Hidden sides of digital teaching

The silence and frequency of posts on this site has been a function of the bad health of my arm, shoulder and wrist. Already the abrupt digitalisation in spring had a go on it, but summer, varied activities and some nice lake swimming helped to avoid the worst. The spring course was work intensive but the student numbers were small, so most of energy went still to the course itself - recording lectures and student interaction.

The autumn teaching was very different and far more devastating on my shoulder and arm than spring for several reasons. While it was less work contents-wise (I gave only some lectures and seminars), it was very heavy in terms of teaching administration, most of which could essentially be done with someone without a PhD. In the following I would like to shortly rant on the hidden side of the Learning Management Systems (LMS) which, like many other digital and administrative obligations, the teaching faculty simply has to swallow - and sometimes pay with their arms and wrists. I say: every click counts, they consume time and muscles, and when we account for our work achievements, we never count how many hours we have spent on futile clicking in the mediocre IT-systems we wrestle with. And so you click away your days and elbows.

I am relatively old to digital teaching. I did my first 100% online course back in 2007 when WebCT still was the thing (long before it merged with Blackboard). It had its flaws and many of them are surely unknown to me as I do not need to engage in system maintenance. It relied heavily on Java and I even edited some parts of it in html - you could do otherwise too, but that gave me more flexibility. The course environment was surely not very light, neither did it have advanced accessibility features. The possibility to use it across platforms and devices was not a thing back then. Yet, the interface was extremely intuitive. The visual language corresponded to the general visual competence of the students. Setting up quizzes and tasks was easy - after a test run you would have discovered the errors in the quiz setup without problems, but they hardly ever occurred. That said, I seldom ran multiple choices or true/ false type of quizzes, because they do not reflect well the deeper learning objectives in humanities. And I drowned in correcting the open question assignments. Learning Management Systems offer very few automatic grading options for the type of knowledge we grade in humanities, but teaching in Estonian made this even worse: if you ask for one specific term from the lecture materials, the students can still theoretically present it to you as a grammatical verb, adjective or a noun in all its 14 singular case forms! The quizzes are really not made for agglutinative languages. I must have got something right, though, because I got Estonian E-learning Quality Award for that course.

KTH uses Canvas. It is an open-source LMS which can be run from the institution’s own servers and has certainly a multitude of virtues from the point of view of a system administrator. But it is unintuitive, old-fashioned, and most importantly, depends on local administrators on which functions and updates they run, while technical support is in forums and external pages. I’m not entirely sure, but I think Canvas is run in most if not all Swedish Universities. The fact that all teaching platforms need to be purchased through central contracts through lengthy and painful processes and that the updates or extensions to the existing products need to be either separately purchased or installed by someone on ground (in cloud-based services the updates come from the central developers), means that we did not really get any benefit of the impressive development that LMS-s have gone through this year. CANVAS’ flexibility is that of a fossilised mammoth and its interface old-fashioned and unintuitive, more like Windows 3.0 than the 21st century high-tech learning systems. If it is your first time to make a false/right type of quiz, odds are that you do it wrong. For students who have grown up with icon-based layouts of tablets, this is like yesterday.

But worst of all: the clicks. I knew already that automatic correction is not an option, so we tried to create quizzes and tools that had answer sheets already incorporated to them, so that students immediately found out what was the right answer. In this way the students’ learning did not suffer if we did not manage to check the quizzes quick enough, which we knew we would not be able to do. The quizzes would therefore be graded Pass/Fail - it is important that they do them and learn in the process. Nevertheless, there was no way to automatically mark them as ‘pass’ - you would still have to click through the tests. “Energy Systems in Society” that I was giving, is in fact two different courses with different codes, meaning that I had two different course environments and content had to be transferred from one to another and synched (they could not be joined for administrative reasons). All in all 90 students. Now imagine that you have one test that would take in average 5 clicks to grade. Already this one test is 450 grades plus at least 180 scrolls, but this does not include the clicks needed to come to the grading system and for double-checking stuff. When we are in the classroom, we have 8 joint lectures for the two sets of students - no clicks or scrolls included. Digitalisation of homework for these lectures last year brought ca 90-180 clicks per lecture last year. But full digitalisation became a clicking nightmare: 1 full lecture was replaced with 2-3 small videolectures with added tasks plus a reading comprehension exercise for which we decided to use an external tool Nearpod - in theory fully compatible with Canvas, in practice never included in our Canvas bundle, even when we asked for it. This means that we had in total 20 small films with tests that had to be clicked through for grading: roughly 20x90x5=9000 clicks. Plus hand-reporting results from Nearpod to Canvas, a great number of clicks and scrolls even here. Nice! But this is not all.

