Issue 1 | Article 17

Abstract
While universities and colleges are celebrating their successful transition to online learning and citing “highest-ever student feedback”, the abrupt shift has left many in the education industry feeling disconnected. Students are limited in their connections with each other and with their teachers, and staff are often left feeling isolated without the daily support of their peers. Confusion around policy within the workplace across department levels, as well as high demand for IT support and training, has led to a feeling of being overwhelmed and under supported. This article highlights the main challenges faced by the coordinator of a large postgraduate introductory economics course during the transition period and how (successfully or not) these challenges were met.

The world had never been more isolated nor more connected than it is right now. Interactions that we had previously thought were impossible online are now totally virtual, and teams connect more on chat platforms than in real life. In the university sector, students and staff are grappling with this new way of interfacing and while some university newsletters seem to report “improved student feedback” (West 2021), the catastrophic effect that COVID-19, and the abrupt move to online learning, has had on staff, students, and procedures must be felt somewhere. So, despite what the reported statistics suggest, I wonder: how can we really know how students and staff are doing when we aren’t seeing them face to face? This article looks at the challenges faced in connecting with students and peers during the period of virtual learning.

On 22nd March 2020, the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic in Australia caused all non-essential services including those being provided by higher education institutions to cease. Academic teaching staff were informed that all classes would be shifted online, effective immediately. Suddenly, ‘teaching staff of all backgrounds and ages [had] to prepare and deliver their classes from home, with all the practical and technical challenges this entails, and often without proper technical support’ (Rapanta, 2020). Many of these staff had never received any training in online delivery and were forced to undergo the stress of rethinking their courses, planning new lessons, and trying to understand unfamiliar technology in an extremely short period of time, all with little knowledge of the benefits or limitations of the technology available. IT departments all over the country were inundated with troubleshooting problems, technical difficulties and requests for support, all while trying to get new systems up and running. Support staff were rushed to create training modules for the thousands of staff in their institutions and to roll out new procedures. These occurred amidst massive job cuts, general confusion and lack of security and transparency at the institutional level.

During all this upheaval, there is one question at the forefront of every teacher’s mind: ‘How are my students doing?’ The juggling act of learning new technology from a distance, losing peer-to-peer connections, and in many cases facing job insecurity do not surpass the anxiety that teachers feel when they suspect their students are falling behind or becoming disengaged.

In some cases, the shift to online learning has seen unexpected benefits. Scull et al. have found that in their Education Department at Monash University, students are responding well to online learning, with over 50% reporting high or very high satisfaction (Scull, 2020). They credit the strong social connections that they are fostering online in the form of: “bring your pet to class day”; weekly mental health check-ins; asking students which dish they are cooking for dinner this week; and thus, embracing the messiness of home and university life colliding (Scull, 2020). This leads one to wonder whether the shift to online learning has improved teaching quality, or rather, has perhaps made us more aware of our students and their individual needs now that we are seeing them in personal settings. While this would certainly account for some of the reported improvements in the student experience, it also places an additional mental load on staff who are, for the most part, untrained in skills like mental first aid. Furthermore, the ability to drop into a peer’s office and ask advice on a certain student’s wellbeing, or any other matter about the course, has disappeared with the shift to online learning. The use of online chat platforms has become both a constant and somewhat invasive presence, while simultaneously cutting out the casual corridor conversations that staff rely on to learn, laugh, and feel supported.

Nevertheless, what might work in a department like Social Science or Arts may not work in Business schools, which are ‘typically characterised by large class sizes and a significant proportion of international students’ (Barker, 2020). In these classes, where students are often already out of their comfort zones with English as their second language, away from their home country or attending class virtually from overseas, students are more likely to feel isolated. Amanda White at UTS highlights that ‘International students studying in their home country may also be experiencing further disadvantage because they are not regularly speaking English with their classmates and general interactions they have when living in Australia, yet their assessments are required to be submitted in English’ (White, 2020). White suggests that this creates the perfect storm for anxiety and academic dishonesty, with students simply unable to bear the strain.

Furthermore, ‘COVID19 and its accompanying financial crisis have added to the pressure, with many students losing their source of employment and having to trade-off attending classes with finding paid work’ (White, 2020). The well-known phenomenon of teaching to the blank screens of students unwilling to turn their cameras on hints at a worrying trend. Many students, suffering the burden of having to support themselves in a COVID19 world, are struggling to remain engaged in a single task at a time. Students have reported ‘attending class’ while working part-time jobs such as ridesharing or food delivery.

White further highlights that the shift to online learning has not been as smooth as reported in published metrics, and that there has been significant ‘discourse in the national media and on student-run social media pages about the dissatisfaction with online learning (Chrysanthos, 2020). To date, there are 67 petitions on Change.org demanding reduction of university fees due to online teaching and COVID19’ (White, 2020). These worrying observations contrast quite dramatically with the positive picture that the Student Feedback Surveys provide, and beg the question: “How are our students actually doing?”

References

• Rapanta, C., Botturi, L., Goodyear, P. et al. Online University Teaching During and After the Covid-19 Crisis: Refocusing Teacher Presence and Learning Activity. Postdigit Sci Educ 2, 923–945 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00155-y.
• Scull, J. Phillips, M. Sharma, U. & Garnier, K. (2020) Innovations in teacher education at the time of COVID19: an Australian perspective,Journal of Education for Teaching, 46:4, 497-506, DOI: 10.1080/02607476.2020.1802701
• Smith, E. K., & Kaya, E. (2021). Online University Teaching at the time of COVID-19 (2020): An Australian Perspective, 9(2). https://doi.org/10.22492/ije.9.2.11
• West, A (2021), UBSS Dean’s message #117, 21 April 2021
• White, A. (2020), "May you live in interesting times: a reflection on academic integrity and accounting assessment during COVID19 and online learning", Accounting Research Journal, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/ARJ-09-2020-0317
  
  

Biography
Harry Tse is Assistant Professor at UBSS and a Lecturer for the Economics Group, Business School, at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). Prior to joining the Business School at UTS, he was Head of the Economics & Statistics Department at UTS: Insearch. Harry has written two well-known textbooks on Economics (one published by Pearson and the other by McGraw-Hill) as well as 14 peer-reviewed journal articles and 11 conference papers.