Post-Pandemic Remote Learning

Looking back on the COVID-19 pandemic period, it seems clear that while we made a valiant attempt at remote learning, our attempts were met with limited success.

Many students despised the experience, both students and teachers had significant rise in mental health problems, and outcomes in terms of how much students actually learned were poor at best.Many academic administrators and Universities have responded to the failure by reverting to ubiquitous in-person learning, undoing advances in remote learning gained even before the pandemic, and throwing away two years of extremely valuable experience gained during the pandemic. Our job at this point is to learn from our failures!

My experience, having participated in both remote and in-person teaching, is that part of the problem is the lack of recognition that teaching requires two-way communication. We concentrate on the teacher-to-student path in which the teacher delivers the content to the student; and often lose track of the fact that the student-to-teacher path is vitally important as well. Most of the reason that smaller in-person class sizes are more effective is because the teacher can manage a small number of student-to-teacher communication paths much better than a large number of student-to-teacher communication paths; giving each student more individual attention and more opportunity to customize the delivery of the content in a way that allows all students to absorb it. Remote learning has a tendency to limit the student-to-teacher bandwidth, making it even harder to maintain the two-way communication required for effective teaching. My favorite example is teaching a Zoom class in which all students immediately turn off their video cameras. Yes, that increases their privacy, but cuts off all the non-verbal communication and visual feedback that make my lectures interesting and tailored to my students. To make remote teaching effective, we need to implement strategies to overcome these challenges. Certainly keeping remote class sizes small is a step in this direction. Innovating new technologies to improve student-to-teacher bandwidth is also a high priority. Zoom break-out rooms are an example of a new technology that allows teachers to spend quality time with smaller groups of students.

We have learned from the pandemic experience that remote learning is not as “good” as in-person classes, but there is still a requirement for remote learning in order to deliver education to an ever widening student audience. There is also an opportunity to improve remote learning, especially given the multi-year “experiment” provided by the pandemic. The real challenge is if we can invest in remote learning and innovate to the point where remote learning approaches the effectiveness of in-person classes!

Tom Bartenstein is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Binghamton University and a 2021 SUNY Online Teaching Ambassador.

If you would like to be a guest author for the Online Teaching Hub, contact Erin Maney (erin.maney@suny.edu).