Midway through Spring semester 2020, in response to the rapidly-spreading and still mysterious Covid-19, we abruptly switched our mode of instruction for our traditional, face-to-face classes into an online-only format. We remained online-only throughout the Summer. This Fall, we moved to a hybrid format called Learn from Anywhere (LfA), through which students were able to take classes either remotely or in-person. All throughout, I’ve maintained one single, consistent policy regarding students and cameras: they are not a requirement for remote learners.
As the instructor, I’m always in “camera on” mode when I’m teaching a class or in office hours. That’s important for many reasons — it enables me to convey emotion and body language. It lets me whip up the occasional “back-of-the-envelope” graph to demonstrate a point. It also enables lip-reading, which can be especially important for an audience of non-native English listeners. For a Professor/ Instructor /Tutor/ Facilitator using Zoom, cameras should be required, for several valid pedagogical reasons. Furthermore, staying ‘camera on’ is actually easier in some ways for the presenter, as that person does not have to maintain any sort of camera-ready ‘resting face’ for extended time periods.
However, I don’t think that a ‘camera on’ requirement should extend to all of the meeting participants. For meeting attendees, to include students in a class or seminar, the virtual meeting experience can be significantly more fruitful when the burden of needing to consider one’s “Zoomside manner” is eliminated. Minus that distraction and hassle, an attendee can focus more on absorbing everything else that’s going on.
Today, my experience with a completely informal, socially-minded video call reminded me why this policy is so essential for classrooms.
This morning, to celebrate New Year’s Day, my parents organized a Zoom call involving each of their four grown children (ages 37 to 42) and their five grandchildren (ages 9 months to 9 years). It was a convenient, inexpensive, and appropriately socially-distanced way for everyone to catch up and exchange some “Auld Lang Syne” to ring in 2021. It had just the right level of chaos, general interaction, and spontaneous outbursts that one might expect from a call involving several very young kids. In short, it was wonderful.
Midway through the call, my Dad mentioned something about some sort of a face I was making. I have no idea what it was — maybe I was getting ready to say something, maybe I was frustrated that my daughter (the elder stateswoman among the grandkids) was resisting my efforts to put her on camera, or maybe I was simply…resting while someone else was talking, and thinking about what to make for breakfast. Regardless of the cause (or lack thereof?) for the expression, I was now self-conscious of how I was appearing on the call.
From that time on, I stayed off-camera throughout this virtual meet-up, except for the times when I was speaking. Even through I hadn’t put much though into my on-camera appearance prior to that comment, this made the rest of the call more relaxing, as I would have otherwise been more focused on my own facial expressions than on the “around-the-horn” updates from our geographically-dispersed family.
This experience reminded me of why I haven’t enforced — and don’t plan to enforce — a “camera on” policy in my classes. This morning’s call had to have been the most relaxing of all possible settings — it was a purely social occasion, held on a holiday, and the group consisted entirely of immediate family members, their spouses, and their kids. There was no ostensible pressure. This was not a performance, nor a tryout, nor a professional setting in any sense. Yet, despite all those things, my facial expression sent the wrong signal (and I’m actually grateful that it was pointed out, as I was otherwise unaware. A less-familiar/less-candid group would have noted it, but without sharing the observation with me). The experience also made me more empathetic towards my students, many of whom have become remote learners due to the pandemic.
In our faculty meetings since the modality switch, an oft-expressed lament is that the “students aren’t turning on their webcams” (as evidence that said meetings occur in an irony-free zone, this is sometimes brought up by faculty members whose cameras are not on even as they’re saying this, or are turned off immediately afterwards). Two of the most common supporting arguments for a webcam requirement are these:
(1) “But how do you know that your students aren’t doing something else?!? They could be folding laundry, watching a TV show, or making an omelette!”
(2) “But in real life, students aren’t hiding. They’re showing their faces in the classroom.”
Regarding argument #1, I’ll concede that logically, this point is unassailable. In a physical, in-person classroom, you can be certain that the students are actually present (assuming you or your TA takes roll in a way that doesn’t allow attendance-by-proxy). However, you can’t always be sure of much else beyond that.
Students can daydream, they can text when we’re not looking (and sometimes, even when we are!), and they *could* be surfing the web even when they appear to be taking notes on their laptops. That’s not necessarily because we are doing something wrong, or because they’re doing something wrong. Our students are human, and they’re prone to distraction sometimes.
Guess what? So are we. I’d be curious to see how a random sample of faculty members would fare if held captive for 90 minutes, let alone 150 minutes, in any lecture setting. How many of us would go that whole time without checking our phones, re-itemizing our grocery lists, or even just briefly drifting off to our ‘happy place’? In an online setting, students can of course take even greater liberties, but since the classes are recorded, they can revisit content as needed. If they miss the content the first time through, AND don’t bother to watch the recording? That’s their problem, and the deficiency should be reflected on a future quiz or assignment.
As for argument #2, these situations are actually very different.
In an in-person setting, yes, everyone is visible to everyone else, but not in a way that’s parallel to having a camera just inches from each of their faces. In a large, in-person faculty meeting, I can sit in my seat, doodling contentedly while listening to, and mostly absorbing, all of the content being disseminated and/or debated. Of course, I’m not physically invisible; however, thankfully, the entire group is not privy to each of my facial expressions. Likewise, a student in a physical classroom experiences something similar — while they can obviously be seen by everyone else, they simultaneously have a certain degree of space from the curious, prying eyes of others. Short of some truly awkward scenario that would likely require an intervention, no one is going to approach any student from just inches away and observe every facial tic and unspoken reaction throughout the lecture. A self-conscious student can even make a seating choice that optimizes this freedom.
In Zoom, there is no “back of the room”, eagle-eye seat to take. Any meeting participant with a webcam on is subject to the scrutiny of anyone else in the meeting. Looking away, looking down, cracking one’s neck, rolling one’s eyes, or having a quick chuckle while remembering something hysterical that a friend said earlier that day are no the longer fleeting, forgettable moments that they have been (and should be!)
When a student in a virtual classroom can forget about his or her ‘virtual face’ and instead concentrate on absorbing the content and concepts from the slides, the chat discussion, and the speaker’s words, the remote learning experience can more seamlessly replicate the in-person learning process that was disrupted by the pandemic.
I’ve seen other arguments for a ‘cameras optional’ policy. Personally, I think the issues of in-home privacy and equity are a little bit overblown (a blank white wall, or a virtual Zoom background, would look pretty similar in a tenement as it would in a mansion — and they’re equally easy to arrange).
For me, it simply comes down to this — maintaining one’s ‘camera face’ for extended periods of time, is draining. It diverts students’ attention and energy away from the most important aspects of the live classroom environment. As proof of this, any skeptic just needs to observe the way he or she feels after being able to go ‘camera off’ following a long period of ‘camera on.’
Even in faculty meetings, in which the Dean encourages us to turn our cameras on to make things warmer/more personable (a totally reasonable thing to ask, and yes, it is nice to see everyone’s mugs) many of us do so for the first 15-30 minutes of the meeting, before going into ‘camera off’ mode for the remainder of the session (which is an equally reasonable response).
Some faculty members might choose to ask the same of their students. Others might require students to turn cameras on only during discussion sessions, student-led presentations, or other designated periods. The specific rules for each classroom are set by each faculty member, and I am grateful that we have that leeway. As long we do, I will continue to exercise a ‘cameras optional’ policy for my students, and will avail myself of the same option when I’m in large meetings, or even when I’m in small meetings but not speaking.
GoodWaveData 