Time.
There’s never enough time. Is there even less when we’re teaching online?
COVID time: it appears to be an actual thing. Ruth S. Ogden published her study “The Passage of Time During the UK COVID-19 Lockdown” in July. She surveyed close to 700 people to find out how they were experiencing the passage of time, especially during the day, at the height of the lockdown. Over 80% of those surveyed felt that time had changed its pace, with about 40% thinking time had sped up, and about another 40% thinking it had slowed down. Four factors contributed to these time distortions: age, stress, workload, and social interaction (specifically, your satisfaction with social interactions). It seems that “younger, more socially satisfied people [were] more likely to experience time as passing more quickly during the lockdown.”
The minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks - they’re all running away from me.
I’m not so sure about that. I’m older and not especially satisfied socially, and I think the COVID summer flew by. The study also discovered that if you were experiencing stress, time would feel slower, but if you were busy, time would feel faster. Like so many higher education instructors, I felt both busy and stressed. The Great Pivot of 2020 had caused many to scramble in March and April, but that scrambling continued over the summer as we geared up for going completely online in the fall. Talk to any prof, and while you’ll find some who will say how much they enjoyed a relaxed summer of writing and baking, I suspect many more will talk about spending the summer preparing, preparing, preparing.
Time has always been an issue for online teaching because it has always been assumed that it takes more time to prepare an online course than it does a face-to-face classroom course. Is this true? Ask the instructors who weren’t baking sourdough bread this summer and instead doing their jobs, and you’ll find that confirmed: reconceiving courses for the online environment required thinking through new approaches, attending webinars, learning how to use the tools available to them to put the courses online, and then doing the work of putting the courses online - recording lectures and curating readings and coming up with cheat-proof assessments.
You can argue, as many do, that this is just a question of familiarity: the first time you do something always takes longer because you have to learn how to do it. That would apply here especially for those instructors who had to acquire new skills and learn how to use unfamiliar tools. This will feel like lost time if you don’t expect to teach online again, but I hope people see it as an investment that will pay off in the future, either because we’ll be teaching online for a while, or because the tools and approaches will be useful in classroom courses. (Is there a face-to-face course nowadays that has NO online element? I doubt it.)
Rebecca Van de Vord and Korolyn Pogue have studied the question about the claims on an instructor’s time in face-to-face and online courses. They concluded “that interaction time with students is greater in the face-to-face courses while evaluating students and their work is greater in the online courses,” with the former being a result of proximity, the latter a result of technology. We should perhaps remind ourselves that spending time teaching students and evaluating their work is putting time to good use. But with the pressures and claims on our time, we instructors must always consider what is the most effective use of our time. The learning curve of online teaching can sometimes be daunting and cause us to ask if it’s worth the time. If it aids student learning, or even if it just makes student learning possible in a time when the alternative is no learning at all, then you’d have to say, yes, it is time well spent.
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.
Post 22/60.