The following is an interview with an anonymous student at Texas State University.

What is your experience with remote learning (if any) prior to COVID-19?  

I have taken online courses at Valdosta State University (VSU) during my time as an undergraduate there. I’ve also taken hybrid and online courses here at Texas State while in graduate school.

At what moment in your remote classes did you feel most engaged with what was happening?  

Regarding engagement, it has been interesting as things have evolved over the years. While I was an undergrad, one of my courses was not only online, but entirely self-paced and isolated. There was no interaction with the other students. I basically got all of my engagement with the course while writing the papers, watching various assigned videos, or completing my readings. I’m someone who would contact the instructor on a regular basis anyway, and that felt quite engaging. But otherwise I didn’t feel like I was “engaging” in the course in the sense of interacting with a professor or other students, etc. Certainly no dialogue was available unless sought out.

I then took my second online course at VSU, which included forum posts. And I certainly felt engaged when I was doing the forum posts, but I seemed to type much more than everyone else and responded more directly to their posts. Most people typically made general responses and just wanted to hit their word count. So despite having ways to interact with the professor or other students, I didn’t feel much more engaged than with the first course, mostly because I feel like I cared more about engagement than others did.

At Texas State, I have had a much better experience. One of my online classes assigned semester-long partnerships that meant many Skype or phone calls with my partner during the week. We even recorded a PowerPoint presentation together. That was interesting in and of itself, as we created a presentation and then had to add voice recordings to our own slides. I felt very engaged in that class, simply by just having one peer that I was required to speak with constantly. But I can imagine that some students may have had a less than stellar experience if they were partnered with someone who didn’t want to engage as much as they did.

All of these experiences have been pre-Covid. I’ve also had post-Covid online courses. However, I did have a Summer II 2020 course that was online but it was *meant* to be online even before Covid. So I will talk about this one briefly. It was engaging the majority of the time. The modules were very small or brief, so I could get through them quickly (even though there were quite a few). So it always felt like I was making progress toward something rather than ticking off boxes for the week. Students were allowed to choose to email a zoom recording of their conversations with each other as a substitute for the forum discussion. Everyone feel incredibly engaged as we were more than just profile pictures on the other end of a forum. There’s really no substitute for engagement when it comes to seeing people’s faces in real time.

At what moment in your remote classes were you most distanced from what was happening? 

I think the most distanced I’ve ever felt was during my first online course at Texas State. Despite feeling very engaged when I was talking with my assigned partner throughout the semester, I’ve never felt more distanced in a class before. I even felt more distanced in this course than my very first online course that had no engagement with other students or forums. The instructor essentially laid out the plan for the semester, said to email them if needed, and then was never heard from again. He would pop in every 3-4 weeks and post an announcement. But other than that he was a ghost. It was also incredibly difficult to get ahold of this professor because they lived in another country, and the time difference created issues.

What action from teachers or students did you find most affirming or helpful?

I think the most affirming/helpful thing a faculty member has done during an online class is constantly send us quick email surveys. This largely was to gauge how much work the class was (to see if the workload could be increased or decreased), to see if the weekly assignment dates worked with our schedules (to gauge how many full time workers/parents we had), and just generally having wellness checks with us once or twice a week (as a class or individually). I can understand that this might seem overbearing or might come across as suffocating for some students, but the instructor had a very warm delivery so it didn’t seem too over the top. She really intended for students to control as much of the course as they could and incentivized our autonomy.

What action from teachers or students did you find most puzzling or confusing?

I was confused at first in my very first online class when there would be no online discussions or communications with others. But I later learned that because this was a Maymester (VSU has two weeks semesters in May which is separate from Fall/Spring/Summer I/II), the instructor didn’t want to create the burden of us monitoring forums. Instead, they opted to have us keep up with several journaling assignments.

So most of the puzzling or confusing things have been able to be explained away through conversations with instructors or just learning things in time periods where I was an online instructor myself.

One thing that I’ve never understood is how the one instructor thought it a best practice to simply publish the course on TRACS and disappear for weeks at a time. I guess disappearing as a presence to the entire class would have made sense if he was keeping up with us person to person. But out of the five or six people in the course, none of us got the sense that he was engaging with any of us personally. It was just a very odd experience. Even with the time difference, we could have interacted, albeit more slowly. And of course announcements stay up, and most people tend to not see those the same day they are posted anyway.

I just simply cannot wrap my head around the fact that an instructor thought such a lack of communication was acceptable to create a classroom environment.

What about your remote classes surprised you the most? 

On the negative end, I was surprised how low the bar for engagement often is for instructors of online classes and yet they still missed the mark.

On the positive end, I was surprised how flexible an online class can be. One doesn’t often think of an online class as being flexible. Students often visualize them as series of modules or classes that are just uploaded and, in that sense, they are immutable. But the instructor really managed to maintain a constructivist approach in an online environment. And that is commendable.

How did the format of your classes change after moving to remote learning? (Asynchronous vs. synchronous, discussion forums vs. real time discussion, etc.)

Moving to remote learning was…interesting. Some faculty members very much had more support systems than others. Friends of mine that are graduate students in the philosophy department say that the department feared a move to online instruction well before there were talks of such a thing happening. They made sure to get all the faculty who were not yet certified to teach online signed up for professional development or have them become acquainted with more complicated aspects of online instruction, including Zoom and the more tedious parts of TRACS.

Some students in other classes that I know simply relayed how their instructors were absolutely stunned and had no clue who to go to or what to do with their online courses. Those instructors essentially just uploaded the final paper project early, made it a tad bit longer, and then said “This is what you will work on for the remainder of the semester. Let me know if you need help.”

