Lights, Camera, Teach!: Online Teaching & Faculty Professional Development Challenges

Lights, Camera, Teach!

Online Teaching & Faculty Professional Development Challenges

The Covid-19 caused shut down of educational institutions and the subsequent switch to online education have raised the bars across the Globe for teachers. This apparently transitory fully online mode of delivery has changed the equations and parameters in terms of what the faculty members of Higher education institutions have been generally doing so far. This upending of the performance modes and delivery methods have pushed the faculty all over simultaneously into panic mode and preparation frenzy, obviously running the risk of preparing in a panic mode too! Though one can comfort oneself with the reassuring thought that this too will pass, what lies on the other side of COVID 19 is a worrying concern, if we are not prepared for the so called New Normal. Because what lies on the other side of the current crisis-mode –teaching will be a Normal in which the students and learning experiences have undergone a sea change. The faculty of institutions of Higher Education need to ready themselves to greet the New Normal and the question is how and how quick.

All the challenges the faculties confront now as part of the Covid 19 made crossovers should be taken as, to use a truism, opportunities for Professional Development. But opportunities which are not merely faculty choices but opportunities to be mandatorily grabbed by the authorities, to push for a  partial rediscovery of the wheel of Teaching.  Rather than let the teachers loose themselves into the den of the online challenges, the bodies concerned- UGC Human Resource Development Centres (HRDCs), State Higher Education Councils (HECs) and other related bodies at Institution, University levels and Govt. levels should put themselves on a mission mode to earnestly push the professional development of the faculties in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This is no stroll in the park as the online teaching/learning space is a vast digital territory without borders and policed by all! A look at the challenges faced by the faculties of the HEIs will help prescribe the training regimen too. This new regimen of Professional development for faculty must be framed with serious intent to not just tackle the real New Normals, but also to address the lacunae which have been prevailing in the field of teaching in the HEIs for long.

The Audience Factor:
The first challenge for the Faculty of HEI right now is related to the public scrutiny they have to face through their sessions. When the sessions are aired live or even recorded, there is a whole gamut of people who may watch these classes and judge. In fact, though this is a reality as evidenced in the trolls and videos which surfaced recently in the social media, it is the possibility of this spectacle that engenders diffidence among the teachers. These potential judgments and feedback will range from the most professional inputs to the worst insipid trolls. In Kerala there was an incident in which a teacher who performed a lesson for the Very Young Learner category was trolled and the authorities swung to action booking them. This was obviously throwing a ring of protection to the new policy of online education.

But this scaffolding can’t last forever and for effectiveness and independence, the confidence levels of the faculty need to be fortified. Equipping the teachers to face healthy trolls like any feedback must be part of the system ( and to ignore the unhealthy ones too!). The Teachers are to shape themselves and their classes through smithy of stronger fires and emerge stable and effective. They need to develop the capacity to let their classes be observed and commented upon. More than improving merely the technical skills (which is where much of the emphasis is being put right now), the system should work equally on the emotional front too. The teacher-as-a-performer element comes to the fore here. Rather than a restricted, registered, admitted, familiar audience, the teacher can be made to be ready for a wider, unfamiliar, unregistered group too. The fear of a beginner on podium seems to bug some of the even experienced faculty when confronted with such a scenario. That explains why the faculty needs to trained in the art of self belief and the raw need to have faith in whatever they are planning to deliver. You can’t always play street cricket wondering if Sachin will come, watch and judge! This is a very elemental dread. But this needs to be addressed. One should find reasons to be delighted with the fact that Sachin watching will be an honour and that won’t take anything away from what she or he does at that level. Simply because the play was not designed to meet a Sachin’s quality benchmark! The Faculty of Higher Education should be taken back to the basics here. Since the faculty of HEI are fundamentally an untrained lot, they must (be made to) work on this aspect. The training regimen prescribed must address this to firm up the self belief of the faculty.

The Space Factor:
Deeply interlinked to the audience element is the space factor. The space of the classrooms and lecture halls inside the space called Campus is a kind of walled community. Like the gated villas of the realtors’ market, this is a gated space, with all the emotional and domestic connotations the expression drags in. There is a sense of privacy involved, a feel of belongingness, a hard to explain category of safety too in this gated community. Before the advent of forced online delivery of content, all the above said features of an educational environment were taken for granted.

Now out of the Covid blues, the world around seems to funnily ask, ‘why can’t they teach on the road if they can teach in a room’! As if all poets were performance poets. Be that as it may, moving to the solution end, it is important now to ready the faculty to take this online bull too by the horns. For one, the Faculty members need to get back to the drawing boards. This is organically linked to the self confidence part and it is not easy to be abruptly ready for the road. One way to address this is to train them to be less self aware oneself. Perhaps it is time that the film actors spoke to teachers, regarding how they manage it while being shot with onlookers around!  There could be solutions like making a statement regarding to whom the show is meant or making the classes available only to the registered participants. But the real solution lies in training the faculty in being less self aware while performing and that way making them more self confident.

