I don't want to go back to the classroom

[lightning]

I'm with ya. I wrote a similar starter post about a month ago.

It's all becoming real, now that the official email has come from the health officers, saying that it is safe to go back to normal this fall.

I'm dreading in-person office hours, where students will occasionally drop by un-announced. Yes, they did that.

[Larimar]

Teaching online is all the boring stuff (grading, reporting) and none of the fun stuff (hanging out with students, talking about stuff, hearing their questions.)

This was pretty much my experience, too. I teach freshman comp, and trying to do so online was very frustrating. It consisted of lecturing to a sea of silent black squares, and practically begging the students to respond in any way to the readings and questions and assignments. They didn't want to talk, period, or do much of anything else, either. They didn't read the feedback from my online grading, rarely asked for help, and didn't even read each other's discussion board postings. Some of them just kept plowing on making the same mistakes over and over no matter what I did. I can only explain how a coordinating conjunction works and what constitutes a sentence fragment so many times over the course of a term. It was as if all my efforts were being lost down a black hole. Teaching writing goes so much better when I can give them work-in-progress feedback and encouragement, and answer the small questions that they seem to think take too much effort to ask online, and that I can't see the context of online in order to answer anyway.

[downer]

If I had a full time job at a campus college in a college town, with mostly residential students, it would be different.

The students I teach in the classroom are mostly commuter students. Most of them have part time or even full time jobs.

To be honest, I was expecting more of them to choose online classes after experiencing them. Their need to be efficient with their time is greater than mine.

The great majority of my fall students will be ones who have never taken a college course in a classroom. I think it might be a bit of a shock for them.

[fishbrains]

I would amend the thread title to say, "I don't want to return 'back to normal'"--whether in the classroom or online (I teach at a commuter CC here). Online office hours and online advising work better than me sitting in a f*cking office waiting on students not to come see me. Zoom meetings work much, much better for 90% of the meetings I attend. I enjoyed online conferences as well, instead of traveling overnight for the few sessions worth attending.

Educating during the COVID era (even if it's not over yet) allowed people to be innovative and find better ways to do some things (not all things, but many things). Even our Student Services side was forced to do more than wait in their offices for students to come to the palace.

Going "back to normal" as some would have us do would be a huge step backward.

[kiana]

Teaching online is all the boring stuff (grading, reporting) and none of the fun stuff (hanging out with students, talking about stuff, hearing their questions.)

This was pretty much my experience, too. I teach freshman comp, and trying to do so online was very frustrating. It consisted of lecturing to a sea of silent black squares, and practically begging the students to respond in any way to the readings and questions and assignments. They didn't want to talk, period, or do much of anything else, either. They didn't read the feedback from my online grading, rarely asked for help, and didn't even read each other's discussion board postings. Some of them just kept plowing on making the same mistakes over and over no matter what I did. I can only explain how a coordinating conjunction works and what constitutes a sentence fragment so many times over the course of a term. It was as if all my efforts were being lost down a black hole. Teaching writing goes so much better when I can give them work-in-progress feedback and encouragement, and answer the small questions that they seem to think take too much effort to ask online, and that I can't see the context of online in order to answer anyway.

This is what I saw in basic math, as well, along with an absolutely massive amount of cheating.

[downer]

It is true that classroom tests is much better at reducing cheating.

For online work, I gave fewer assignments that allowed cheating, and made them a smaller portion of the total grade. I also took some steps to reduce cheating -- mainly in modifying questions so that they weren't easily searchable.

It is true that I probably gave more A grades for my online students. At the same time, for some classes I also failed more students. I'd argue that the students got A grades because they deserved them.

[dr_codex]

The drift towards A's and F's in online courses is real. I saw similar numbers in blended courses, too, although to a much lesser degree.

I'm not going to be sad to get back into the classroom, although I won't love the commute.

The one thing that I think my students really lacked last year was all the time that they spend teaching one another. I don't mean formal class time; I've tried all the think-pair-share stuff, and the products of my formal peer review sessions are embarrassing. But students talk. They talk in the halls, in the eating areas, during exam prep sessions, in the bars, and more. They also text. And text. And text. Even if only a tiny fraction of what they discuss is my course, the shared college experience is powerful, and I think that that will outlast all of the online programs, except for the segments of the student body that were always best served by distance learning.

[OneMoreYear]

I will definitely miss my easy commute from my couch to my kitchen table.  And, I will miss not wearing shoes. I will miss virtual office hours, as students popped in and out with good questions, and we solved any confusion in real time while they were working on their assignments (I'll probably still hold these, though we are mandated to in-person office hours starting fall). I will miss virtual department meetings because everyone was so tired of being online by that time in the day that the grandstanding was reduced to nil.

But . . one of the required classes I teach must be taught in person (special dispensation was given last year by accreditor, but no longer), so there's no option there.

And one of the school-based grant projects I'm involved in was much less effective online, so we're excited to be in-person again, though we'll integrate some of the ideas we piloted last year.

And there was so much complaining by a subset of our students when we went online, so at least I won't have to listen to that any longer (now, I'm sure there will be just as much complaining about how they actually have to attend class in-person but at least it will be a change in content).

So, it's good and bad, as are most things.

[marshwiggle]

I will miss virtual department meetings because everyone was so tired of being online by that time in the day that the grandstanding was reduced to nil.

My experience matches this. I have a hunch that online department meetings may stay around indefinitely for this reason. (Also, attendance at online meetings has been much better than at pre-pandemic in-person meetings.)

[jerseyjay]

Before the pandemic, I taught anywhere from a third to half of my courses online (as asynchronous) and the rest in the classroom. When people asked about what I thought about teaching online, I would say that teaching online removes the most frustrating part of teaching, which also is the most rewarding: the students.

