Twas the Monday before March break when the TDSB posted the key concerns for e-learning revealed in a survey they hosted! They received approximately 6,000 comments from parents/guardians, students, and secondary school teachers explaining why they do not support the Government of Ontario’s plan for mandatory e-learning. The key concerns were:

• Lack of face-to-face interaction necessary for learning.
• Inability to meet the needs of all learners.
• Inequitable access to technology.
• Online format of instruction.
• Lack of information and research evidence.

Well, it’s funny how the world works because that very Friday the 13^th – an ominous dark windy day – the provincial government decided to close all publicly-funded schools in Ontario from March 14^th to April 5th amid growing concerns over the spread of COVID-19. That meant that schools would be out for 2 more weeks after March Break. Many students already did not show up on the day of that announcement. Uneasiness was brewing over stories in the news. The WHO declared the virus a pandemic (an outbreak of a disease that occurs over a wide geographic area and affects an exceptionally high proportion of the population) Students in my calculus class were startled to find out that Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson contracted the virus. Developments were happening one right after the other. One could say talk of the virus was a pandemic in and of itself. I would have been daft not to tie a unit on exponential relations back to the spread of the virus.

It was an uneasy March Break. Many trips were cancelled. People stayed home glued to the news for the latest developments. On March 24^th, the premier announced that school buildings would remain closed after April 5^th. Students and teachers would have to resort to online means of instruction. On March 31^st, the Ontario government announced that due to the continued spread of COVID-19, all publicly-funded schools in Ontario would remain closed to students until May 4th. March already felt like an eternity with some Twitter users comparing it to a full year. What would April look like? Confusion and worry grew with each day. On April 14^th, the Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced that the province’s public schools would not be reopening on May 4th after all. Today, it’s looking more and more like the entire school year will be cancelled. EQAO assessments and OSSLTs for the remainder of the year are canceled. The 40 hours of community involvement necessary for secondary students to graduate has also been suspended.

Despite the key concerns for e-learning, many learners across the world now have no choice but to embrace it in order to continue their education. In the world of e-learning, one platform has emerged to rule them all.

Zoom

Zoom is a videoconferencing service founded in 2011 by Eric S. Yuan. The number of daily users jumped from ten million last December to two hundred million in late March. This has made Zoom the fastest-growing videoconferencing service in the world. Many businesses are using it for meetings, many extending families are using it to chat, and many schools are using it to teach lessons. Zoom stands out from Skype, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, and other videoconferencing tools because there is no need to log in with a username and password (great for ease of access, but not so great for security). There is also a unique active speaker mode in which the current speaker takes up the entire screen.

            Despite its current monopoly on e-learning, Zoom has also raised some eyebrows. On April 21^st, the YouTube channel Techquickie posted a video titled “Zoom is Getting BANNED.” The video goes over past security issues with Zoom that were fixed because of public outcry. Google, SpaceX, NASA, the Australian military, and the government of Taiwan forbid their people from using Zoom. The current concerns are:

• Weak encryption.
• Zoombombing, in which Internet trolls test random IDs to crash meetings whereupon they can play inappropriate video/audio.
• Heavy routing of traffic through servers in China (China’s government does not need a warrant to see what’s happening on servers located inside the country at any given time, raising fears from the privacy conscious).

TikTok

TikTok, a video-sharing social networking app, has emerged as a medium for learners and educators to express their rushed e-learning experience. From office hours on Club Penguin to an instructor comforting his baby during a lesson, there are plenty of endearing parts to e-learning. Being in the comfort of one’s home presents opportunities. Ms. Brittney Lynch, a grade 9 Algebra I teacher in Southeast DC, for example, asked students to show and tell an object in their home that resembles a parabola. Teaching and learning from home may also get too personal. Arguments with family members, falling asleep on webcam, fire alarms going off, and loud TVs can be easily be shared to an entire classroom.

TikTok posts also highlight the not so fun parts of e-learning. Learners don’t like long assignments on a computer, they don’t like receiving a barrage of emails, and they don’t like logging into several platforms. Teachers are unaware that they are probably assigning more work than normal and that their work requires more screen time than a traditional course. Notifications cause anxiety. Responding to the posts of others for the sake of creating a community of inquiry feels forced. I think teachers in a school should stick to the same learning platform and adopt the same style of posting. There should also be a limit to the number of emails/notifications a teacher can send per course.

Students share TikToks about missing their friends and becoming stir-crazy with family members. It has become harder for them to complete even basic assignments because of their new confined way of living. They have difficulty being motivated and mustering up energy to compete work that may have been more feasible before the pandemic.

