On March 17, the student body and the faculty were made aware of the temporary transition to online courses that would later apply to the remainder of the semester. Professors scrambled to adjust their syllabi and put themselves in the shoes of the students. There was a single day before classes were shifted online. It goes without saying that those first few days were hectic. Elaine Fefferman of the Music and Technology department described spring break as “a frantic week.”
No time was wasted in determining what aspects of courses could remain and what had to be changed. Amber Benezra, a professor of the College of Arts and Letters, had to completely reconstruct her syllabus, as did Eduardo Bonelli, professor of Computer Science. Both professors had to alter assignments and deadlines for their courses to better accommodate their students and their varied circumstances.
Benezra’s discussion-based medical anthropology course required face-to-face meetings. “It is so important to be in each other’s presence and to have discussion. I don’t think my teaching is comparable to what I did before,” Benezra said in an interview. She utilized the breakout room feature of Zoom, but discussion was lacking. The final project for the course relied on meeting with medical personnel, which became impossible once the COVID-19 pandemic ensued.
Professor Bonelli replaced midterms with week-long projects, explaining, “I think it’s easier on them in a way, they don’t feel the pressure of sitting in an exam on campus.” Students in the course were given a week to complete the projects, which allowed them to go at their own pace and use the concepts in practice.
Imagine teaching a Music and Technology course online. It sounds impossible, but with perseverance and dedication, anything is possible. Professor Fefferman of the Music and Technology department taught Music Appreciation and Electroacoustic Composition this semester. Like Benezra, she had to reconstruct the scope of her Electroacoustic Composition course. She disclosed that it was extremely difficult to conduct the course online as performance was an integral part of the course. She spent a lot of time trying to make the course gratifying for students, and is appreciative of the effort they put in during such an unprecedented time. Fefferman is grateful for her students, saying, “They were amazing — my job was made so much easier and inspiring.” Rather than making hard-cut guidelines, she met with her students over Zoom and allowed them to express their views on what they felt the semester should look like, and together, they recreated the layout for the rest of the course. She says that without their cooperation, the course would not have run as smoothly as it did.
Teaching a “classroom” full of black rectangles with students’ names in them does not offer any indication of student comprehension. Just as students find it valuable to see professors go through proofs and practice problems on a whiteboard, professors rely on the body language of students to ensure they understand material.
Kevin Ryan, a professor in the Schaefer School of Engineering & Science and the School of Business, gains a good understanding of students who are struggling by looking at them. “I’m missing the body language feedback. All of us professors, after we do this for a number of years, we get a pretty good understanding just by looking at someone whether they’re really struggling and they don’t really know what to ask […] but here online you’re searching for that feedback,” said Professor Ryan. It is vital for professors to observe their students and encourage inquisitiveness to confirm their students’ understanding or lack thereof. When you’re teaching asynchronously, body language feedback is out of question and the reliance on email and text chats is heightened.
Ryan is not alone in soliciting feedback from students. Professor Bonelli of Computer Science was also challenged by not receiving the same level of feedback and interaction. In an attempt to simulate face-to-face classes, Bonelli and Ryan encouraged students to use different features of Zoom like the raise hand, yes, and no functions, as well as turning on their video and microphone. Bonelli does not record his lectures because he believes that one should attend class as if they were on campus. He shares his screen and conducts live coding examples similarly to how he would in a classroom or lecture hall. He also uses a tablet to draw examples of computer science concepts such as binary and AVL trees.
Michael Parfett, a professor in the School of Business, uses his sense of humor and calls on students in Zoom as a replacement for body language. Parfett has been teaching online courses for many years, so the transition was not difficult for him. The course materials and assignments have remained the same for his in-person courses.
Faculty members have the common goal of being fair and flexible while still giving students an opportunity to grow, but they have different approaches. Ryan wanted to keep a business as usual model and was “determined not to let this virus not let me teach all the material.” He wanted to keep the course as similar as possible to what it would have been, and he wanted to “be as fair as possible.” On the other hand, Bonelli cut a few topics to ensure better mastery of a smaller set of topics rather than average mastery of all topics.
Most professors did not change their grading policies, though many replaced exams with projects or mini quizzes. Professor Benezra is a unique case — she felt the Pass/Fail Policy did not do the students justice and therefore implemented an A/A- policy for her class. “Everyone has different circumstances […] we really have to account for those things,” she explained. Professors Ryan, Bonelli, Fefferman, and Benezra loosened deadlines for assignments as did numerous other professors across the university.
As their home became their workplace, the boundary between work and family life has been blurred. Professor Benezra has two children in grade school, so she needs flexibility along with students because her children use her laptop for school and, essentially, she became their schoolteacher. Professor Bonelli has a teenage son, so his teaching environment also has distractions. Along with teaching, the state of research has also been altered. Bonelli explained, “I need for it to be peaceful and that is not easy.” He has put his research on hold, as has Benezra. Conferences have been cancelled and research projects have been put on hold, which becomes problematic for professors who are on a tenure track. They were given an optional one year extension, which is frowned upon in the academic world.
Changes were inevitable in a time of crisis, but what does that mean for the future? In the face of adversity, new ideas are born. While we were only online for half a semester, professors are taking note of how successful the changes they made are, with Professor Bonelli suggesting that “perhaps this might change the way we evaluate some courses moving forward.” Bonelli is seriously considering altering his instruction methods and assignments for CS 496, Principles of Programming Languages. It is too early to have solid results, but he believes students are learning more from projects because they aren’t cramming to memorize information for a test only to forget it the next day; instead, they are putting concepts into practice, which is the true testament of understanding. Professor Parfett received the Provost Online Teaching Excellence Award in the 2017-2018 school year. Parfett believes online academia is the future and learning online will be inevitable.
The spring semester of 2020 was far from normal, but students and professors trudged on and made the best of an unforeseen situation. Professor Benezra, who I’ve had for Anthropology of Technology, said something that stuck with me: “It’s our job to support you in more ways than just academic ones — I think that giving you a technical education is one part of it, but also supporting you as human beings is one part of it, that’s really important.” All the professors I had the pleasure of conversing with expressed their dedication to their students and found ingenious ways to teach them.
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