Digital Tools in the Classroom -- is it amnesia or has something changed?

Since I left academia at the end of last year, I've been thinking a lot about my role as a professor in the role of traditional academic institutions, universities, as the jumping off point for most people's careers in engineering. If you have had your ear to the ground, there seem to be two dissonant and conflicting messages that I've than hearing over the past six years. The first, that many of us experienced directly and everyone heard about was how dreadful and painful the process of learning became during COVID. The second message is how technology is permitting us to -- and how we must -- scale up teaching and learning, a message I hear most from universities dealing with the pressure of budget cuts, but that I hear also creeping back in to the conversation as AI becomes a realistic tool, companion, and assistant.

Indeed, the pressure to scale up and/or go digital has never been higher for your typical state university prof. I have been consistently hearing similar talking points over the past couple years, and not just from the top down. Sometimes this would come with incentives to record all your lectures, like a one-time stipend. Other times it would come down to room design choices... The bigger the room, the more people you can teach, right? It made me wonder, is this amnesia, forgetting how difficult and terrible some of our digital tools really were, or have we actually learned something and/or created better experiences? What value does the traditional four-year degree deliver that has value most importantly to the student, and do we lose that by going digital and/or scaling up again?

As both a parent and an educator, during COVID it was plain to see how schools struggled with delivering traditional curriculum and content digitally. My oldest son was in kindergarten at the time and had to plant his bottom firmly in his seat for far too long in order to participate in poorly conceived daily video check-ins with his teacher. The audio was terrible. His fellow students kept unmuting themselves. Two twins in the same house and class would put their laptops too close to each other and create an audio feedback loop that made the whole experience inaudible. A lot of the teaching material came straight from YouTube videos. And he was in kindergarten. The stakes were low. I can't imagine what going through middle or high school would have been like.

From the teaching side, I was running project-based, hands-on, and team-based engineering courses. Imagine trying to debug someone's circuit over video chat; It quickly turns into a Keanu Reeves-style action movie. "Now carefully pull out the blue wire without touching the red wire." ZAP.

But realistically, the planning and effort required to coordinate a hands-on electronics course remotely over Zoom required an intense level of preparation and planning up front, either during summer break or over winter break, that under normal circumstances would normally be amortized over the course of a semester. Every circuit had to be built and checked up front with new parts selected because the old parts were no longer available. Orders had to take into account the new cost of parts and materials that changed rapidly based on availability and demand. While things have settled down a bit since then, it seems that the instability of parts pricing and availability is still an issue, albeit now from different causes. But most importantly, the stress of teaching was high because the stakes were high. A missing part or a shorted circuit would mean that learning for the entire semester was going to be more limited than if we were all in the same room.

Looking at some of the digital tools we fell back on most, I'm thinking primarily of Zoom, Canvas, and Slack. From a teaching perspective, Zoom was both an equalizer and an excuse. It didn't matter where you were, you could connect and participate. The anonymity that it gave you -- the ability to set your own profile picture, turn on your video or not, etc. -- was a good thing because it permitted some people to be more comfortable. You also didn't have to drive to campus to learn.

However, that distance and anonymity from in-person interactions also made it easy for people to zone out, act more passively and reactively, and use the technology in a way to make it a barrier to learning. I once had a student check in on Zoom while driving. I had students who would sign in, show their face to get attendance credit, and then never respond again. They were ostensibly paying tuition, but trying their hardest to avoid showing up. Was it really that bad? There was the sense that we were delivering a product meant for in-person learning over a medium that made that product worse. No wonder people zoned out. So enticing them to come and participate more was hard. It was equally difficult to penalize for participation, because sometimes there were no-fault technological problems.

And still, I was TRYING. I was attending workshops and seminars to learn how to engage better with students digitally. I was trying different techniques to encourage engagement, often through deeper integration with the same digital tools causing all the friction. It started to feel like it was becoming my responsibility to enforce participation, as if the student wasn't already paying a lot for the opportunity to be there. At the end of the day, even with all the things that we implemented and tried, the digital classroom was just a worse experience with higher stress all around. Learning suffered, and so did I.

Fast forward to today. Most of our digital tools are still there, and have only become more integrated into our work lives. Perhaps we've equalized a bit... I didn't teach over video that much over the past couple years, thankfully, even though I would get the persistent request to share recorded lectures, most often from people who most frequently missed the campus shuttle. It's funny, the more I would share those videos, the less people would attend.

I think I will stop here but look for more thoughts on this soon.