The Paradox of Remote Learning

Do you remember where you were when you received the news, that heartbreaking notification some claimed would sound the death knell for higher education, that the college had officially decided to transition to remote learning for spring term?

I do. I was with a friend, shut up inside his New York apartment, watching some tacky foreign film on Netflix, doing what can only be described as languishing. We knew it was coming, of course; anyone who said at this point they believed classes would be held normally the following term was in denial (and I count myself among these pitiful few). Yet this premonition, subconscious or otherwise, that what would come to pass was by then inevitable, did not in the slightest soften the blow when the words were staring up at me from my phone, terribly concrete. We then did what any good Dartmouth student might be expected to do when he finds his current situation unbearable and did our best to not dwell on the consequences we expected.

Traveling home, I found myself thinking not of the uneventful spring break that awaited me nor of the risk of contracting coronavirus while flying out of a Laguardia, but of the ramifications this decision had on the coming term. Too busy thinking of the friends and events I’d miss while watching the flowers bloom with my family in a tiny dairy-farming town instead of with my peers in the tiny college town I had grown to love over the past two terms, I neglected entirely to prepare myself for the horrible reality that comprised the learning portion of remote learning until I found myself confronted with it directly during my first Zoom meeting. 

It was a disaster, and anyone could have predicted that had they spared even the smallest amount of time to think about it. My professors, outstanding academics, and giants within their own fields, bless their hearts, took weeks to adjust to instructing over virtual platforms, and figure out exactly what the hell they were doing. I do not blame them in the slightest; I myself more often find technology a bane rather than a boon, ever since I forsook STEM my sophomore year of high school to spite my pre-algebra teacher. Still, my sympathy for their situation did not ease the difficulty I had in keeping up with my courses; it is, after all, a challenge to know what I am supposed to be doing if the professor herself doesn’t know. And so we spent many weeks, in some courses, up to the first five, wrestling with Zoom and Canvas and fighting to find a rhythm until we eventually settled into a dazed and melancholy pattern of clicking on boxes and staring into webcams.

Whenever someone would ask me, therefore, what I thought of my classes, I would immediately begin to complain about the frustration I had with Canvas, the stress-inducing floods of emails that dwarfed even the regular torrent of list-serve spam, the long hours spent on zoom meetings that did not fill my head with knowledge so much as a dull and persistent ache. “This,” I would say to them, “is online learning, and it is unbearable. If only we were on campus, then maybe I could actually get something out of my classes.” But then one day, a friend replied, “No, I mean, what do you think of the course material?”

It was only then that I realized that I had been so busy lodging complaints against the format of online courses that I had entirely forgotten to consider how the material itself, and my understanding of it, was affected by the distance. As we discussed, we came to the unsettling conclusion that, though distance learning was a nuisance, the courses themselves felt no less enriching than we imagined they would have on-campus; or, perhaps more accurately, we imagined that taking the courses in person would offer no less shallow an overview than the one we now received and felt was inadequate. Granted, I may have benefited from the aesthetic of Sanborn when writing a poem for my creative writing course, and I would gain a deeper understanding of the material of my philosophy course had I been able to discuss it with my peers as I ran into them on campus, but these are all supplementary perks; they are not a part of the course itself. 

The courses my friend and I had elected to take this term are not indicative of the entire registry Dartmouth offers. I have taken some fascinating and challenging ones that I enjoyed thoroughly, and we had both decided to take a couple of layup classes to fulfill distributive requirements this term. Yet is it not troubling to learn that our dissatisfaction with the quality of our education came not from the fact that we had to engage with the material remotely but from the simple truth that the courses were unremarkable? It seemed to me that, if virtual platforms seemed obstructive yet the dullness of the course remained unhindered, perhaps higher education has taken for granted in-person instruction, and, in many cases, neglected to take advantage of it in the first place.

I reached out to a couple of other students, partly out of curiosity, and partly to reassure myself that this odd paradox, that the experience of a class remained unchanged in spite of the online format, was merely the fault of my particular course load. Kevin Larkin, a ’22 taking three Engineering and one Chemistry course, had this to say about remote learning: “Classes are going pretty well, but for whatever reasons it feels like I am spending more of my time on classwork. I’m pretty sure I have more time to really commit to understanding the material in the one or two classes that I genuinely care about.” He did not mention that the new format hindered his ability to learn effectively, only, “the hiccups I experience with [Chem]26 are mostly to do with the difficulty of the content.” Yet the model for the course, “mostly semi-self-paced textbook readings,” seems mostly unaffected.

Jesse Ferraioli, ’23 taking a mix of humanities and STEM courses, said, “All of my courses are very effective in an online format, and the workload is less in all of them. None are really more compatible [than any other], but my seminar-based philosophy class sometimes feels strange to try to have a seminar-based discussion over Zoom.” When asked how she feels the online courses compare to their in-person counterparts, she said, “The quality is comparable.”

Personally, I am not reassured to hear that the quality of courses has remained unchanged in the transition to online classes. I know for a fact that remote learning has introduced challenges to both instructors and students alike. Why, then, do some students feel that their relationship with course material is business as usual? Are all of the benefits of on-site learning found outside the classroom? Has higher education always been a farce, and it has only taken a global catastrophe to reveal it as such? Regardless, I look forward to the day I am permitted to return to campus, when hopefully we will not take for granted the days we pass together, instead of over Zoom, and will leave it to the reader to draw conclusions.