Altered Landscape

A few years ago, I joined an adjunct faculty discussion forum on Google Groups.  More of a lurker than a joiner, I’d read some of the discussion threads if they interested me and ignored the others.

The forum was active for a while, then fell mysteriously dormant for the longest time.  I had pretty much forgotten about it when the moderator sent a message asking if we would be interested in reviving it.  It’s been about three weeks, with more than a dozen messages landing in my inbox each day.  I’m still a lurker, but what’s being discussed is alarming.

There was some tension at first.  In any online forum you always have people who want to stir up drama rather than contribute.  In this case, a row came up surrounding an admittedly ill-advised remark by the moderator describing adjunct working conditions as slave labor.  She was called out by one member.  The moderator apologized for her poor choice of words, but as is so often the case with these situations it was more about the complainant than the complaint itself.  There were more recriminations followed by more apologies. The kerfuffle ended when the offended colleague demanded to taken off the mailing list.

That initial unpleasantness aside, the forum topics have generally fallen into two categories.  The first category consists of anecdotes and advice negotiating the unemployment insurance mess arising from the large numbers of people out of work owing to the coronavirus pandemic.  I’ve mostly ignored these posts since I’m teaching a full (adjunct) load this summer and don’t qualify for UI.

Then again, I should probably pay closer attention.  The second thread has to do with the steep learning curve experienced by my colleagues new to online learning.  Our institution’s campuses will remain closed through at least the fall semester.  Official communications contain dire warnings that faculty who fail to complete the distance learning training course will have their fall offers of employment withdrawn.

This requirement has inspired numerous angst-ridden exchanges.  The fear some of them express is as palpable as the written word allows.  It isn’t as much a matter of mastering the LMS and its bewildering array of features, it’s also the state-mandated accessibility requirement that has everyone—myself included—anxious.

The problem is that this is an under-supported mandate for adjuncts.  We are strongly encouraged to add visual media to our courses, but features such as Camtasia or DIY options like YouTube have godawful self-generated closed captioning.  But you have to have closed captioning to comply with the accessibility requirement.  So, a number of disheartened colleagues have had to resort to manually adding the captions.  This is a labor- and time-intensive process when you’re prepping content for a 16-week class.  Similarly, we are required to convert PDF files into more accessible formats and add “alt-tags” to any images.  Both are also labor intensive though not to the despair inducing extent of creating and properly captioning video content.

Naturally, no course preparation work is compensated under our contract, though there have been vague promises of a stipend for the newbies who finish training and build a compliant course.  Those of us who are established online faculty must submit at least one course for review during the fall.  I have exactly one fully compliant course, a shell I created two years ago and which passed muster but was never assigned to teach.  Like my colleagues, I have my work cut out.

All of this begs an existential question.  Is online instruction the effective equivalent of a live classroom?  The COVID-19 crisis is providing clues.  Since March, I have extensively interacted via videoconference platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and GoToMeeting.  Six months ago, I’d only heard of the latter and only then because they underwrite some the programs I listen to on NPR. 

Zoom is the preferred platform at my college, and at first it was kind of cool to attend trainings and department meetings seeing coworkers’ faces arranged Brady Bunch-style on my laptop screen.  The novelty wore off fast.  After a while I found myself switching off my camera, muting my mic, and going about my daily business during trainings where the moderator’s screen was the focus point and active participation wasn’t required.  I don’t think I was the only one.

What we’ve been left with is a shiny tech-dependent version of an old model, the correspondence course.  Back when, these courses were of mixed quality.  Some programs, such as the extension courses offered by land grant universities, were respectable.  Others, most often private outfits advertising on matchbook covers and in the back pages of magazines, had lesser reputations.  A notorious example was LaSalle Extension University, based in Chicago, which thrived in various guises for over seventy years until it folded in 1982. 

The GI Bill and federal student financial aid multiplied the opportunities for abuse.  Some correspondence schools received shameless celebrity endorsements; Bennett Cerf, Rod Serling, and Phyllis McGinley shilled the Famous Writers School.  The Famous Writers School, the subject of an exposé by Jessica Mitford in The Atlantic, deliberately misled its applicants, 100% of whom were accepted, that these renowned authors would personally evaluate their work.  (FWS continued to feature Cerf in their print ads well after he died.) 

The completion rates for FWS students, many of whom received federal financial aid, were abysmally low.  One FWS official told Mitford that the school wouldn’t be profitable if every student finished.  After Mitford’s article, the Famous Writers School lost much of its enrollment, limped along for a few years, and eventually closed.