Unfortunately Canvas is a LMS that is mostly meant for blended learning, not full digital teaching. It’s compatibility with synchronous teaching is limited. Yes, you can embed a link to a Zoom session and hold the lecture and then even record it and even upload the recording. But here its functionality ends. It is not very useful for the kind of work we do and leads to a lot of handicraft and crazy clicking. We have four seminars where students have to submit assignments beforehand and then give peer feedback to each other in the class. Very classical setup. Except that these are two course codes - and we cannot ascribe peer review across courses. Then we need to divide the 90-people crowd into 5 seminar groups and that is easy with Canvas - it creates random groups. But once they submit their INDIVIDUAL assignments, it becomes complicated. You can not divide peer review tasks only within the selected seminar groups. Even worse, the random attribution of peer reviews is not compatible with the Breakup-rooms function on Zoom, because it does not form groups of three. It can assign the essay of A to X, Y and Z, whereas the essay of X will not be assigned to A, but K, L and P. So if you want to make them work in the break-out rooms, you would have to hand-attribute the essays. If everybody has 2-3 works to read, it makes 4-6 clicks per person (so ca 500 on average per seminar) plus endless scrolls back and forth though the list of 90 students. This is a humble estimate because in reality you would also want to know if the students have actually submitted their assignments and are likely to turn up for the class - and this is done in a different part of the system. It is easy to make a mistake, because you are yourself making up the groups and some names are very similar. Every time you assign a task to student, they get a notification: if you click wrong, they get many notifications, and you have no power over this function. Then you would need to program the breakout groups in Zoom or set them up manually according to the list that you’ve made. A real clicking spree that ends up with your elbow spitting fire. I used two different mouses and a mouse pad and a tablet with a pen, and yet it hurts. Do I need to say that I made mistakes?

This is only the easily quantifiable part of clicking and handicraft hidden in these softwares which could easily be automated. Perhaps Canvas has it but we don’t. It is even a possibility that the functionality is hidden somewhere and I couldn’t find it. After all, online teaching has been dominated by lack of time to slowly go through all the world’s tutorials and forums on one hand, and it is not an intuitive system on the other hand. If a person with 13 years of experience in multiple systems cannot find it, then the function s virtually non-existent, even if there is some hidden way to do it. Add here the requirements to make all materials accessible to those with hearing impairment and dyslexi, and very little energy is left over for the actual contents of the course. It is easy to add one small requirement to teachers from the central level, but I doubt that anybody has ever dimensioned the demands that editing machine-generated captions puts on teachers and the time it takes. I’m lucky to have experience with many online teaching platforms and caption generation from before, but what if this is your first course? And you had planned to give it person because that’s what the university leadership had decided, but now had to re-plan everything? Students who do not meat real teachers in flesh are more anxious than normal. The questions that they could ask informally in the break before the seminar, need now to be handled through E-mail. This is a lot of keyboard time. Such hidden clicking time is included in all platforms we use institutionally and they are many, partly doubling each other’s functions.

I’m lucky because I still get paid for those hours I spent on the courses and I get to go to the physiotherapist three times for free (not that it cures by now a chronic issue). But my elbow and shoulder spit fire and I haven’t published much and applied for a lots of funding which are the activities that decide whether or not I have a job in coming years. Not my ability to click well.