How Education Brings Us Together

March 2020 marked a historical moment for educators in the United States and around the world. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the coronavirus (COVID-19) a pandemic on March 11 [1]. Almost instantaneously, many postsecondary institutions started suspending on-campus, face-to-face classes and transitioning to remote instruction to support social distancing practices [2]. Administrators, instructors, students and their families worked together, with education binding us, to work on a common goal – to continue to empower and be empowered with knowledge in the midst of COVID-19.

As a society, we have done a remarkable job to deliver education, and learn and support learners in a brand new way with almost no time to prepare. For some of us, the transition happened within a few days. Yes, it may not be seamless, but it is indeed remarkable. With uncertainty on whether we will be able to move back to campus in the upcoming fall semester, it is time to look at some lessons learned to prepare for the path forward.

Engagement takes planning, practices and discipline. The more the students engage in learning such as participating in discussions, the deeper they come to understand what they are learning [3]. While literature on student engagement in the classroom under a traditional face-to-face setting is well established, literature on student engagement specific to “virtual classroom” is relatively limited [4]. In the past few months, many postsecondary institutions and scholarly associations like the INFORMS Committee on Teaching and Learning (CTL) have hosted online discussions related to challenges they are facing and/or posted tips on engaging students in virtual classrooms [5, 6]. These tips generally focus on encouraging student engagement through communications, as well as use of technology.

Encouraging engagement via communication. Combining both verbal and nonverbal communications is paramount. In terms of nonverbal communication, an instructor’s face should be visible to students throughout the lecture. Once this is established, the instructor can use facial and body language to encourage students to engage. Making eye contact could help students better receive the message that you are addressing directly to them.

In a virtual environment, making eye contact requires the speaker looking directly into the web camera. This takes practice and discipline, because when addressing audiences, a speaker’s natural tendency is to look at the screen where he or she can see the audiences and generally not where the web camera is located. Regarding verbal communication, similar to a face-to-face setting, pausing and inviting students to ask questions, as well as soliciting answers from students, helps keep students engaged.

Encourage engagement via use of technology. Simply, using the cursor from the computer mouse during an online lecture to do the job of a laser pointer or your hands during an on-campus classroom can help students follow along and stay focused. Technology such as chat and polling tools provide instructors opportunities to interact with students through live activities. Through the chat feature, students could post questions and/or share their perspectives through typing messages into the chat box. Through the polling tool, instructors can collect a distribution of students’ viewpoints on a specific question. A benefit of chat and the polling tool is that rather than only receiving one or a few responses to questions posted in a face-to-face setting, the instructor and students can see a larger number of responses in real time.

The engagement techniques suggested above require not only detailed planning ahead of the classroom, but it also requires practices before the lecture and discipline to follow through. This includes not only the technology used to support virtual classrooms that is relatively new to most, but also some of the best practices communication skills to encourage student engagement such as maintaining eye contact with students, which requires instructors to act against their natural behavior tendencies. Therefore, practicing outside of the class to achieve a good comfort level of the technologies and master the necessary behavior adjustments would better prepare instructors for adopting these techniques in the classroom. Instructors also need to be disciplined in terms of executing these techniques – a simple sticky note pinned at the edge outside of the computer screen with a list of techniques to deliver throughout the session could help bring one back to focus rather than being distracted by unexpected disruptions such as sirens from a firetruck outside the windows.

Other issues to consider include:

Bridging the time zone divide. Organizing classes with students from different time zones requires more to consider than the obvious time difference among locations. On its own, time difference is a challenging issue to handle when students in the same class come from different continents such as Asia, Europe and the United States, which is fairly common. On top of this, different countries may have different working weeks, start and end times for a typical workday, acceptable lunch break practice, public and religious holidays and different daylight-saving practice [7]. Some approaches that could help bridge the time zone gap include increasing access to course materials, further live interaction between students and instructor, and collaboration among students from the same time zone.

Increase access to course material. Increased access to course materials could be achieved through making materials, including lecture slides, available before lectures, as well as recording live lectures and making them available to students immediately after live lectures. Most courses meet at least once a week and sometimes twice weekly or more. For full-time students generally enrolled in four courses per semester, posting live lectures without delay could minimize the possibility that students are constantly catching up.

Increase live interaction opportunities with instructor. To increase live interaction opportunities for students, instructors should schedule their office hours at different times of the day to best coordinate the various time zones for students in their course. For those students who still encounter time zone challenges, instructors could encourage students to make individual appointments and/or organize group appointments at a time that is outside of the regular office hours.

Encourage interactions among students in the same time zone. An option to increase interaction among students is to incorporate group assignments or projects in the curriculum that require regular, live working sessions for team members to collaborate. The goal is to encourage students from the same time zone to organize their teams among themselves. This will make it easier for working groups to come up with a meeting time that works well for each member. In turn, students will have the opportunity to learn from each other [8].

Be mindful of communication overload. Colleges and universities have been communicating with students through email and electronic notifications to keep students well advised of available resources and the information they need to successfully learn off-campus. What comes as a surprise is that some students have begun to experience information overload and have started to ignore some of the communications they are receiving [6]. It appears that students are receiving messages not only from their university administration and instructors, but also from different groups including student organizations, centers, advisors and administrators within their departments. With students’ limited time, these communications have started to compete for their attention.

Such communication overload depends on various factors including the number of communications received, quality of the messages and the perceived response obligations. More messages require more time to review. Messages that are vague or unclear require readers to do more work to interpret. Even if there is not a deadline to respond to some of the communications, research indicates that recipients often feel obligated to respond in a timely manner, thus increasing personal pressure [9].

