School

Cutting Edges: Zoom is Not School

Dr. Brooke Lester, Associate Professor of Hebrew Scriptures and Director of Digital Learning

The pandemic is not over and neither is pandemic learning. By “pandemic learning,” I do not mean only “teaching and learning during a pandemic.” I mean also, “learning from the pandemic.” The tragic human toll exacted by this crisis renders obscene any notion of purported silver linings. At the same time, a tragedy not reflected on and learned from is a tragedy senselessly compounded. It’s not too soon to ask what lessons the pandemic may suggest toward our construction of a “new normal.” I urge three lessons: Online learning does not equal videoconferencing; assessment does not mean surveillance; and learner-centered instruction calls for the whole institution’s time and attention.

Zoom is not school. This is not a new, late-pandemic insight. Since before the turn of this century, synchronous audio-visual conferences have played an intentionally limited role in online learning environments that have typically been largely, or completely, asynchronous. (“Synchronous” means that participants are all “there” online together at the same time; “asynchronous” means that participants are active in the shared online learning space[s] at varying times.) Just as importantly, online instructors recognized that synchronous online learning environments are as different from the brick-andmortar classroom as are asynchronous environments: you have to re-think your resources and activities from the ground up, not simply take your face-to-face show onto the Zoom road, so to speak. Optimistically, the pandemic crisis has forced many reluctant educators to take up online instruction if mostly in a limited range of models. Post-pandemic, if these instructors take away a false lesson that “online learning” means “Zoom University,” then we risk erasing a two-decade history of online-pedagogy scholarship that we rather should be plundering for seasoned insights made fresh by this year’s efforts.

Anxiety about assessing student learning “at a distance” has been a higher-education pandemic constant. Many schools responded by spending fortunes on surveillance software and invasive proctoring tools, even though it should be obvious that having one’s eye movements and bedroom environment captured and reported by a robot is destructive of learner performance, especially in a high-stakes, timed examination. In a more compassionate (and effective) vein, hundreds of schools relaxed prior limits on “Pass/ Fail,” “Pass/No Record,” and similar low-stakes options for end-of-term assessment. “Assessment” needn’t be all about an end-of-term letter-grade judgment; it can be an all-semester, iterative process of providing constructive feedback and diagnosing how well the course is preparing learners to move forward from one unit to the next. Hopefully, higher educators as a group are in an improved position to reflect on why we “grade” and how assessment can not only judge learning, but also promote it.

In a crisis, it’s natural to ask, “What do we need, and what’s available?” Besides a healthy skepticism about the technology vendors eager to press forward with their answers to the second question, we have to take a moment to ask, Who is this “we”? Instead of asking what we (teachers, institutions, etc.) need, a learnercentered pedagogy asks: “What about the learners? Who are they? What are their circumstances? What do they need from us in order to be able to have healthy opportunities to learn during this terrible year?”

As we have progressed from the emergency “pivot online,” into the planned pandemic academic year now concluding, toward decisions about a new normal, Garrett-Evangelical and other schools have solicited feedback from learners on how their needs have— and have not—been recognized and addressed. If we budget the time and attention to evaluate that feedback, we have also at our disposal several years of scholarship on “learner-centered” instructional design on which to draw. Among the many ways we as a society will seek to honor our countless horrific losses, we in higher education can do so (in part) by committing to a sustained and duly humble inventory of our online instruction and of its possibilities for a learner-centered, learner-trusting, flexibly designed facilitation of learning.