With the COVID-19 speeding up the shift of higher education online, it might seem that the golden era of online education has finally come. However, while some educators sing praise of Zoom lectures and are going to keep this tool in their teaching kit even when the crisis is over, others ring the alarm creating awareness of Zoom fatigue. So, what about Zoom? Is it a blessing or a curse?
The major shift higher education is going through can be called seismic changes only partially. It is true that the situation was greatly influenced by the novel coronavirus pandemic. But it is also cannot be denied that the recent move online is a direct result of a long-delayed response to demographic and economic shifts and of the technological change, which has been underway since around 2010, when universities and private entrepreneurs first began to experiment with Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs.
Back then, these early MOOCs could hardly compete with the mainstream providers of traditional, campus-based higher education and were mainly viewed upon as a complementary tool for those who cannot afford going to college for financial or social reasons. Even today, the many discussions around the topic demonstrate that online learning, which has morphed from the earliest MOOCs and has been forced upon the most conservative universities and colleges by the pandemic, is still in the middle of its own evolution.
Most Zoom sessions offered to the students in 2020 looked more like a hasty adaptation in the times of a crisis. Everyone and his brother has discussed the limitations of using Zoom, which was not originally developed as a pedagogical tool.
Not all classroom formats translate easily onto Zoom. It works well for small-scale seminars and critiques, which do not lose intimacy and close contact of campus-based classes even online. Bringing in guest speakers works remarkably well, allowing faculty to introduce a wide range of voices into their classroom conversations. On the screen, everyone can see and hear and participate.
However, videoconferencing could hardly be the answer when it comes to classes requiring practical instructions and other hands-on teaching methods, which are often the key for fine arts and design education.
Zoom lectures are not so unambivalent either. They might work, if the instructor is compelling. Still, it is no secret that the fastest way to lose the attention of students on Zoom is to talk at them. It is even more complicated for learners to follow the lecturer when they find themselves gazing into a sea of black boxes, while all kinds of distractions are close at hand in their “home office.” “Students’ faces slip from one screen to the next as new people join in. They disappear into a tiny side panel once anything is shared. Unmuting becomes a weary standard of the class period (“can you hear me now?”) And everything in everyone’s background–the dogs, the posters, the siblings, the furniture–melds into a visual cacophony. On Zoom, the peripheral truly takes over,” Debora Spar, senior associate dean of Harvard Business School Online, explains.
Class conversations on Zoom also seem to be very different from those held in a classroom of brick and mortar. Inevitably, a few students will dominate the conversation leaving quitter ones and those experiencing problems with their internet connection excluded and shut out. This requires teachers to be very directive on Zoom, asking some students to speak and diplomatically cutting off others to bring taciturn ones into the discussion.
Participating in a synchronous online class taxes powers of both the student and the instructor. Though the reasons why online meeting tools are more exhausting are not fully understood, this effect likely has something to do with how our brains process screen as compared to physical presence.
When asked to describe their online learning routine, students talk about spending most of their day in front of the screen. With classes and homework running entirely online, some claim they click their camera on as soon as they roll out of bed, others complain that screen time feels like a 24/7 commitment. Even when they are not actively on a Zoom call, Canvas discussion boards and Google Docs absorb all their studying time. This pattern induces what many call “Zoom fatigue” — exhaustion from blue light and remote interactions, which is strongly related to our brain’s inability to differentiate Zoom meetings from everything else we do onscreen, drawing down the same reserve of focus. This also brings to the lack of any physical mobility between classes.
Synchronous Zoom sessions is even more exhausting for international students, who are faced with a time difference from their classmates and professions. E.g. for learners in China studying in US universities and colleges classes could start at 11 pm and run till 2:30 am.
Besides, growing popularity of Zoom sessions reveal socio-economic differences that are harder to notice on physical campuses. This teaching method places low-income students at a disadvantage. The underprivileged group cannot afford the cost of an Internet upgrade and therefore can experience connectivity issues, which might cause video or audio interference and impair their ability to participate in discussions on Zoom.
Dr. Joshua Kim, Director of Online Programs and Strategy at the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL), is convinced that when it comes to Zoom and teaching, less is more. He suggests following a three-to-one strategy, holding one hour of Zoom for every three hours of class and making that time more conversation-based. Instead of taking three Zoom meeting a week, he recommends using those time blocks to hold three separate Zoom sessions and letting students signing up for just one discussion per week – to reduce the overall time students spend on Zoom.
Lucy Biederman, assistant professor of creative writing at Heidelberg University, believes that the role of Zoom in online college teaching is overestimated. In her opinion, when faced with closing campus in March 2020, most of the instructors turned to Zoom as an alternative to teaching in a physical classroom and remain dependent on this software without taking a broader picture. Biederman points out that videoconferencing software wasn’t an essential part of higher education before the pandemic, and warns against using this technology solely for technology’s sake.
Derek Bruff, director of the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching, also believes that learning objectives should guide how college instructors use technology, not the other way around. He has coined the term “intentional tech,” meaning “knowing what kinds of learning experiences you’re interested in creating for your students, then finding technologies that help support those experiences.”
This means that educators can support their student in ways other than Zoom, choosing best-suited technologies depending on the course goals. Besides Zoom, synchronous and asynchronous options include other technologies, such as Slack, Canvas, Google chats and Google Docs, as well as own open courseware and open-source platforms.
What is indubitable is that we are now at the beginning of a new stage, which will develop into a very different model of higher education in the nearer future. The tools of online learning, with Zoom sessions playing the lead role, are undeniably powerful, even at this point. As we use them to help traditional teaching deal with the current crisis, we need to focus not on how we return to the old normal, but rather what a new normal should be.