One year in: Instructors continue to adapt to virtual learning

Annabella Rico
Tue, 23 Mar 2021 02:49:49 +0000
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One year after Ohio State began entirely virtual learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic, instructors are still adapting to online classes.

As classes went online during the pandemic, many instructors had to learn to navigate and adjust to the new online platform, evolving classes to best meet the academic goals and needs of their students. Credit: Christian Harsa | Asst. Photo Editor

As students logged onto their virtual classes for the first time March 23, 2020, instructors were still in the process of adjusting their courses for online accessibility and effectiveness. One year later, instructors are still making adjustments.

Sarah Neville, assistant professor in the Department of English, said her Special Topics in Shakespeare class typically puts on a live performance of “Hamlet,” but she adapted it into a Zoom-based documentary to accommodate COVID-19 health guidelines.?

Neville said she took inspiration from the department-based theater company she directs, Lord Denney’s Players, which performed “Much Ado About Nothing” via Zoom after its in-person production was canceled last spring.

“It was a way of trying to build students’ comradery, I suppose, as much [as] it was learning the skills to make a film,” Neville said.?

Neville said collaboration is integral to her performance-based class, which was hard to accomplish online, but the ability to do retakes as opposed to live dialogues helped students with stage fright. She said the documentary enabled students to interact with each other, as well as learn things they might not have considered when signing up for the course.?

Even with the benefits of online classes, Neville said the pandemic highlighted the need to be attentive to students when they face outside stressors.

“I think it’s really stressed how vulnerable students are, how we all are, to adversity,” Neville said.?

A November 2020 Undergraduate Student Government survey of 7,481 students revealed 57 percent of students felt they didn’t understand their course material and 58 percent felt unmotivated to do their school work during the pandemic.

Neville said she estimates in a normal semester about one in 10 of her students face a form of difficulty during the course — whether it be mental health issues, family issues or other stressful life events — but the pandemic has exacerbated that amount.

“I need to build into the class those spaces with the assumption that a large percentage of the students are going to need a little bit of extra time to do tasks, or they might need different resources to do tasks,” Neville said. “So that adversity doesn’t seem like something that only happens occasionally, but something you can kind of expect to happen.”

Neville said she feels an instructors’ flexibility with deadlines and assignments not only benefits their students, but themselves because instructors are experiencing similar stress due to the pandemic.

“Not everything needs to be a high-stress, high-stakes situation, because good learning doesn’t happen in high-stress situations,” Neville said.

Deja Beamon, a doctoral candidate in women’s, gender and sexuality studies, said she has also worked more flexibilities into her class Black Women Writers: Text and Context for both her students and herself. She said many students have different online learning styles and she needs time to process her own stress.

“[The class structure is] definitely more fluid, and I always try to do portfolios instead of smaller assignments, so there’s longer deadlines for students so that they can deal with the world and what’s going on,” Beamon said.

Beamon taught online classes asynchronously before the pandemic, but said she’s struggled with effectively teaching them synchronously. She said she focuses on keeping her students informed on potential learning opportunities outside of the classroom.

Beamon said she works with Ohio State’s Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning, which helps conduct graduate teaching assistant workshops, to introduce tools and techniques conducive to learning. She said teaching is a learning process, but the components of good teaching remain constant, no matter the way the course is offered.

“The teaching doesn’t change, but the way you interact with your students and maybe the life skills you try to help them cultivate is a little bit different,” Beamon said. “You have to be willing to help your students get where they need to be. I think that’s part of the disconnect between in-person and online teaching.”