Easy-to-digest messages with a set delivery schedule. To address communication overload, instructors can adopt techniques with focus on refining messages and injecting a sense of stability during this uncertain time. In terms of refining messages, capturing the essence of the message in the subject line, using headlines to make it possible to jump to the section that is of interest, and highlighting the action required are some of the techniques that can help ease the communication load [10]. Sending emails to your students at a specific time(s) of the week can also help to establish a routine. Routine in turn helps to alleviate anxiety by providing a greater sense of certainty.

Set expectations for virtual classroom etiquette. All students, by the time they reach postsecondary education, are familiar with in-person classroom etiquette. For example, students know they are expected to be courteous to fellow students and maintain a good presence. In terms of etiquette in virtual classrooms, most postsecondary students are new to participating in live virtual classrooms. Furthermore, these students’ experience with live online activities are generally associated with entertainment such as participating in an online video game. The etiquette for these other online activities is more casual than the relevant etiquette for a virtual classroom setting. This makes setting clear expectations for virtual classroom etiquette necessary to foster productivity in the classroom.

Code of behaviors to promote respect and harmony in a virtual setting. Etiquette in a virtual classroom generally refers to behavior that promotes the notion of respect and harmony in an online class setting. Maintaining relevant in-person classroom etiquette is a good start. This includes dressing appropriately, being in a suitable surrounding, and not engaging in activities that are generally not appropriate during a classroom lecture, such as smoking.

In a virtual classroom, in addition to verbal communication, texting through a chat box is a popular medium for communication during lectures. Some common forms of etiquette include not dominating the discussion, using capital letters only when relevant since it could give the impression of shouting or pressuring, being cautious in using humor that could be misinterpreted as mockery, and being sensitive to your own and others’ personal information [11].

In a virtual classroom, we see each other through a web camera and talk to each other through a headphone. Having all participants keeping their camera on throughout a lecture makes it possible for students to engage through body language. It also helps to foster respect and harmony among participants and encourages other students to turn and keep their cameras on if they see others doing so as well.

Put expectations on syllabus/electronic course site. Communicating the importance of these expectations enables students to achieve them. Including expectations of virtual classroom etiquette in the syllabus/electronic course site can help signal that these expectations are similar to other course requirements and that instructors expect students to follow them during online lectures [11].

Path Forward

Colleges and universities have years of experience in preparing for the unexpected, including earthquakes, snowstorms and even seasonal flus (most institutions offer free flu shots on campus). Unfortunately, COVID-19 has caught us off guard. With no advance preparation, we transitioned to remote instruction almost instantaneously. We are proud of what we have achieved, but the transition has been neither easy nor flawless.

We have learned interesting lessons such as keeping eye contact with students in the virtual classroom can mean going against our natural tendency of looking at the audience as we speak. We have already been working on solutions to resolve some of the obstacles discovered along the way, but there is still much more to do including research in operational planning and pedagogy.

The flexibility to quickly transition from in-person to remote learning while keeping consistent quality of education is much needed. This will enable us to better respond to new threats in the future. In addition, this opens up new opportunities for using remote classrooms to address more traditional challenges, such as making up lectures on snow days. The ability to interchange between the two modalities while maintaining consistent quality of education offers the option to minimize learning disruption to students and operating costs of rescheduling.

References

1. “Coronavirus: COVID-19 Is Now Officially A Pandemic, WHO Says,” 2020, NPR Online, March 11, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/11/814474930/coronavirus-covid-19-is-nowofficially-a-pandemic-who-says.
2. Levenson, E., Boyette, C. and Mack, J., 2020, “Colleges and universities across the U.S. are canceling in-person classes due to coronavirus,” CNN Online, https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/09/us/coronavirus-university-college-classes/index.html.
3. Kuh, G. D., 2009, “The national survey of student engagement: Conceptual and empirical foundations,” in Gonyea, R. M. and Kuh, G. D. (Eds.), “New Directions for Institutional Research,” pp. 5-20, Jossey-Bass.
4. Bryan, T., Lutte, R., Lee, J., O’Neil, P., Maher, C. and Hoflund, B., 2018, “When do online education technologies enhance student engagement? A Case of Distance Education at University of Nebraska at Omaha,” Journal of Public Affairs Education, Vol. 24, No. 2, p. 255.
5. “Best Practice Online Pedagogy,” 2020, Harvard University, May 7, https://teachremotely.harvard.edu/best-practices#anchor1.
6. Desnoyers, N., Jaramillo, J., Nydick, B., Mori, V. and Wilson, J., 2020, “Issues in Transitioning to Remote Teaching of OR/MS/Analytics: A Discussion,” INFORMS Committee on Teaching and Learning (CTL), April 24.
7. White, M., 2014, “The management of virtual teams and virtual meetings,” Business Information Review, Vol. 31, No. 2, p. 111.
8. “Strategies for Teaching Students in Different Time Zones,” 2020, Eberly Center, Carnegie Mellon University, May 7, https://www.cmu.edu/teaching/online/timezones.html.
9. Stephens, K., Mandhana, D., Kim, J., Li, X., Glowacki, E. and Cruz, I., 2017, “Reconceptualizing Communication Overload and Building a Theoretical Foundation,” Communication Theory, Vol. 27, No. 3, p. 269.
10. Forsyth, P., 2008, “The Art of Successful Business Communication,” The Institution of Engineering and Technology, Jan. 1.
11. Mintu-Wimsatt, A., Kernek, C. and Lozada, H., 2010, “Netiquette: Make it Part of Your Syllabus,” Journal of Online Learning and Teaching, Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 264.