On Monday, January 26, and Tuesday, January 27, Stevens Institute of Technology held classes virtually through the video call-hosting platform, Zoom, following a great deal of snowfall. While virtual learning has become more prominent over time, its popularization by necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic has rendered the now old assumption of the need for a snow day in particularly bad weather as a largely obsolete way of thinking. In fact, students in New York City were instructed through virtual learning on that Monday as well — the buggy experience not only left a bad taste in the mouths of students and parents but was indicative of the future of what would otherwise be off-days. This new said future comes after an agreement with the United Federation of Teachers mandating virtual learning in such circumstances to meet the 180-day requirement in the area. However, is this new solution that has brought a wide-scale shift in schooling truly preferable when compared to its older alternative?
A popular term used to shed light on the common drawbacks of virtual learning is “Zoom fatigue,” which describes the phenomenon where those who work remotely experience the side effect of exhaustion and irritability derived from days of video conferencing. While this observation is somewhat subjective, head of the Institute of Neural Engineering at Austria’s Graz University of Technology, Gernot Müller-Putz, sought concrete, neurophysiological evidence of cognitive overload during long, virtual meetings that could explain these effects. In order to collect such data, he, along with his colleagues, conducted a study involving 35 students who would take part in two 50-minute classes: one performed in person and the other virtually.
The tools at the team’s disposal were both in-class questionnaires from students on how they felt during instruction and electrocardiograms (ECGs) and electroencephalograms (EKGs) hooked up to students to measure their heart rate and brain activity, respectively. Through particularly the ECGs and EKGs, Müller-Putz and his colleagues found that heart-rate and brain wave readings indicated exhaustion and difficulty focusing only 15 minutes into the online class — a capture of said “Zoom fatigue.” Having acquired this newfound data, Müller-Putz rationalized these results through several factors, explaining how aspects such as lag make it difficult for the brain to rely on body language or eye contact to help with interpreting conversation and the tendency to become self-conscious with one’s own image presented to them by Zoom and similar apps.
These findings supporting the legitimacy of “Zoom fatigue” are, in fact, further substantiated by active scientific research conducted in 2021, useful for not only understanding the limitations of the medium of learning but, perhaps more importantly, methods for countering such limitations. This research emphasized how our brains use rewards from tasks, even simple ones such as simply walking in between classes, as ways to increase alertness, energy, and motivation principles in reducing fatigue, such tasks being noticeably absent from the medium of the non-physical virtual learning. In addition to Müller-Putz and his team’s findings of newfound difficulties relying on body language or eye contact in interpreting conversation, these studies found that non-verbal cues are easier to pick up on than in online video calls: a factor necessitating greater work to socialize and, therefore, greater fatigue.
Yet with all of its imperfections, is virtual learning the best that can be done given the less-than-ideal circumstances? To investigate this, Joshua Goodman, a professor at Boston University, examined data concerning weather, attendance, and test scores in Massachusetts available from the years 2003 to 2010. By comparing the data of test scores of years with more and less snow, Goodman found that years of heavy snow (some days receiving more than 10 inches) resulting in greater snow days off had no effect on math scores while they lowered in years of moderate (4-10 inches) snow — a result of some schools remaining open in poor conditions and negatively impacting students unable to attend.
Goodman would go on to say that “snow days, maybe surprisingly, are less disruptive than other forms of lost instructional time,” that “coordinating everyone being absent at once is actually easier to deal with than the messiness of other kinds of lost instructional time.” Additionally, with greater absences in virtual learning, such as only 400,000 of 500,000 New York City students appearing virtually on January 26, which may therefore disrupt learning potential and scores, the question must be raised whether, simply because technology has enabled this new mode of learning, it is truly the most fitting response.
