Welcome Back! We Are Social Work Students and Instructors in a Virtual World

by Stephen P. Cummings, MSW, ACSW, LISW

     By the time you read this, it’s fall, and school has started, somehow. As I write this, it’s summertime, and plans are still being worked on. I’d love to be where you are now. At least you know what’s going on.

    If you are a social work student, you may remember last fall. (It feels so long ago.) Sometime in March, you received a series of messages from your institution informing you that spring semester plans were changing out of an “abundance of caution.” Maybe your college added a few extra days to your spring break, then more days, then a message that you would be completing your coursework using distance technology. Your classes were scuttled into the virtual classroom.

    If you’re an instructor, you may recall the mounting concerns about the pandemic during the spring semester, but it was hard to focus on details because your course was being moved into a virtual space. If you were fortunate to have some background in distance education technology, this transition was somewhat painless. However, the transition was unplanned, and your vision of the class was upended.

    If you’re a field instructor, you may have had to reconcile that your field student would need to wrap up early. Your fall social work student started contacting you, asking if the placement they worked hard to establish, is still in place. You say you aren’t sure. Could a virtual practicum even work, if it came to that? What precedent is there? Hard decisions started to appear on the horizon.

    If you’ve read my column, you probably know that I’m a believer in the implementation of technology in education. Of course, I don’t advocate the use of tech in all spaces and in all ways. I administrate the online program at my institution’s social work school and love teaching online. I’m happy to work in a space that’s “both/and.” I continue to teach both in the virtual classroom, and the so called In Real Life (IRL) space. I also love the so-called traditional classroom, that place of desks, dry erase boards, and overhead projectors. In every social work class, I use some form of educational technology—my goal is to be thoughtful and intentional. I intend to make the learning space meaningful for everyone. Personally, I’ve been grateful for the infrastructure we’ve been able to access. Had this crisis hit us even 10 years ago, we’d be making harder choices about how we create learning opportunities for students.

    So, as we students and faculty return to the classroom this fall, I’m reflecting on a couple of misconceptions about the virtual classroom.

Online education is not strictly utilitarian.

    During the summer, at least one administrator (at a Midwest university with which I’m familiar) asserted that students should return to campus this fall because students are seeking the “real campus experience.” If they wanted to take online courses, “they’d just go to an online school.” To me, the message was clear: online education is inferior, however useful it was in carrying out the remainder of the previous semester. This is an unfair statement, and it’s not backed up by the actual student experiences.

    The spring semester’s massive shift to the online environment was reactive. Students and teachers were overwhelmed and under-prepared. Now, forget moving from in-person to online: in the past, I’ve been asked to move my entire class to another classroom down the hall. That was enough to throw me off. Moving courses entirely to the online environment, without meaningful planning and preparation, was more equivalent to asking everyone mid-class to drop everything and finish the semester aboard Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket. Completely unprecedented and untested, of course a large swath of students and instructors wanted to scrub the mission.

    We’re now deep into the summer. It would be nice to say that we’ve been given more time to prepare for the fall. Yet, this isn’t what happened. A handful of programs have declared their plans, either online or some version of hybrid, or in-person. A majority of programs are still working out the fall details. Again, by the time you read this, there’s likely some idea about what’s expected this semester, and you know how your courses are being offered. Maybe things are changing again. Perhaps this is inevitable. The number of new coronovirus cases is rising again; yet, campuses are planning some form of re-opening.

    I’m prepping courses that have, per my institution’s expectations, some form of in-person experience. I’m told I need to have approximately 50% of my class “in-person.” This means I’ll be using educational technology to deliver half this course in some way outside that physical classroom. Some of my students are living in campus dormitories, while others are off campus. The group is on diverse plans of study toward multiple degrees. Throughout my planning, I need to be conscientious of how my students are affected by online course delivery. Will they have sufficient broadband access? Will they have sufficient privacy?

    This leads me to the second assumption.     

Taking online courses is not a “do anywhere” solution.

    Perhaps one of the biggest complaints from the spring was the over-reliance on online education as a patchwork solution. And it was. I am grateful that we had these tools available in a pinch. Consider what things would have looked like 20 years ago. I was in my MSW program in the year 2000. One of my professors built a makeshift course management system on his own, using a Geocities platform. The URL listed in the syllabus looked like a small paragraph of dashes, dots, and random letters. And it worked! Sort of. Students in class had asynchronous discussion boards. We uploaded article drafts with each other and worked in groups outside of class.

    Could the whole class be delivered that way? Absolutely not. We have so many applications now. We complain about Zoom, but imagine having to dig through the endless subdirectories of the old Microsoft NetMeeting platform. We may struggle with setting up student groups in Canva, but forget about how Yahoo! Groups was the place to go for online group discussions 20 years ago.

    The tools have improved. Yet, it’s important to be mindful of the student’s changing situation. As I prepare for this fall, I need to acknowledge that students may not want to be in the classroom, or have options if they cannot make it (for example, if they start exhibiting symptoms of COVID-19 and don’t want to risk exposing others). The worsening pandemic could be putting pressure on students to engage in multiple roles—they may need to be at home more with their families, or work different shifts to make up income loss from unemployment. As I prepare to teach this fall, it is absolutely important to consider what students are going through and be flexible. How can I use the classroom technology to be most beneficial to students?

    This discussion is particularly important for international students. Over the summer, the federal government announced a plan to require international students attending programs in the United States to return to their home countries if their programs were going to an online-only model. This was later retracted to allow students to remain in the United States, after all. I imagine the central concept of this announcement was centered on the fallacy that online courses could be taken anywhere.

    Please. This entire plan was xenophobic, anxiety-inducing, and completely devalued the right of the institutions and their faculty to work in the best interests of their students. I pictured my students, uprooted from their lives and returned home, waking up at 4:30 a.m. to connect to my class.

    So, from a social work perspective, I give these points of consideration as we return to school this fall.

Instructors and students: start with taking care of yourself.

    Yes, we will get past this pandemic. I don’t know what life will look like when we do, and I know the world will look different, but the “new normal” will have elements of the old one: face-to-face conversations, in-person office hours, informal gatherings. In the meantime, to every extent we can, do not put yourself at undue risks.

    Use technology purposefully and mindfully. I encourage instructors to work with their students. Whether online, in some hybrid fashion, or in person, anxiety is high. Fear of the future is real. As I progress through my plans for the fall, I keep checking myself. Does this plan focus on the student’s learning, or my desire to gate-keep? Do the web objects I’m using (a link to a podcast, or a short video) truly enhance the learning experience? And do students have the tools, and the time, to access the objects I’m including?

Seek support from your friends and colleagues in the field.

    Check out resources for education and technology, like Professor Laurel Hitchcock’s blog Teaching & Learning in Social Work (https://www.laureliversonhitchcock.org/), which includes recent posts on working from home and volunteering during COVID-19. These are valuable resources for instructors and students. Take a moment to read the University at Buffalo’s recent post, “Delivering Remote Education in Place of Seated Education: What and How” (http://socialwork.buffalo.edu/resources/delivering-remote-education-in-place-of-seated-education-what-how.html).

Stephen P. Cummings, MSW, ACSW, LISW, is a clinical assistant professor at the University of Iowa School of Social Work, where he is the administrator for distance education.