By: Anya Schiffrin

Halfway into the semester, it’s time to check in with our community and see how people are feeling about their courses. After all the Zoom training over the summer, many faculty weren’t sure how the fall would go. We spent weeks reading about how to teach online and then tearing up and rewriting our syllabi. How would we keep students engaged and treat everyone equally when folks are scattered around the world in different time zones? Should we cut up lectures into little pieces so they’d be more engaging? Tape them in advance? Go into breakout rooms several times per session? Whichever way you approach it, it was clear that teaching on Zoom would be much more work for students and faculty too.

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, I have gathered some thoughts from SIPA students and faculty about how it has turned out. Most seem to agree that the flexibility of teaching and learning online offers opportunities that were previously unavailable in the traditional classroom. Thanassis Cambanis, who teaches the course “Writing About War,” says that though “there are obvious down sides” to Zoom, “in some ways it’s been better — for instance, I’ve been able from the first session to bring everyone into the discussion, and it’s easier on Zoom to bring the less talkative students in and prevent the more charismatic and comfortable students from dominating discussion.” On this same note, Professor Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, who teaches “Politics of Policymaking,” writes “that the chat and breakroom features [of Zoom] offer more opportunities for discussion than my large lecture class would have normally afforded."

Moreover, some of us in the Columbia community even think Zoom learning can be fun. Professor Sarah Holloway, director of the management specialization, says, “I have enjoyed getting to know students up close on Zoom and I am finding Zoom to be a lot more intimate than you would think.” Professor Savita Bailur, who teaches an EPD/TMAC course called “Policy and Practices in Digital Development,” cites a number of further advantages to Zoom teaching, such as “students have different ways to be interactive…we are able to have speakers from around the world...we are able to really think about who could be excluded from technology because we ourselves are experiencing various connectivity issues or know others who are….”

Though most surveyed still acknowledge that Zoom learning and teaching is not the ideal, the semester is still going far better than expected. Allynn McInerney, a student in my Global Media course, reflected that while she “...had a certain feeling of dread as the semester approached... the willingness of my fellow students to engage and focus in online classes has made all of the difference. If you have a committed group of people on screen, then pandemic-forced Zoom works. None of us want this to be the norm...But this is our reality, and I am really encouraged by how people make the best they can out of a hard situation, showing up and doing the work it takes to make this as fulfilling an experience as possible.”

Similarly, Léa Allirajah, in her first semester in the Human Rights program, says that visiting speakers on Zoom are “providing global perspectives and experiences that I have never encountered before… with an online platform, geography is much less of a hurdle.”

It seems that our efforts to revamp our courses for the COVID-19/Zoom era have paid off.

To bolster my own small-scale research on this topic, Hazel May, the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at SIPA, shared with me the results of the course implementation survey, which is always carried out around the third week of the fall semester. This year, 75 percent of responses identified “the commencement” of courses “as very good or excellent” and 93 percent chose “good, very good or excellent.” Of these respondents, 84 percent are attending their courses remotely. As Professor Paola Valenti perfectly articulated, “Teaching is definitely more challenging this year, but I have to say it is also more rewarding… we are in this together.”

Anya Schiffrin is the Director of the Technology, Media, and Communications specialization at SIPA.