The Isolation Factor:
Many suggest that there is nothing out of the ordinary in online teaching and direct the teachers to go and flip their sessions. This simple Go-online ho! shout is taken with deserving lack of conviction by the faculty. Talking to a camera and doing the same in front of a specific target group present physically are entirely different ball games. In one way the online lessons keep you disconnected from those you used to be physically connected face to face. This isolation at one end and the potential possibility that one may be connected to many who need not necessarily be the target audience at the other end, complicate the situation for the teachers. The out-of water fish, transferred to  virtual waters overnight, is expected to swim with ease! Only gradual practice with excellent regimen of training will render a faculty to be shoot-ready and normal in the absence of students and face to face with devices. The training menu should address the postures before camera, lighting, movements, dressing and the like, not to mention the technical and non technical aspects related to handling gadgets that are excluded here.

The Comparison Factor:

Another irritant making its entry with online teaching is the acute awareness on the part of the teachers that they do not measure up against the quality scale of the sessions by the professors of the reputed universities they encounter online. Unlike the public who happen to gaze at their sessions, this is the case of the faculty themselves gazing at their big counterparts’ sessions. The quality of what they say and present put thoughts of insecurity into our faculty’s minds. This works on the teachers in both ways. While some see an opportunity to pick models here, many find it intimidating and feel that the best from them won’t be good enough to impress. To address this issue, the training regimen should again work on the authenticity skills of the faculty. This necessitates training faculty in learning who they are in the first place. Comparison is to be often  treated as a threat to performance as it tends to pull us down and lead to self underrating. They need to be trained to draw a line between differentiation and integration while fixing ones identity.

The Student Awareness Factor:

A faculty the other day brought a related interesting facet. The students are into online learning and out of curiosity they have started browsing for other available sessions on the web. This googling for online classes and exchange of sessions among them have also led them to quality sessions by brilliant faculty, home and abroad. This in turn is putting more pressure on the faculty as they are aware of the quality to which the students have been exposed. Thus the pressure to raise their bar of teaching mounts further.  The supposed quality of teaching the students are/may be exposed to becomes the new benchmark of the faculty to go for. The solution to this too lies in what was discussed above: make the faculty capable of trusting ones capacity, scholarship and skills while being able to appreciate and model oneself on better performances. This amounts to being able to effect a subtle balance between strengths and limitations. The faculty should be made capable of learning from better peers rather than shying away from them. Also, any faculty member trained to interact with the students will be able to draw from the said exposure of students to quality sessions in a constructive fashion and use the same to feed the their own performance!

The Self Observation Challenge:

Finally the faculty are watching themselves through recording and the camera views!  When you watch yourself perform, there could be multiple outcomes, starting from self feedback of the instant kind to heightened levels of self awareness. Though it is possible to turn the view off and not watch one self, often one can’t help watching how one looks and delivers! The being lost in the job feel, fully connected to the target audience, is damaged here. The frame restricts. The frame within which the class is caught, becomes a frame of disconnection, simultaneously catalyzing a feeling being caught in the crowd. Practice, they say, will sort this out. Hopefully! But this problem too needs to be factored in while drawing up the Faculty upskilling agenda.  As many of these are intertwined, the training suggested earlier regarding the audience and space related issues will help the faculty tame this too.

The Tech Challenge:

This challenge thrown at the faculty by the abrupt switch to online education has been placed at the bottom for two reasons.  Firstly, from the very beginning there has been an 'undue' stress  on the technology part while debating the problems encountered by teachers as they teach online ('due', but tech skill up-gradation is easier, I feel, than the other issues highlighted here!). Though this is a core concern, the teachers have been making do with whatever technology skills and resources they possessed before this mandatory move to online teaching. But that always happened in classrooms and campuses. Though the current scenario warrants a huge spike in their skills and awareness, equal or more emphasis is needed in rewiring the attitudes and working for emotional fortitude.

Since online sessions are to be delivered to students on daily basis, the  technology skills of the faculty should be excellent. From their familiar PPT mode, the teachers need to be more aware about plethora of online tools and media, about creating videos, editing and uploading it, about inserting subtitles and texts. Even many of those who knew it only ‘knew’ it and have never ‘done’ it often. As a result when they have started doing their learning, obviously problems arise. This has caused a huge amount of learning now. The teacher professional development has picked up tremendously and lion’s share of this is self driven.  New web sites, new tools, apps, workshops and online seminars are found and shared. A good amount of upskilling has already happened in this direction. That brings to the second reason: the amount of work the teachers are made to perform technologically definitely calls for professional technical assistance. There is a limit to what a teacher can single handedly do. Hence rather than trying to push the technical skills of the teachers too high within such a limited time, the colleges should make available a technical assistant who can support the teacher. All those who swear by Coursera and the like need to know how those classes are designed and delivered, how much professional technological expertise is spent on those world class sessions.

The switch from real to virtual is no easy transition. It may be easy to talk of the advent of the tech era and ubiquity of cell phones. But all these tech penetrations have come to us slow and it took decades to be what it is today.  These devices, even today, are an ally or an adjunct, not the substitute! Pushing  online mode too far without addressing the concerns of mind first and then of technology will not serve the cause of education even during a Covid crisis. This is the time to flip the crisis to an opportunity, to institute a meaningful training regimen and facilities for the faculty members so that the post-Covid scenario will be truly New Normal with upskilled workforce, upgraded facilities with rewired aptitudes. This will enable the academia to switch confidently to a truly blended mode for which the teachers are professionally made ready.

Babu. P. K., PhD.

Principal,

Al Shifa College of Arts & Science,

Perinthalmanna, Kerala.

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