Such past abuses notwithstanding, federal financial aid is still a cash cow for unscrupulous for-profit operators.  The occasional scandal, such as the one surrounding Corinthian Colleges, still erupts, while some self-proclaimed institutions of higher education are too big to call to account.  (The University of Phoenix, National University, Grand Canyon University, et al., come to mind.)

There have been precursors of online courses stretching back to the 1950s with NYU’s Sunrise Semester TV program.  My own institution offered two-credit courses built around TV programs for many years.  You watched the episodes at home and went to campus at your convenience to take exams.  (For a few weeks in middle school I faithfully got up at the crack of dawn to watch a series on the history of Mexico.  I found out much later that this was one of the TV courses.)  The college currently has two dedicated cable channels for instruction, but they are used sporadically.

Television wasn’t a panacea, however.  Sunrise Semester was an extension program and the two-credit classes I described weren’t widely accepted for transfer.  But they did afford options for nontraditional students.

A generation ago, the idea of web-based instruction was a dubious proposition.  I first came across it in the late 1990s, when it was part of my job to confirm the accreditation of high schools attended by applicants to our employment training program.  This was merely a check-the-box exercise if they had attended local public schools or established private schools. 

When faced with an applicant enrolled in a private online school, I was in turn faced with a conundrum.  Until then I didn’t know online schools existed.  In fact, there were no accreditation provisions for them at the time.  I phoned the virtual school’s principal, who invited me over to his brick and mortar office to discuss.

The principal was a pleasant older gentleman who assured me that web-based instruction was the future.  Being a) new to the very idea, and b) hamstrung by my employer’s policy that schools be actual places, I offered my skepticism.  He demonstrated one of the courses, navigating through one of the clunky Web 1.0 browsers available then (probably Netscape or Mosaic).  I was at once impressed and unconvinced. 

More than twenty years later I’m just as unconvinced, but I am in the minority it seems.  Considering that community colleges such as mine cater to a wide cross-section of students, a long-term or semi-permanent shift to distance learning might be a welcome change for many.  I strongly suspect that it will be welcomed by administrators as well.  The college can still collect the same tuition and fees with reduced overhead.  Unused facilities could be repurposed and monetized as office or commercial space. 

Even as students at pricey four-year universities are demanding tuition refunds after their classes went remote, trade publications such as Inside Higher Education are predicting that the pandemic will force many community colleges to a mostly online format. 

The paradox is easy enough to resolve.  If I was paying out the nose to attend, say, Columbia, Penn, or Dartmouth, I would expect the experience of campus life at those institutions. For their mostly affluent student bodies college is a social experience, a lifestyle.  By contrast, the largest identifiable subset of community college students just want a diploma.  For older and other nontraditional students, school is just one part of their lives to juggle along with work and family.  This may be disappointing for me and my fellow liberal arts profs, but those are the facts on the ground (and in cyberspace).

There’s just one remaining obstacle to our sudden and perhaps irrevocable shift to remote learning, the digital divide. 

I discovered this in no uncertain terms after we went on lockdown.  Our main campus is suburban and students in the surrounding communities mostly have reliable internet service and cell phone reception.  I teach at two of our satellite campuses.  One is in the well-heeled community where I live.  Even though it’s 85 miles from the mothership most of my traditional-demographic students there are technologically well-connected to the college’s resources.  Few of them fell behind because they couldn’t access the course.

The other campus presented a different story altogether.  While situated in a picturesque small town, a substantial number of students live in the surrounding hills.  Not all of them have reliable home internet or cell reception.  A winter snowfall or summer wildfire emergency could leave them without electricity for days or even a week or two.  A few, but still too many, are homeless and did their work from the campus computer lab before the lockdown. 

Within the first two weeks of the stay at home order, about a third of the class had stopped participating online.  The campus administration attempted to ease the situation by affording wi-fi service in one of the campus parking lots so people could work from their cars or while seated outdoors.  It’s unclear to me whether this helped many students.  Several of my students ended up failing or earning a lower grade than they would have made had on-campus instruction concluded normally.

The funny thing is that we’ve been aware of the tech gap for a very long time.  The Clinton administration floated the idea of providing laptops to low-income families twenty-five years ago.  In the present, my state’s governor has pledged to remedy the digital divide problem but obviously that can’t happen overnight.  The deficiency’s implications for education, K-12 and higher, are damaging.   

The folks who tout technology as the answer to all of society’s problems conveniently omit how unevenly these solutions benefit people.  I happen to find the altered landscape of online instruction among COVID-19 discomfiting.  But for those who cannot scale the suddenly heightened obstacle of the digital divide will have deep implications, not just for them but for our society as well.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar