Image courtesy of Unsplash.
As we come close to the two year mark since the world shut down and turned to virtual interactions, it is important to think about what direction higher education intends to go as in-person learning begins to return. The recent snow storm that came to Connecticut on Jan. 29 sheds some light onto how adapted we have become to online learning and whether that’s a good thing. Rather than cancel classes, as would be expected in pre-pandemic times, classes were instead moved to remote learning for the week. “Forcing [remote learning] to happen in a time when things naturally slow down, I’m not so sure about that both on a human level and an ecological level,” says Professor of Education Paul Madden. “I think that using energy intensive means to overcome natural things has actually become an endemic, or a problem.”
While there are benefits of in-person learning and remote learning, it elucidates a larger opportunity at hand for Connecticut College: accessibility and reach to a larger audience. The accessibility aspect of remote learning can have great benefits for students as Madden has noticed in his remote classes and ultimately decided to keep it for his in-person classes. Rather than lecture in person, Madden posts his lectures on YouTube instead. “It’s been something that I have been interested in for a while from an accessibility standpoint,” Madden explains. “I have ADHD and auditory processing issues as well, and so for me the affordance of having my lectures recorded on YouTube is multifold. One, you can listen to it on YouTube at half speed, two-fold speed, whatever works for you. Also, it has closed captioning. For students who have challenges hearing or English is not their first language, it aids the process of accessing the content.”
For Professor of Government Maryanne Borrelli, greater accessibility means reaching out to more students beyond Connecticut College and even beyond our borders. When “we have different communities coming together and different life experiences, your classroom gets richer,” says Borrelli. “You can’t do that without the help of technology.” This semester, Professor Borrelli is teaching a remote class on Politics of Bureaucracy with Conn students and students from Ayeshi University in Ghana. “I just sat there thinking that we invested so much into this,” Borrelli explains after it was announced that Conn will return to in-person classes after three remote semesters. “Yes, there are problems with this. Yes, we haven’t gotten it down, and yes, it’s not the same, but there are resources here that we should really be thinking about more creatively. All this investment has been made, why would we walk away from that?”
It should be noted that Professor Borrelli is not the first to bring in people across the world with the help of technology here at Connecticut College. In fact, Professor of Slavic Studies and Director of the Toor Cummings Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts (CISLA), Andrea Lanoux beat modern remote learning to the punch by about 10 years when she taught a class with a professor and her students in Russia. “I started working with a colleague from Russia back in 2011 and we taught three courses together,” Lanoux says. “We called them networked courses and the class was called Russian and American Youth Cultures and we connected our classrooms in real time.” Lanoux continued the networked learning courses two more times in 2014 and then in 2015, calling the experience one of the “most exciting classes I have ever taught.”
From that experience, Lanoux recounts that she has “learned the power of this model: teaching live in real time with other students talking about how they see things and how they understand culture.” Once the pandemic hit, Lanoux continued internationally connecting with students from different cultures with two separate projects: The Summer and Winter Language Challenge and The Global COVID Project. The Global COVID Project in 2021 connected Connecticut College students with students from Ayeshi University, Morningside College at the Chinese University in Hong Kong, Ashesi University in India and The Higher School of Economics in Russia, in a collaborative research project to address the impacts of COVID-19 on various socio-economic factors. “These are three areas where I think it’s already the future. We are already doing it. And it’s just experimentation and innovation. What we haven’t done yet at Connecticut College is institutionalize any of these forms of learning.”
While the potential of what remote learning is capable of is intriguing when thinking about connecting with more students on a global level, there are still challenges that both Borrelli and Lanoux have had to face. One major problem that Borrelli touches upon is connectivity. “It’s not easy. There is a lot of patience that is involved. And patience comes into the technology and that is what you feel that you have the least control over.” For Lanoux, she spoke about the many challenges within the planning aspect of teaching with international classes which can be very time consuming. “It’s extremely time consuming to teach with a colleague in another culture. You just have to do a ton of work to figure out how to do this. There are institutional impediments on [the Russian professor’s] side. It’s like many other challenges, it’s just easier not to do it.” But for Lanoux, the end product truly made it worth it. “That is the potential: improve the quality of the Conn Coll education by imploing some of these network structures with partners and to sustain them. It has to go from the personal to the institutional commitment.”
Overall, in-person interactions as the foundation of learning is essential for Connecticut College as a residential college. “There is just no replacement for international travel,” Professor Lanoux emphasizes. “You have to go to the place—there’s no substitute for in-person learning.”
However, there is a lot of potential for connecting institutionally that could be used to further elevate the experience at Connecticut College. Professor Borrelli does not think that total remote learning is the answer, but she does think that we should “diversify our learning,” especially since technology is the future. “This is not just a teaching investment but also a learning investment. Your generation will be doing a lot more virtually. And virtual learning in terms of presentations and work is very different.” When asked how her remote class is going so far this semester Borelli responded, “Everyone who is participating in this, especially the students, all of us are pioneers. Pioneer is a really good term because you are kind of going out into this unmapped landscape. Everybody I feel has to be very patient in order for it to work because there are so many things that we did not anticipate.”
For now, we will just have to wait and see what the future holds for remote learning at Connecticut College.