I am blessed to be in a doctoral program that is very small and where all faculty members are very used to doing research projects via Zoom with faculty from other universities, already had online experience, or had graduate students that could assist them with the transition. Over spring break (and the extra spring break) our program was constantly communicating with students and faculty alike both inside and outside their classes. I couldn’t have possibly been given a smoother transition. It also helped that we all agreed (faculty and students) in each class to continue to meet synchronously. So not much really changed.

How, and how often, do you communicate with your instructors in your remote classes? (Email, phone, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, etc.) 

It depends on the instructor to be quite honest. Unsurprisingly, the instructor who sent out the surveys gave out her phone number the week before classes started and said she could be reached via email or text (of which I did both depending on the context of the question and brevity of the response needed). And they communicated with us twice a week at a minimum of their own volition. Always through email instead of announcements.

Other instructors tend to just stick to a weekly update every Monday and then communicate primarily through the comments they leave on your papers. And it was always easy to get ahold of them when needed via email.

How, and how often, do you communicate with fellow students in your remote classes? (Email, phone, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, etc.)

On average it is just during the mandated forum posts for the week. I tend to respond more than the minimum, but it is difficult to engage more when your follow up responses typically do not get answered. I think instructors and students alike often forget how mentally taxing it is to keep up with forums. It is much more time consuming than we realize to even type out a small response sometimes. But I think that’s because people often treat forum posts as a graded academic assignment rather than something more casual like dialogue in class (which it is meaning to replace). Actually, some faculty members even require APA, etc., formatting for posts and maintain that formal or academic language be utilized. I’ve never quite agreed with that because no one ever gives a formalized and completely thought out response in class. So why then should we be required to do so in our forum posts (given that they are intended to be a substitute for in class dialogue that is much less refined)?

It is difficult enough for students to write, and even more difficult when they are trying to meet a word count. They are constantly editing down their sentences and find themselves answering the question in one or two sentences. It’s best to just let students write out their thoughts as they progress and allow things to flow. I tend to post that way and it seems to help me, and also (I think) makes me more approachable in the forums (as I usually have a lot of people responding to me as opposed to others). I think it also makes my responses to my peers less finger-waggy or combative. It is very difficult to want to respond to a post on your forum when someone is required to have a thesis statement and at least two citations when having to hit back at your idea.

How did discussions change before and after remote teaching? What made them work as well (or not)? 

Discussions haven’t really changed, I would say. For example, when going from in person to remote in a class that stayed synchronous after returning from spring break, the discussions were taking place on Zoom rather than in the classroom. And if we had group work that regularly occurred, we did so in breakout rooms on Zoom rather than at different ends of the classroom in our groups. So I don’t think things have changed there.

But as far as asynchronous classes go, they seem to just still be the same old forum or discussion posts — or just dropping off discussion as a priority entirely for some classes. It’s a bit disheartening.

Having a model where we can (a) talk asynchronously or (b) set up times to talk and discuss via Zoom or the phone with students that have a similar schedule is so much more effective than forum posts. I think forums were innovative and necessary for the time they existed in, but we have the technology now readily and (sometimes) freely available through our institutions that we should really be leaning on that to take care of discussions rather than relying on forum posts (when we can).

What unique challenges did you and/or your fellow students face? (i.e. disabilities, technology, home/work situation, geographic location, etc.) How did your instructor handle these challenges?

One of the biggest challenges for me was the internet. It took two months to convince Grande to come out to my house to even look at what was going on, and during all the time I was having my internet drop multiple times per Zoom meeting/class session and dropping up to 20 times a day on bad days, which seriously impacted how much I was able to work on TRACS/Canvas. Stable internet is always going to be the Achilles heel of remote learning. I think until access to the internet becomes viewed as a right rather than a privilege, it will always continue to be an issue.

Another issue was when attempting to do work from my phone over data (when the internet would not work), the TRACS app and TRACS page in general was just incredibly unworkable. You can’t check gradebook or do half the things that you need to do on TRACS. I have however had fantastic success with the student Canvas mobile app.

I’ve also had various disability issues with remote classes. With my severe arthritis and disc issues in my back, it is difficult to sit at a computer for long periods of time, and it is difficult to type very much. I often use voice software to dictate what I want to be typed (which can be done from a headset as I walk around). The biggest issue is that TRACS was entirely incompatible with any dictation software I tried. I have not yet used my software with Canvas, but I can be certain it won’t be as bad as TRACS was. As aggravating as it was, there was an easy fix. Simply dictate into a Word document and then copy and paste to TRACS. But, having extra steps isn’t exactly equity.

As far as how instructors handled this, most offered to Zoom/Skype with me regularly as a means to substitute my forum posts requirement. However, that defeats the purpose of the assignment because I would not be interacting with other students. One instructor set up her class in such a way that we were allowed to video record our Zoom conversations with other students and submit them on TRACS in place of the forum assignment. I needed no accommodations there, and things were quite equitable.

I also know of one or two students who are blind and are having particular trouble with Zoom. Their screen readers obviously cannot read the PowerPoints or documents being shared on the screen by their peers or the instructor. Lots of upfront work by the instructor needs to be done to send them all the documents so they can download them and use the screen reader. The instructor also needs to be very detailed about where they are on the documents or PowerPoints and attempt to minimize any new or unexpected visuals.

Anything else you’d like to address? 

The only thing I want to address/reiterate is the fact that instructors need to be much more creative, as does professional development. Constructivism, student autonomy, face to face time, and flexibility really need to be incentivized. In my opinion as someone who has filled the roll of student and teacher (in person and in online environments), it is the only way to adequately create an engaging online environment for students. I think our professional development focuses much more on how to operate software and what software are available to give more choices to instructors, rather than focusing on which ways instructors can create a student-autonomy-based environment online, as they would in person.