The scourge of online education
A professor when asked how online classes are going, replied “Awesome! Attendance is close to 100 percent! Students are enjoying”. I wondered what this meant and how this professor measures teaching and learning outcomes. Is it attendance that is ‘important’ or is attendance merely the physical or in this case virtual presence of the student in the classroom? How did this professor measure enjoyment? Or was he merely patting himself on the back since he could log onto the online platform, get the camera to work, spew words into the microphone and conduct a random poll in the ‘Menti polling platform.’? All of which may or may not be related to any learning outcome for students. Maybe he mistook his own enjoyment for student’s enjoyment. One would never know.
Every day I log onto my educational institution’s preferred platform for online teaching to teach enthusiastically and I find students disguised as ‘Ghosts on my grid panel.’ I call them ‘ghosts’ because most of them are never seen or heard. They login diligently with their roll numbers and names for attendance, and then they are part of the ‘interwebs’ for an hour. When there is a question posed or an activity given only around 5–10 percent of the class participates and it’s always the same group of students. When a pointed question is asked of a student, in some cases the student doesn’t answer and then the class representative or a friend sends a cryptic message: ‘Student X is facing technical difficulties.’ Maybe its ‘real’ or an ‘excuse,’ however there is no way of knowing or cross verifying.
So, how do we measure the effectiveness of online education? Not by a score in a test, I suppose? When the physical classroom connection between student and teacher is lost the satisfaction of a job well done is lost. Any teacher worth their salt will tell you that no amount of money can replace the joy, excitement and energy they get when they have a discussion and the students respond enthusiastically. You know you have done a good job and you don’t have to wait for the end of the semester appraisal to find out about your performance. You know you delivered, it gave you a ‘high of positive energy’! That ‘high’ is taken out in online teaching. It’s very difficult to gauge student response from the creamy layer (top 10 percent of the class) than the entire class in a physical setting. There is very little satisfaction derived from teaching just the creamy layer. A good teacher makes every student engaged and involved in the teaching process, not just the ‘academic elites’! There is great joy in seeing students ‘learn’ and ‘grow’ through the semester. This joy is taken out through the online mode of education.
Therein lies the scourge of online education. It is for this reason I believe that ‘online education’ can supplement and not replace the traditional university system. This ‘symbolic interaction’ a term derived from the work of George Mead and others who developed ‘symbolic interaction’ theory which talks about how individuals interact with each other to create ‘symbolic spaces’ and how these ‘spaces’ then go onto to shape their interaction. In this case the ‘virtual space’ can supplement the ‘physical space’, but not replace it entirely. The classroom in this case is a much more viable space for teaching rather than the ‘virtual space’ that is supposedly more interactive but makes teaching and learning more distant.
During these times of a global pandemic, ‘virtual learning’ is second best, indeed! Unless Artificial Intelligence finds a better way, the performance art of teaching is here to stay.