As schools of different kinds require their faculty to move instruction online, I remember my early encounters with this request, back when it was just a request. I was hostile, at first, because my whole way of teaching depended on the spontaneous interactions of a class. There was no meaningful content to my courses, apart from that. Anything they read or watched was intended as a provocation to build something together, to take their own responsibility for a question or concept or project. So, online teaching betrayed all my commitments.
When a class-dependent course worked well, it was splendid. But I found that many students were not willing to participate. They insisted on “the delivery of material in digestible pieces” (think ‘feeding a baby owl’) and waited me out, when I tried to make different rules. Also, many students had so many higher priority commitments, like football practice from 6 to 11 am, that being alert in a classroom at the same time each day was just too much to ask.
When I was finally forced to teach online, I found some surprising advantages. For those with limited time, the mechanics of going to class eats up a substantial part of their time-budget. In an online class, it is possible to make the reading and writing the whole story, and have more hope that the reading is completed and the writing is worried over. Also, I had more time to revise assignments, to make lectures clear and short, to give the course a simple structure.
I was never able to replicate online the interaction I valued in the classroom. That would have required much more attention to guidelines for online discussion boards and to technologies for virtual meeting. I was just beginning to experiment with those tools when I stopped teaching.
I came away with a few ideas, from my early experiments:
1. The online format requires short, tight, high-energy lectures – at 20 minutes maximum. One cannot do such things without a lot of work, polishing and editing a script, practicing delivery. Each semester, I would try to add a couple more good pieces to the mix. It was not possible to do it right the first time, at least for me. Here is one piece I did, to give you an idea of the cope and limits of my ambitions. (The context is a review of one central argument in Plato's Republic.)
2. I came to think that lectures made sense mostly as set-up for writing assignments. I designed the assignments to build directly off of ideas in the lecture, so that people would see the point of watching the lectures carefully.
3. I decided that almost every paper I read should begin with a personal story, and that the assignment should encourage students to think about that story. This was partly because I think that ethics is primarily about being thoughtful about one’s own life, a project not well honored in other college classes. But, likely more important, it was almost always possible for me to like a paper that began with a story. I looked forward to hearing about unjust principals, bad coaches, acts of true friendship, saints, mistakes, perplexities and dilemmas. Even when the analysis had problems and the writing was shaky, I loved the stories. This was important because my main teaching mode was to assist with the revision of papers, which meant I had to spend a lot of time with each one. If I couldn’t like a paper, couldn’t see it as a project with room for improvement, I was stopped dead. The stories kept me reading the assignments and thinking about them.
4. Online quizzes are magic. The classroom management programs do quizzes so much better than one can do other ways, taking over the record-keeping and grading. Making quizzes helps teachers figure out what is important in the readings or in the lectures, and what distinctions they want students to make – how closely they want them to read or listen. Taking quizzes stirs up students’ memory in useful ways; there’s research on that. Also, taking quizzes gives people comfort in a philosophy course where they are sometimes puzzled. They can secure some kind of a reasonable grade by being conscientious and careful, and they can evaluate their progress by their quiz scores. (This matters especially if a course has few other checkpoints, or if those checkpoints happen toward the end of the course.)
I never had a chance to fully explore this teaching medium. I know that colleagues can make magic happen in online discussions and that meeting tools are good enough to allow a lot of small group work. I was never very satisfied with my own experiments in that direction. In that way, my teaching became much more ‘teacher-student’ than it had been in the classroom, where my hope was always that people would take each other seriously and begin conversations independent of me. I hope this new wave of experiment, this massive shift in how education is done, prompts many new discoveries about how to invite students to take their own responsibility for questions and issues.
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