It can also be more difficult to manage a classroom while on videoconference. I’ve seen TikTok videos of students arguing during Zoom class as the instructor can only look on hopelessly, unsure of what to do next. Students are in the comfort of their homes whereas a classroom is the teacher’s domain. Is it a teacher’s place to stop a student from snacking during online class or to punish a student for talking to their family? Student attention is split between what’s happening on their screen versus what’s happening around them. From a student’s perspective, how does it feel when a teacher is telling you what to do while you are in the comfort of your home? If you can’t relax at home, where can you relax?

There are numerous TikTok videos of students giving tips on how to cheat. There’s almost no way for a teacher to know if students are in a group chat during an online assessment. Students can have another device to look up answers. I’ve seen a TikTok where a student simply inspected the page source on a Google Form quiz to display the solutions. Where there’s a will, there’s a way to cheat. Websites and apps that say they are for studying also walk a fine line between support and facilitating cheating. I wonder how they will be perceived by stakeholders in the future as e-learning becomes the new norm. Students can even advertise for cheating. On Kijiji, there are several ads by students looking for someone to take their online assessments for them.

e-Learning while Self-Isolating

What are the effects of social isolation on e-learners? Isolation is defined as a state or situation characterized by being physically separated from other people – intentional or not. In the Journal of Health Psychology, an article titled “Loneliness, self-isolation, their synergistic interaction, and mortality” by Beller and Wagner (2018) found that a higher level of social isolation usually produces higher levels of loneliness.

Hilary Brueck of Business Insider wrote a 2018 piece titled “We’re learning more about how social isolation damages your brain and body – here are the biggest effects.” Below are some excerpts that jumped out to me:

• The form of extreme self-exile has been linked to a host of debilitating health problems, like high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and smoking. 
• Being socially disconnected can also up your risk of developing high blood pressure or inflammation, and make people more aggressive. 
• There’s also budding evidence that socially isolated people are changing their brain chemistry in dangerous ways. One recent study in mice found that just two weeks of “social isolation stress” caused negative behavioral changes and shifts in their brain chemistry. 
• A group of German researchers revealed that connecting more with others can boost how people rate their own satisfaction with life.

If e-learners today are facing these changes, how can they be supported? My professors in teachers’ college allowed me to submit assignments past their deadlines because I felt mental block and fatigue. That helped, but I still felt a dark cloud over my head because assignments were still the same amount of work…and I still had to submit them.

This is a unique time where such a large group of people are doing almost everything from home. This is perhaps a reach, but maybe research on juvenile house arrest can shed some light on the effects of self-isolating on e-learners. “‘House Arrest’ or ‘Developmental Arrest?’ A Study of Youth Under House Arrest” in the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology by Chamiel and Walsh (2018) examines the experience of 14 adolescent boys under house arrest. Here is an excerpt from the findings:

An analysis of the youth’s interviews reveals two very different potential and actual experiences of house arrest. In the first case, the period of detention could be seen as a period of rethinking their behavior and way of life that led them to the situation, an opportunity to learn, creating an organized agenda, and strengthening contact with parents and family members. For this group, meaningful contact with a case worker enabled the forming of a therapeutic relationship in which they felt supported and which allowed them to work through their difficult feelings. The second case is characterized by a chaotic period of detention without a clear agenda and boundaries, experienced by the boys as a waste of time, without new learning and experience, with friction and quarrels with family members and supervisors, and feelings of loneliness and frustration from “missing out” on social contact. They are the boys who “burnt away half the day in sleep” (Alex) and, for whom, we would like to suggest the experience of house arrest can be a highly detrimental developmental experience or “developmental arrest.” It is important to note that for all the boys from both groups, the period of detention was experienced as a period of suffering and punishment but the findings suggest that the nature of the experience can vary significantly between individuals.

Conclusion

Although educators are trying their best to recreate classes online, I don’t think we can recreate authentic social interactions. School is a place not just for academic learning, but for social learning. If students are lacking face-to-face interactions with their peers, then they’re possibly being held back socially. Lack of social interaction can even reduce motivation to do academic work. It creates fatigue. If we continue to live at a distance, then we should anticipate an impact on student work.

When students finally return to school, how will they adjust? Will the hysteria of the previous months have a lasting effect on them? I think teachers and schools should not transition to business as usual when students finally do return. Students should have some time to talk about what happened and how they experienced it. Educators should also reteach students study habits. Self-regulation and time-management skills may have taken a toll after months of not being in a classroom. We should teach young people to remain level-headed in the face of adversity, instead of resorting to panic.

Back to the key concerns of e-learning, I think e-learning must consider the physical and mental heath of students. Though mental health is often addressed in formal administrative emails, I’m not sure what steps are actually being taken to adjust classes accordingly. A good start would be to design courses with minimal screen time.

__________________________________________

^{Subscribe for new episode notifications:}