Stress.
There’s a special kind of stress that comes with online teaching.
I’m interrupting my recent string of posts on course content to discuss a pressing issue.
I don’t think I’ve spoken to anyone teaching in higher education lately who hasn’t mentioned the stress they’re under. Professors feel like they’re working around the clock; the lines between work and home when you’re working from home start to blur; everyone asks “where did the summer go?” And these aren’t just anecdotes. Professors have always worried about burnout, and those worries are becoming more pressing as the realization dawns on us that things are not back to normal, and it will be a while before they are. The sense of burnout is even affecting contract negotiations. Students are facing many challenges as well, and though theirs are of a different nature, they too are affected by the pandemic. One stressor they share in common with instructors is the switch to online education.
Photo by Anthony Tran on Unsplash
I’ve discussed elsewhere in this blog series the trepidation with which instructors greeted the Great Pivot to online instruction, their worries about what it would do to their style of teaching, the learning of students, and the university as an institution. Educators, both those with deep online experience and those new to the format, have risen to this challenge and have demonstrated inventiveness when it comes to devising teaching and learning activities that promote engaged learning, community and inclusivity. The thinking here is simple and sound: create courses that overcome the barriers of the virtual format and are welcoming to all, and everyone — students, instructors — will benefit. It takes a lot of work to create these environments — hence instructor stress and fatigue — but the effort is surely worth it.
You can find a number of good sites like this one that help instructors design courses that reduce stress on students, and the strategies there can be transferred to the online environment. But what about the instructors? What can be done for them? There are ways of reducing stress being suggested during the pandemic that propose the usual strategies: connecting with others to overcome isolation; being flexible in course design to help both students and yourself cope with the unexpected; practicing mindfulness; exercising; eating well; getting enough sleep. All good ideas.
But there’s also a special kind of stress that comes with online teaching. Some days you just don’t want to turn on the computer let alone open up the discussion forum to see the latest posts of the students. Why does this happen? Part of it must simply be the fatigue that comes with sitting in front of a screen all day. That kind of work loses its appeal pretty quickly. There’s also a drudgery involved: discussing verbally with students, even by Zoom if you can’t be with them in a classroom, is a much more active and interactive experience not just for the students, but also for the instructor. Reading student discussion posts has more of a mechanistic feel. You read many of them at once, they often blend into each other because many students often share a similar communication style, and it begins to feel like grading, which is its own special hell.
Other factors associated with online teaching add to the stress. Thinking about the tech, especially if you’re having issues, or keeping your eye on the many balls in the air as you manage the learning management system (which can often feel like a learning unmanagement system), or helping students find their way through said system — all of these can wear you down.
I’m sure that many of the strategies for dealing with other kinds of stress will help with this special situation. I’m not trying to solve the problem here, I just want to acknowledge it and encourage anyone afflicted by it not to think that they’re doing something wrong. It just goes with the territory of online teaching. Like any human activity, it has downsides.
For Fall Term 2020 this blog will be exploring issues informing education during a pandemic. It is appearing as part of a graduate seminar on online teaching and learning. You can read more about the seminar or see the other posts.
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