Transfer, or Transform? What the early weeks of remote instruction can teach us about undergraduate online learning
#4: Syllabi as Social Contracts
Undergraduate students are often told to treat the syllabus as a “contract.” It is not legally binding of course, but the syllabus lays out the expectations faculty have for students — and what students should expect from their instructors. The syllabus is a traditional and effective way for both instructors and students to hold each other accountable; a social contract of sorts. The transition to remote instruction meant rewriting those contracts, and many students felt the new contracts broke the terms they had originally signed up for.
Students felt their instructors were not providing them with enough support. During in-person instruction, students found faculty more approachable. In contrast, students felt less confident approaching faculty during remote instruction, perceiving them as unable to reply to emails or arrange office hours. Some students even felt they deserved certain allowances because of how disruptive the transition turned out to be: “I’ve honestly experienced a lack of communication and support by my professors and TAs… I feel like I am isolated in my decisions and feel as though I should be receiving high grades still given the circumstances.”
Deborah Tannen writes about how people perceive digital communication in different ways, particularly across generations; many students felt those generational gaps in the pivot to remote learning. A student noted: “It feels that tone can be miscommunicated over email, so communicating with my TA about my grades is very difficult. If in-person I might have approached the professor to settle the disagreement, but I don’t feel comfortable doing so over email.” These new feelings of faculty inaccessibility left many students feeling that the social contract for open communication with faculty had been broken. Quantitative data analysis from the same survey reinforces this finding, showing that faculty communication quality was crucial to whether students developed remote learning proficiency in those early weeks of the online transition.
Students felt they were assigned tasks as busywork. During remote learning, students were overwhelmed with assignments they felt did not serve their learning experience. Due dates were closely spaced, and assignments were seen as menial and/or providing little knowledge or experience: ”my university’s attempts to replicate a classroom setting is more tedious than helpful (ex. online discussion boards are all over the place, no sense of structure)”.
Some faculty tried to compensate for limited opportunities for synchronous interactions with instructors and classmates by swapping out attendance points for discussion board posts. However well-intended, students often resented such substitutions: “Professors think we are not doing anything all day so they can overload us with work, NO! I have what feels like double the work I had previously.” Students also discussed how overwhelming it was to suddenly have more assignments than the syllabus originally stated: “some professors have been assigning a crazy amount of busywork.”; “More busy work!!!! that isn’t even graded!”
Students expected their workload quantity and quality would stay consistent throughout the term, and were largely resentful of rewritten expectations after the remote transition, even though faculty may have had good intentions in attempting to compensate for lost in-person interaction.
Students felt inconsistent application of online teaching methods affected their performance. While faculty have always had freedom to determine the structure and content of their courses, students felt the inconsistencies across their classes more acutely during remote instruction. Many were balancing synchronous and asynchronous classes, different learning platforms for different classes, and shifting assignment requirements and deadlines. When students were performing better in one structure than another (e.g., in a synchronous rather than an asynchronous class), they attributed their poorer grades to the class format, rather than themselves.
Without established, consistent expectations of what to expect in online instruction, students often felt instructors were choosing teaching methods that were more convenient for themselves, regardless of whether those choices created challenges for students. One wrote, “Only having some classes with live Zoom lectures and others with pre-recorded lectures/only assignments is difficult. It is a little easier to keep up in classes with live lectures…[ but] the classes that just expect me to watch videos and turn in assignments I find myself falling behind….”
Inconsistent enforcement of the social contract between faculty and students had more global consequences too, including how students felt about the education they were receiving: “I feel pressure to maintain the same level of quality in my schoolwork, even though I do not feel that the education I have received since moving online is the same level of quality”. Students felt that the lack of consistent application of transferred practices meant the original value of their syllabus as a social contract had been lost.
Catch the next last part of this series here!
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.
