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I often get asked about why college students are being assigned "more work" during the pandemic based on anecdotes. Since I have never met an instructor who sat down and decided "I'll give the students more work during this plague," something odd is going on here. A thread.
We do know that worries about engagement have led to many changes in instructional practice, including introducing more exercises, discussion boards, collaborative editing tools and so on. IN addition, most instructors have changed the structure of their assessments.
The latter changes, far from being a way of torturing students, have been a response to calls for an ethics of care, for trauma informed teaching practices, for "lowering the stakes" in times when, at least at my institution, >50% of students report high degrees of stress.
So what's going on here? We're trying to lower the stress and students are perceiving us as giving them more work. Well, one possibility is that our previous expectations of how much work students were actually doing in our classes were off by a mile.
Let's say you're a student who did not previously do much of the reading. Now the instructor introduces engagement tools like reading questions or a group editing exercise or a discussion board. You can no longer get by with not doing the reading, right?
So it's not that there is "more work." It's that the expectations are becoming transparent and there is more "accountability"--by accident. That that accountability comes as the result of an attempt to help students stay motivated and engaged is ... well, a bit of a bummer.
In the same way, if you now have low stakes quizzes every week instead of two big exams, it can feel like more work because you have to be doing some work every week, instead of saving it up for half way through the term.
I don't have a solution to propose at this stage, but I hope this helps solve the mystery of why we keep getting these outraged messages from students, staff, and parents about "more work" when nearly everyone is trying to be super sensitive to student needs right now.
Finally, it's hard to measure learning in a pandemic when everyone is cognitively impaired, but I suspect that if we continue these basic course design shifts post-pandemic, we may see a significant uptick in student learning. At least, I hope so.
@CathyNDavidson @Jessifer @slamteacher and all the other rockstar educators out there, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and any suggestions. Sometimes it feels like our best intentions .... well, you know.
