Like many other full-time academics, come May or June every year, I begin frantically looking through all my calendars and diaries, trying to piece together a narrative of productivity for the institution’s annual report. How many invited talks? How many conference papers and panel discussions? How many book chapters and articles in refereed journals? How many online resources developed? How many funded projects?
Does it seem like there is a big hole there, despite the many thousands of words generated and many hours undoubtedly spent in the course of these activities?
I define myself as an academic in many ways; by my research interests and the position I occupy of course, but the unchanging core of that definition—particularly in relation to my status as a university employee–is teaching. But this is the role that is least reflected—directly at least—in this annual stock-taking exercise. Simply listing the number of courses I taught over the year does little to fill out the picture (for a professor in a central university that is usually no more than three, excluding doctoral supervision or directed readings).
Keeping track of what one does in order to fulfill the metrics-hungry system whose appetite for neatly totted up productivity units is stressful at the best of times. During the pandemic-related lockdown, it turned into something of a nightmare.
In the early days following the Covid-19 related lockdown and suspension of face-to-face classes, once the initial shock wore off, it was as if borders had suddenly dissolved. Soon, we were zooming everywhere, attending webinars and dropping into virtual classrooms to listen to lectures happening all over the world. Collaborations that seemed to have been waiting in the wings for years suddenly materialized with the possibility of sustained conversation in these online meeting rooms, and new projects were conceived, discussed, and even approved. I found myself becoming part of many interest groups, from the sub-disciplinary to the trans-disciplinary, even academic-activist networks that seemed to have found a space and a voice in this strange new world. We shared concerns and frustrations, finding resonances across geographies when it came to the occupational crib-sheet. We engaged in exciting and stimulating conversations, partly born out of pure academic interest, and partly to escape from the one uncertainty that loomed large over us, and that we were afraid to confront with any measure of realism.
That uncertainty had to do with the job that we had all been hired to do, in the first place. To teach, to help young people learn and explore their potential, to mentor them as they took their own steps into the world of work, to create a space where they could find their own sweet spot of intellectual excitement. Even as we—to use that tired phrase—pivoted to the virtual classroom and the patchwork strategy of a/synchronous lessons, we were hesitant to look the beast in the eye and acknowledge that we could simply not do our job the way it was meant to be done, and the only ways we knew how were woefully inadequate.
When I wrote about this shift to the online in the early days of the lockdown, the sense was that this was something we had to put up with for a short time, that we would come out soon on the other side with no more than a few months of lost time (Raman, 2020). I bemoaned the lack of effective connection and the disappearance of context, even as I did find some ways to accommodate these aspects in my online classroom. But we soon realized that this was also an opportunity to understand and better exploit the possibilities of both fully online and blended modes of learning, some of which was reflected in the National Education Policy document that was released in early 2020.
As I write this, sixteen months since I last faced students in a room without the intervening screen, I am not sure we did use the time to do that. What we did do was learn how to better use our devices, make slicker presentations, and maybe fumble a bit through collaborative tools such as Padlet and Miro and the Google Meet whiteboard. We learned the power (and nuisance) of turning off microphones and cameras (on both sides of the learner-facilitator equation) and became more efficient at finding and pointing to online resources. We figured out how to manage, make and upload classroom materials in digital folders. By the end of the first year, we had to some extent learned how to handle assessments, with an eye more on control and efficiency than on really measuring learning outcomes with any degree of sensitivity.
We have also understood what the shutdown means in terms of learning loss. One paper estimated that 10 million academic hours would have been lost in the first phase of the lockdown (Dutta, 2020), while another said that close to 32 crore students in India were affected, across education levels (Jena, 2020). The immediate response was to try to mitigate the loss through online lessons, right from elementary to tertiary levels. And that’s when we began to see all the cracks, in the clear light of our locked-down days. The challenges have been well documented, from lack of access to devices and connectivity, to the lack of environments conducive to focusing and doing the tasks required to learn. These challenges were faced by everyone in the system. While students suffered from lack of motivation, the absence of peer-group energy, and uncertainty about their future, teachers suffered from a lack of feedback and reinforcement, discomfort with online modes of delivery and assessment, and a sense that their work had been reduced to the flatness of content input.
The work of a teacher, or an academic mentor, is much more than content delivery—however bulky and complex that task might be. There is work that goes before and after the classroom, and the long tail of emotional labour that is put into nurturing students. And here’s where I’d like to go back to that task of filling out the details for an annual report. The many spreadsheets of data that are harvested by that report say nothing about the hours spent on teaching, re-thinking courses and assessment, and, this pandemic year, offering emotional and psychological support to students. One of my colleagues who teaches video production, usually (pre-pandemic) works with students individually to ensure that they acquire competencies in the art and science of image making. The time table may show four hours in the classroom/studio, but this is just the front-end of a process that might on occasion take up to double that time or more when students are working on an assignment. This is the case for all those who teach skills courses in media studies. The labour that is invested by the teacher of practice—and to some extent, all teachers–beyond the time table has no place in those annual reports. This is labour that is taken for granted, even as it is what sustains the education system.
