When teaching turned to online instruction back in March, professors were just as caught off guard as their students.
Not only were they required to find a way to finish their teaching online, many professors also struggled with finding a space in their own homes where they could effectively lecture for their students.
Katie Heaton-Smith, an associate professor of psychology at LBCC, shared her teaching environment with her husband, a music teacher. She claimed the hardest part about sharing a home with another online instructor was finding space for herself.
“My husband and I are both teachers, and we are both teaching remotely at the exact same time. So I could literally move my laptop over 20 feet right now and you would hear him… it’s been very hard because if we’re both talking at the same time it’s just loud. Our house is very small so if I’m doing student hours… literally the only reason you don’t hear music right now is because his student didn’t show up. I’ve had to walk to a corner to find quiet,” Heaton-Smith said.
As a compromise, Heaton-Smith and her husband had to find a teaching schedule that worked for both of them. She decided to record her lectures and upload them to Youtube so that her husband could teach his music lessons live with fewer distractions.
“I have 194 Youtube videos this semester. So it’s a lot. It was a lot of recording so we can do two things at one time,” Heaton-Smith said.
Though her lectures are online, Heaton-Smith claimed her work load has not diminished at all. In fact, it seems to have increased. She said she often has to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week in order to record lectures and respond to students’ emails.
“I have 317 students this semester. So at any given time, there’s an email or there’s something going on. It just never ends… we’re working more than we ever have before. To be available all the time and trying to be the best version of yourself for your students is a lot,” Heaton-Smith said.
While she is normally a very social teacher who loves to tell stories and have small talk with her students, Heaton-Smith said that teaching online has greatly affected her typical teaching style.
“I know that students aren’t connecting to me the same way, and that makes me super sad because I am social, I am friendly, but I don’t think students get that necessarily through emails, or that they understand that I really do want to talk to them. It’s just not the same.” Heaton-Smith said.
Annahita Mahdavi, an associate professor of human services, shared the same sentiment.
“It was really hard at the beginning to find a balance, because mentally I wanted to make sure everybody’s in the class… but I have 270 students, five classes, so it became crazy.”
Mahdavi said she had to convert an extra room in her house that once held all of her exercise equipment and a small library into a makeshift office space. She utilized a bookshelf as the background that her students would see while she taught.
“It’s full of my favorite authors such as W.E.B. Dubois, Angela Davis, James Baldwin… I also brought my daughter’s old desk to the room. There was no working space in this room before,” Mahdavi said.
Mahdavi even took an extra step and bought a studio light that faces her when she is teaching so that her students can see her clearly when she is instructing on Zoom. But she admitted that there was one thing she was not willing to substitute from her usual office space on campus: her chair.
“At first I brought my old [office] chair from the garage, however it was not comfortable so I requested the chair from my office because when we went online in March, I found myself working 10 hours a day to create assignments online and change the whole class. It contributed to severe back pain and I had to seek treatment for it,” Mahdavi said.
Even with the improvements she made to her personal work environment, Mahdavi said the most frustrating aspect of online teaching was when the technology simply didn’t work. Such technical difficulties could be due to faulty wifi or a server overload. Zoom recently had issues with students and teachers randomly being kicked out of meetings with no reason given.
“Yesterday it took me half an hour to get to my Zoom class because it wouldn’t buffer. So when technology fails there’s nothing you can do,” Mahdavi said.
Though there were a lot of logistical changes to be made, Mahdavi said she also struggled with adjusting to mental and emotional changes that ultimately affected her teaching style.
“I’m such an old fashioned teacher. I like to go to class, and I like to have an audience, I like that human connection. And my classes have always been so interactive, so it frustrates me because I feel like I constantly talk to myself when I lecture. I miss the human connection, but I do my best to not let this affect the quality of my work,” Mahdavi said.
Sheri Galvanized, an associate professor of human services, claimed that she struggled to interact with her students and have those students interact with each other. Though she described her usual teaching style as “ skills-based,” she had to become a bit more “content-based” in order to teach her students effectively.
“The most frustrating part about online teaching is that all of my communication has to be electronic in some capacity, and you just lose that human touch. Being able to actually be with people, and read people, and understand where they’re coming from, even when you’re face-to-face in Zoom it’s not the same as being face-to-face in person” Galvanized said.
Galvanized had no experience teaching online prior to March, and had to improvise a teaching environment that would allow her to stay focused.
“I ended up putting a lot of dry erase boards up on the wall and rearranging the furniture in my office. I had to do a lot of different organizing,” Galvanized said.
Even though she had difficulty adjusting to online teaching, she said she understood that her students were also going through major changes that would be challenging for them too. Her brother, a software engineer, who she described as a “computer wizard,” had difficulty navigating Canvas for his kids as they learned from home.
“That really shed some light on me about what it must be like for some of our students who are doing this for the first time and don’t have any software background at all,” Galvanized said.
Overall, professors did what they could to create a teaching environment that was beneficial to themselves and their students. Spring 2021 will mark one year that professors have had to make the switch to online instructing.
Though the transition has been tough, Professor Heaton-Smith said she is just glad that everyone is going through it together.
“It’s hard because I know students are facing a lot of challenges, but for the first time ever we’re all in the same boat. Students will tell me ‘My internet’s crazy’ and I’m like, ‘My internet’s crazy too.’ I totally understand all of those challenges. As hard as it is, I’m grateful that we can still work together and we can still make progress.”