After Spring 2020 (when the transition to remote learning was chaotic), all of my classes have been synchronous, but done on Zoom. With some exceptions, this was a margarine to the butter of classroom learning. So I am looking forward to going back to the classroom.

In terms of whether asynchronous teaching is more efficient, I think it really depends on the student and the subject. I have taken quite a few of synchronous classes and, at their best, they approach the utility of a well-taught in-person class (and surpass a poorly-taught in-person class). At their worst, they are useless (which can also be said for in-person classes). For learning just skills, they can be very useful, especially if the students are motivated and already have a basis to learn the material.

If the students are poorly prepared, or if they find the material difficult, they don't work well at all. The very "inefficiency" of classroom instruction--the ability to ask the professor to repeat himself five times, to have her demonstrate a technique, etc--makes them more effective in some situations. I am not going to say you cannot teach maths or foreign languages in an asynchronous format--because you can--but for me, who finds these subjects difficult, I find asynchronous very difficult to learn. While subjects I "get" work easier.

I think it is the same for many students, because some students just seem to do really poorly in my online courses, even if they are not bad students.

Finally, in my more than a decade's experience teaching asynchronous courses, I have never once really built a relationship with a student like I do in my classroom courses. In both formats, most of my students are a grey blur that pass by semester after semester; but some of my in-person students are really nice and I still am in contact. I assume some of my online students are also really motivated and nice, but I just don't build this kind of relationship. For example, online students tend not to ask me for letters of recommendation, and if they do, I really don't have much to say.

[downer]

Yes, that mostly fits with my experience, jerseyjay.

I guess with struggling students who don't have much clue about how to study, I find that they don't ask questions wherever they are, unless you give them in-class tasks. There has to be a lot of scaffolded assignments. And lots of hand-holding.

I might argue that it is possible to do that asynchronously, but it would take a lot of careful course design. Those students also tend to have problems with simple technology, working out how to use the LMS. A scaffolded course would have lots of parts and subparts, and they would get easily lost.

Maybe if we ever do start teaching real "digital natives" rather than kids who are good at using their thumbs to type and post memes, it might be feasible to do that kind of teaching online well.

But I will say that I have sometimes been pleasantly surprised that students can do better than I would expect when I raise standards for my aysnchronous classes and demand quite a lot of them. In the classroom, the students who don't get it can bring the thought level down, and they all settle into an attitude of learned helplessness. Online, if enough of them do get it, the others can look at their work and learn from it. I do find a discussion forum a very useful teaching tool.

I will confess that one of the main motivators I've used for students is fear. I tell them how badly the students in last semester's class did. It can be quite effective.

[apl68]

Online classes weren't a thing back when I had my limited teaching experience.  But I've been on the other side, as a student earning a professional MA degree in online-only classes.  I've had years of experience in both synchronous and asynchronous classes.  ciao_y'all's observation that online education is all the boring stuff with most of the fun stuff taken out sounds about right.  Since I was in MA-level classes we always had engaged students who wanted to discuss and "teach each other" and collaborate.  We had some good interactions, but it was an uphill struggle to make them happen, especially in the asynchronous classes.  Collaboration on projects was very awkward.  I made a point of going to meet classmates face-to-face on a couple of occasions where feasible.  I rode a motorcycle two and a half hours one way to make one of those meetings happen.

The caliber of the instruction mattered a LOT.  The instructors I had online were mostly full-timers with relevant degrees.  They ran the gamut from excellent, to challenged in their teaching skills, to just phoning it in.  One in particular was just shameless in assigning work that mostly came from the canned exercises included with our textbook purchase.  We had some feeble discussion board exercises, in which the prof and TA were AWOL for days at a time.  And there was a single collaborative major project due at the end of the semester.  It wasn't that "hard" of a class.  It also didn't contain much value added by the prof.  We engaged students taught each other more than the prof ever did.

That one class was an exception.  Mostly I found the online classes to be worthwhile and engaging.  But I can all too easily imagine an institution where phoned-in classes like that are the norm, and students aren't knowledgeable enough to realize that they're being cheated.  So while I appreciate online education and its possibilities--it was a great boon to me and many of my colleagues who've had to earn professional degrees in a state where there are no certified face-to-face programs in our discipline--I remain deeply skeptical about the rush to online that we've seen in recent years.  I'm very afraid that online degree programs are going to lead to a great many students being fobbed off with a manifestly inferior education.

[Parasaurolophus]

I don't want to either, because I don't want to commute and I don't want to be away from the hatchling, even just two days a week (I still have two online courses).

It's certainly nicer to teach something in person, though.

[Ruralguy]

I don't have a commute, and I hate working at home, so I never really felt much of an advantage to online other than some of the hassle of dealing with problematic people in person and freeing up some time. Though, honestly, most of the fungible time was just spent recording lectures, redoing labs so that they had something they could do remotely,and so forth. Also, I was on sabbatical for part of the time, and that went more or less the same way as my two previous. So, I'm a little nervous over going back, but I have some new teaching techniques and material I want to try, and it's much better to do that in person. I get why folks are either apprehensive about the return, or genuinely see advantages to online instruction.

[downer]

I'm all for scepticism about standards. I'm sure plenty of online classes are basically scams.

But I will take that scepticism and raise it. I'm not sure that more online classes are more likely to be scams and a waste of time than regular face to face classes. I've seen plenty of faculty meant to be meeting for 3 hour classes let students go after an hour or so, for example. Indeed, I don't really see how it is possible to hold students' attention for 3 hours, so the whole idea of a 3 hour gen class seems bad from the start. But plenty of schools run those evening and weekend 3 hour classes.

If anything, it is easier for administrators to run surveillance on online classes than inspect what is going on in classrooms.