Six reasons I hate and three reasons I love about online teaching

For years, I wanted to stand before a class of bright young minds and teach. After having completed my PhD (in marketing) from IIM Calcutta after nearly four years, I picked up a teaching assignment at the Vijay Patil School of Management in Navi Mumbai. It was a new school, filled with fresh energy and ideas. They were open to letting me experiment with the pedagogical approach, and the amazing people I get to work with were just icing on the cake. Regardless of all the things that were going on in my favour, the fact that Covid- 19 had happened meant that teaching was to be carried out completely online. Armed with a dual screen setup and a professional zoom license, I was just too excited to start teaching the classic ‘Marketing 101 – Principle of marketing’ course.

At the same time, the School of Public Health in our university wanted someone to teach parts of the ‘management of public health’ course. Given that I had extensive experience in managing hospitals in Africa, my dean felt that I would be an ideal candidate to introduce the students to basic health care concepts, customer orientation, and healthcare logistics. Furthermore, this would be a great opportunity for me to teach in person. Given that this was part of the medical school, the students were going to be physically present.  That meant that I could actually achieve the ‘standing in front of bright young minds’ part of my dream. The only difference this time would be that I would teach doctors and not management students. Understandably, when the opportunity presented itself, I jumped on it.

Since I was teaching both online and offline classes in quick succession, I was able to experience both the pros and cons of teaching online in a very dynamic environment. I thought that documenting them could be of some utility to other first time teachers like myself. Over the next few pages, I shall go about discussing six things I absolutely hate, and three things I really love  about teaching online.

Things I hate about teaching online

Everything is too regulated

One of the key issues with online teaching has to do with everything being regulated. The chaos of class participation, the excitement of debate, the tangential cross talks are all gone. From the moment students click on the ‘join meeting now’ button, their muted microphones go live only after a virtually raised hand, or cold call from me. The frantic meeles that develop once in a while where heated discussions lead to interesting teaching points are almost dead. To be very honest, I did fear that not experiencing such buzzling in the class would take away a part of the teacher in me during these formative years of my teaching. Clearly, the many to one conversations that unfold in virtual classrooms has much left to desire.

Ctrl+F and Online Search

Equipped with digital copies of their textbooks, and the ability to perform online search in just a few keystrokes, students in online classes hardly make mistakes. Without students making mistakes, there is no way to demonstrate some of their false assumptions and lack of clarity. More often than not, when I ask students a question that goes “what does xyz mean?” I get a textbook answer such as “Xyz is defined as …”. Clearly this has taken away the ‘idea grappling moments’ from both the students and teacher. I really miss the opportunities to engage with students, make them understand their assumptions, and challenge their views. In some way, amazing learning opportunities have really gone missing.

Moving from a multisensory to a mono, duo or (if I am lucky) tri sensory teaching mode

When teaching offline, many of our senses are simultaneously employed to scan the class and get a grasp of how comfortable students are at any given point in time. This often allows teachers to ‘shift gears’ to adapt to changing classroom realities. During online classes however, one would be lucky to get more than one sensory input at any given point in time. Students often turn off their video citing ‘bandwidth’ requirements, and remain muted for most of the class. Sometimes, it feels like it’s just me talking to a monitor.

Class recordings

There is nothing more bothersome than the fact that the entirety of my class is being recorded. Clearly, Jeremy Bentham was right. The seemingly constant surveillance that I am subject to definitely keeps me from making mistakes. In the process of avoiding careless mistakes, I believe I have developed my own way of not making mistakes at all. ‘Stick to the PPT file and lecture notes’ and ‘refer when in doubt’ have become cardinal rules that I follow to alleviate the fear of being a meme on 9gag or reddit, freely shared for the world to see. Perhaps more seasoned teachers may not make any mistakes in class. But I am certain young covidien may need a little elbow space to make a few mistakes here and there to evolve a teaching style that is unique to themselves.

The chat functionality

Imagine teaching in a classroom. Imagine someone passing you on a note on a piece of paper. Imagine reading that note, processing it, and somehow integrating it into the classroom discussion. Imagine thinking about “does this student want to remain anonymous” during class and wondering “what was I doing before this” all while delivering a lecture. That’s what the chat feature in an online classroom feels like. Sure it’s useful to have the feature to pass on some web url to students, but the amount of discomfort the feature causes far outweighs the benefits that it offers. I do understand that the bandwidth restrictions that students face forces them to do so, and empathise with them. But online chat is severely distracting and tough to simply ignore while in class. I always feel like the person who sends in the chat mid session saying “Sir, I have some connectivity issues. Will logout and log back in in 2 minutes after resetting the router” does more disservice than help. It’s not like I can say “NO” while teaching, right?

Exams

With the midterm exams for my course nearing, I am having nightmares about how to organize a fully online exam. Given that most of my students know more about technology than me, I am positive that there is no foolproof way to organize an exam online. Challenges with online proctoring, handling internet connectivity issues, IT issues, and getting students to follow simple instructions are just a few of the things that can go wrong with online teaching.

Three things I love about online teaching

While there are a variety of problems that may crop up when teaching online, doing so may also provide us with some very interesting benefits. Here is a list of three benefits that I experienced while teaching online.

The ability to use life data to demonstrate ideas

Many people think marketing is all art and no science. In truth, marketing is a conglomeration of art and science. And teaching online definitely helps me bring to life the science in marketing. For instance, during class last week, I utilized a combination of Google forms (to collect student data), R Studio (using a prepared R Markdown file that made use of the googlesheets4 package to import Google sheets data) and Zoom polls to demonstrate k-means clustering (a technique commonly used for consumer segmentation). I also tried contrasting k-means clustering to the use of just one dimension (or variable). Since it was students’ own data, and I could individually point to each student and show them which groups they belonged to, students were more engaged with the lessons. There are many more resources online that allow teachers to gamify the teaching process and make it much more fun.

The teaching plan is adhered to

While in B School, not all the topics that were intended to be taught were actually taught. More often than not, my professors would shoot off on a tangent and skip covering certain key concepts in class whilst covering some topics in much greater depth. With online classes, what I plan is what I get. Since there are multiple windows open in front of me, I get to see check items off a list of key topics I want to cover in class that day. Also, this sort of planning helps me recall some of the other topics that were covered in the past and relate them to the current class discussion.

Keeping the kids and their families safe

Perhaps the most important advantage of having online classes is in ensuring that my students and their families are safe from contracting the COVID 19 virus. Knowing that they are safe and healthy is probably the one thing that keeps me going while teaching online.

There is no denying that teaching online is somewhat of a mixed bag. On the one hand, it takes away the personal connection that students and teachers have historically shared. While on the other hand, online teaching has, in my view, enabled teachers to augment their teaching by creating courseware that is more hands-on, and provides students with a variety of tools and resources that can enrich their learning experience. Although I find myself drained of all energy after teaching an online class, I feel that this mode of teaching is bound to stay for a long long time to come.