Anecdote ahoy! (It’s relevant, I promise)
When I was a PhD student, I took a statistics course on questionnaire design. Content-wise, this was one of the best courses I’ve ever taken. I still refer to readings semi-regularly, and learned lessons I’ve been applying on every survey – and there have been MANY – I’ve designed and/or implemented since.
Format-wise, well, let me explain. The two professors who taught the class were teaching the same class at UMD – where I was – and UNC at the same time. This meant that one week they would be on-site and the next they would be teaching remotely from Chapel Hill. The course was also pretty big in both locations: maybe 40 students in each classroom.
Luckily, since the course was in the statistics department, it had at its disposal the most high-tech classroom available. The classroom had three screens at the front (one for the powerpoint, one showing the prof, and one showing the other classroom), was studded with microphones to pick up questions, and had a very robust internet connection. This was back in the early 2000s (the aughts? Have we ever figured out how to refer to that decade?) but honestly I don’t think there would be a substantial difference in equipment today.
Anyway, with all that technology to ensure good interface between professor and students, what did I think? In brief: yech.
Let me elaborate:
I’m not exactly a blushing flower, but I never spoke to either professor during the entire semester. Yes, there were microphones, but that just made it really awkward to be in the class. Any shift of the chairs was also picked up, as were classroom noises from UNC. Speaking up just felt much more intimidating than it usually does. You had to have your ideas completely worked out and then speak like you would at a Starbucks drive through. Result: no one spoke.
Plus, since we were in two different classrooms, there was no community building among the students. All that technology meant we were focused on the screens, not each other. Trying to make conversation with someone at UNC was pretty much impossible, but that didn’t stop us from fretting about how we looked and sounded to them. As a prof, I know very well that the person up front sees much more than students think they do (seriously, kids, don’t sleep in class. And don’t text. I can tell. Really.) But there’s a difference between having a single prof looking out at you and knowing there’s a camera on you at all times. People worried wayyy too much about how they looked, which is not a very good match with being studious. Not fun.
The result of all this is that no one asked clarification for anything. No one felt comfortable asking their neighbor, either, lest that conversation be picked up by the microphones. The class was just painful. I saw some students leave because they were coughing or sneezing. Again, these weren’t freshmen but graduate students, most in their late twenties and thirties. In other words, people who in theory at least are pretty confident. Still, it felt horrible all the time in there, and not because we were studying sadistics.
Why do I tell this story? Well, with all current the talk of technology as a magic bullet in teaching, I think it’s pretty relevant. Being able to ask questions, not just of the professor but of each other, is to me a cornerstone of teaching. As far as I can tell, the technical solutions for that remain pretty dismal. Yes, you can learn a lot in that environment. No doubt. And the discomfort isn’t really that big a deal. I’ve learned in worse environments (ask me about that sometime!)
But all I can think is how much more we could have learned in a traditional classroom. The answer, I’m afraid, is quite a bit.