instructors who attempted to preserve the timed-test approaches of in-person learning often resorted to online programs like ProctorTrack, a software that claims to prevent cheating by monitoring a student’s computer screen, browser, and webcam. Students were disturbed by the invasion of privacy and undue stress imposed by online proctoring. Furthermore, students who are under-connected or have malfunctioning digital devices, lockdown testing technologies were especially challenging: “[Proctortrack] has flagged me for cheating when I truly was not and I had to get in contact with my professor and explain it was … due to the bad connection my laptop had with the Wi-fi in my house.”
Not only did Proctortrack test students’ connectivity as much as the material for the exam, but many also felt that it unfairly hindered students whose homes were not optimal learning environments: “The solution to safeguards against cheating is not going to be locking browsers during exams for an hour or so. Not everyone has access to a quiet place to take a test, not everyone has consistent internet and can take the test in one shot. Moreover — locking the browser does nothing to prevent cheating on [other] devices.” This student highlights an emergent theme in the survey responses: students felt that the technologies used to transfer exam proctoring practices online were fundamentally flawed. Proctortrack and equivalent programs placed unfair burdens on students with low bandwidth, living in crowded homes. Even worse, the programs were ineffective in addressing their main objective: to prevent cheating.
Other students indicated that faculty tried to use Zoom to replicate the experience of taking an exam together in person. A student wrote, “One of the exams was proctored [on] Zoom, and I had lots of difficulty finding a quiet space at that time, so the noise was disturbing to me and to the other people being proctored in my Zoom meeting.” Instructors’ well-meaning efforts to maintain an offline practice online may have in fact disadvantaged students’ exam performance, as the familiar became strange in an online environment.
Practices that were strange in-person became familiar, or rather easier to do, online. On the other hand, some students happily reported that the traditional structure of a professor on the stage with a largely silent audience became less hierarchical in a remote context, providing lower-stakes ways to interact with their professor and classmates. One student wrote, “Oddly enough, I noticed more participation from students in one of my courses with 200+ students. Because of the size and distance between students and the professor in the classroom, it seems some of us were more intimidated to ask questions during the lecture or respond to his questions. Instead, after the course moved to remote learning, students were much less intimidated in participating in the online chat function for Zoom.”
The Zoom chat function also allowed for students to speak to each other more directly than in a lecture hall: “[There] is more efficiency with Zoom! [I] can connect with more people at one time, [makes it] easier to multitask and communicate.” Beyond direct learning advantages, students also reported other behaviors that increased their comfort during remote class time that would have been felt strange during face-to-face classes: “…remote learning gives me the opportunity to eat during classes without fear of disrupting the class or fidgeting with something without seeming rude”.
In sum, traditional practices that relied on physical space (such as, proctoring exams by overseeing students), tended not to transfer well online. On the other hand, learning practices that were more flexible and not restricted to physical space (such as socializing between students and faculty) were actually facilitated by online learning in some cases. Even so, the strange/familiar dynamic was highly subjective and depended on the unique circumstances and interpretations of each student.
Catch the next part of this series, Novelty Overload
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.