In the shift to online education, these are the courses that suffered the most. Teachers of practice in my field have never thought about what they offer in a class as “content”. Rather, the focus in such courses is on building capabilities and sensitivities to become media producers—to create, edit, and manage media with a keen sense of context and culture. Not to say that it is impossible in an online mode, but it requires a complete re-thinking of our pedagogies. Even for theory courses in the social sciences and humanities, which thrive on discussion and argument—the application of a dialogic method—the online has been a mixed bag.
I teach a course on digital culture, a broad survey course that offers an introduction to the internet as a communication infrastructure and the various forms of interaction and representation it affords, along with the attendant social, cultural and political dynamics. Perhaps because of the subject matter, the online mode actually threw open many new possibilities. The chat function offered a parallel avenue for discussion for students who either had poor connectivity or who were too shy to speak up. Students shared links and images from time to time in the chat, and in our WhatsApp group, thus opening up many concurrent strands of discussion. Advait Sarkar and Sean Rintel of Microsoft Research (2021), while acknowledging the potential of chat to distract, report that during online office meetings chat has had a net positive effect, particularly in large groups where turn taking might be difficult or intimidating. I certainly found this to be true in my class, and took to saving and sharing the chat from every session, as part of the materials. It made up to a large extent the absence of the affective space that enriches classroom interactions.
However, this was not true of every theory course. One student remarked to me, comparing the digital culture class with a concurrent course on media historiography, that “some classes are not meant for online”. His point was that the other course required one to think deeply before responding, and the silences were just as important as the dialogue—and we are yet to become comfortable with long silences in front of a screen.
Personally, I wouldn’t say the year of teaching online has been a total loss, but I can see it has been pretty much a write off for many students who have found it impossible to engage online, partly because of technological or situational constraints, but also because they have never learned how to learn independently. Their ability to take full advantage of the online system—listening to recorded lectures, participating in a flipped classroom by keeping up with readings, exploring materials beyond the syllabus—is limited simply because they have never been expected to learn on their own. For me, this has meant constantly thinking about and adjusting for several mental models of learning. While one also does this in a physical classroom, the work that is required to make this happen on a screen is, I have found, far more intense. Consequently, the number of hours put into preparation and assessment, and the energy put into delivery, is much higher than in pre-pandemic times. And the lack of feedback turns what might be a closed loop in physical classrooms, into an uncertain spiral. This, combined with the frenzy of collaborative projects that I jumped into in the early months of the lockdown, has been, to put it mildly, exhausting.
There are indications that the lockdown, and the extended isolation and hours spent on screen has led to a variety of stresses among groups beyond the health impacts of the virus. Teachers are among those who have experienced burnout, in some ways because of the anxieties generated by the gap between what was traditionally expected of them and what (and how) they are now doing. Victoria Turk, writing in Wired magazine, observes that “our current burnout moment may pose an opportunity to rethink our roles at work”.
In the past year, these roles have taken on new dimensions, and we have had to learn new tricks for a changing game. We’re not certain about how learning takes place in this new environment, and what the enablers might be, particularly given the diversity of students’ contexts and experiences.
In their preface to a volume of essays about early experiences of online teaching, Babu and Ramaswamy saw the circumstances created by the pandemic as an opportunity to “reimagine higher education in India”, that we could find ways to rebuild our it in a manner that was more equitable, accessible and democratic (Babu & Ramaswamy, 2020; p. 10). While a year may not be long enough to judge whether we have sufficiently acted upon that imagination, it is enough to see whether there is a commitment to a different vision of education.
This imagination—or revisioning—needs to happen beyond the classroom transaction. It needs to reflect in the way we think about issues of context, teaching roles and workload, and how faculty responsibilities can be realistically managed and supported—not just with training and the provision of technologies, but by creating supportive environments.
When I look back on the work year, I want to be able to count everything I do, the visible and the invisible, and feel that all the roles I play have some meaning and some contribution to make to the larger project of education. The pandemic year has allowed to see some of the gaps in how we think about and do our work, and this is perhaps its only positive fallout.
References
Babu, S & Ramaswamy, S (eds), Higher Education in India: The Challenges of Going Online. Bengaluru, Indian Academy of Sciences.
Dutta, A (2020). Impact of social media on Indian higher education: alternative approaches of online learning during Covid-19 pandemic crisis. International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications; 10 (5). http://dx.doi.org/10.29322/IJSRP.10.05.2020.p10169
Jena, P K (2020). Impact of pandemic Covid-19 on education in India. International Journal of Current Research; 12 (7): 12582-86. https://doi.org/10.24941/ijcr.39209.07.2020
Raman, U (2020). After the pandemic: the precarious classroom. Pages 31-36 in Babu, S & Ramaswamy, S (eds), Higher Education in India: The Challenges of Going Online. Bengaluru, Indian Academy of Sciences.
Sarkar, A and Rintel, S (2021). The rise of parallel chat in online meetings: how can we make the most of it?
Turk, V (2021). Our current burnout moment is a good thing.
Usha Raman is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Hyderabad. and the lead editor of teacherplus. Views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of Confluence, its editorial board or the Academy.
This article is part of a Confluence series called “Still Online: Higher Education in India”. The remaining articles of the series can be found here.