mental health

Are you exhausted? Zoomed out? As we say in critical incident stress management (CISM), “You are having a normal response to an abnormal situation.” This reflection is considering the faculty or administrator perspective on our current interpersonal reality. The student perspective is a separate writeup.

How could you have attended the same number of meetings in Normal World B.C. (Before COVID-19) and your schedule wasn’t nearly this exhausting? This is a matter that potentially affects only those of us privileged enough to be able to do at least two things: (1) continue doing our paid jobs, and yet (2) stay home and safe. For those of us in this virtual boat, many are realizing how attending the same number of meetings as in a usual week is way way way more exhausting when they happen via a video conferencing platform such as Zoom. There are many reasons, and here are three:

1. Perceptual mismatch

When you’re in a meeting, like back when we did that sort of thing together in the same space, you’d get a “read of the room.” It’s in our nature to do this. You’d scan the room, passively attending to details like, how are people feeling? What’s the mood or the vibe here today? Do folks seem to be on the same page? This is natural. In a video conference though? You are trying to read 25 rooms. You are. It’s in your nature. And you’re trying to do this while, ironically, ignoring the room you are literally in. That is not how perception works, which is the process through which we attach meaning to our sensory input in order to understand the social world. You’re trying to read all the rooms up on that screen, while ignoring the sensory information coming at you from within the room in which you are physically located, and that’s before you even engage with anybody. Speaking of the rest of the people:

2. Interpersonal intensity

When you’re in a room in Normal World B.C., you are not trying to maintain continuous eye contact with 25 people for an hour. In person, you can be in a group in shared space, completely engaged, attentive and present, and you’re still not maintaining eye contact with every single person at the same time. In a video conference, even looking down at a relevant piece of paper can be perceived as you checking out, no longer actively listening, or some other indicator assumed to be a lack of effort. 

3. High vulnerability and intimacy

While reading all the rooms and ignoring your own, and doing your best to maintain eye contact with everyone in a group continuously, you are also letting people read YOUR room. Your room right now is probably inside or outside the place you presently call home. That’s a level of vulnerability and intimacy greater than you signed up for when you began in this position, right? You didn’t plan on letting these people into your living room or your bedroom.

There’s Science Behind This!

The psychological and mental health effects of shifting nearly all of our interpersonal interactions into video conferencing is yet unstudied. What I’ve written in this piece is based on what we know to date about how the brain does its job. 

For more information on the perceptual burden you might be experiencing, look first at the process of “unconscious inference” known as perception itself. As we take in sensory information, through the process of sensation, our brain has to work with that input to produce something for us to understand and to which we then respond, through the process of perception. Reading 25 rooms while ignoring the sensory input from the very room you are in, makes this entire meaning-making process inherently more complex and likely burdensome. This is a traditional, bottom-up explanation of perception. 

• Brascamp, Jan, Philipp Sterzer, Randolph Blake, and Tomas Knapen. 2018. “Multistable Perception and the Role of the Frontoparietal Cortex in Perceptual Inference.” Annual Review of Psychology, 69:77-103.

Another perspective on perception is one of top-down processing, which “occurs when people’s expectations, emotions, and bodies affect how they see the world” (Reiner, 2019:267). This explanation is one of embodied perception, considering sensation and perception as not linear and not separate from our physical selves. 

• Riener, Cedar. 2019. “Approaches and Debates on Top-Down Perceptual Processing.” Teaching of Psychology, 46(3):267–272.

Whether you view processing as top-down or bottom up, you will find explanations of your present state of exhaustion. Then recognize that making eye contact is one of the earliest forms of social communication we learn in our lives. This primal social role is made more central when we’re in video conferences that make most other social communication harder to gauge. We might feel the need to maintain eye contact more than what we would normally do, given this restriction of the medium, and this would likely contribute to our cumulative exhaustion.

• Mansour, Hassan, and Gustav Kuhn 2019. “Studying ‘natural’ Eye Movements in an ‘Unnatural’ Social Environment: The Influence of Social Activity, Framing, and Sub-clinical Traits on Gaze Aversion.” Journal of Experimental Psychology, 72(8):1913-1925.

What else?

Of course, there are more than three reasons why you might be feeling exhausted. The runners up include blurring of boundaries that can lead to you working well into the evenings and weekends when you never did that before. You might not be the cause of those boundaries blurring – especially when your boss expects you to respond at all hours, but you might find that you need to draw a line more firmly around your off time. You’re also suddenly some kind of movie producer to some extent, which probably isn’t within your skillset, so that’s tiring as you try to excel at something you’ve possibly never even planned to try. And none of this even considers the exhaustion and psychache we all are feeling to varying degrees as we interpret the current global pandemic, with concerns for the future of society and worry for the people we love within it. How could you not be exhausted right now?

If you are reading this and you have any authority in this world, please cut folks some slack. If your organization can continue to be fully functional online? Cool. If you’re a boss, shorten the meetings. If you are an educator, lean towards fewer assignments and lessened demands. Shorten the meetings and classes. The exhaustion you are feeling makes sense, and it is universal. Please take care of junior faculty, graduate students, and the support staff whom you are probably realizing are working more than they should be.

In this unprecedented time of suddenly teaching courses online that were designed to be taught on campus, and as we look ahead to the upcoming semester, we are now solidly in the realm of online teaching and learning. Neither you nor your students signed up for this. No matter what you chose to do early on in the response to COVID-19, what are you going to do looking ahead? What have you learned that can help you decide? Are you going to teach synchronously or asynchronously? What’s better for your students? What’s better for you? 

Teaching synchronously involves holding “live” sessions that generally allow interactions in real time. Teaching asynchronously means you are probably producing little movies of what you wish you could be teaching in the in-person classroom environment where we all thought our classes would be taking place, and you upload these little movies for students to view on their own schedule. Acknowledging that there are strongly-held beliefs about the superiority of the method on each side of this debate, let’s walk through the key strengths and drawbacks of each option.

What’s so great about teaching synchronously?

This category of online learning allows students to see and interact with one another and with you, to give and receive real-time feedback on their ideas, to brainstorm and collaborate with peers, to ask questions of you as a lesson is being shared, and to be reminded that we are community members, separated physically but not in spirit. With real solidarity, synchronous classes can remind all of us that we are not alone even as we negotiate our changed landscape amidst the novelty that is physical isolation.

You can be creative in nurturing a sense of community in your synchronous classroom. You are a team, on a shared mission. You are in this together. Making eye contact and having conversations at your regularly scheduled class times is priceless as a preventative measure for mental health outcomes, and for increasing engagement with the course materials. Whether students are in your class to complete requirements of a major, or to earn elective credits or specialty skills and knowledge, in the synchronous online classroom you can readily help students remember why they registered for your course to begin with, which can be very grounding. 

So the benefits of teaching “live” include improved communication efficiency and clarity, increased sense of community, fostering solidarity with and among your students who might deeply value the peer support and shared experience of being together for your class. 

What is good about teaching asynchronously?

The most popular reason for choosing this option for your teaching is flexibility regarding when work is done. You can make your little lecture movies whenever you have the time and space to do so, recognizing that your own obligations have likely increased for now as well, so this flexibility can be invaluable. Also, of course, your students can watch those recordings at their convenience. Students’ life circumstances have likely changed. They did not plan to be where they physically are right now while they are completing your course. They might be sharing technology and not have unlimited access to it. They might be across the globe in an incompatible time zone. They might not want to let you and their entire class into the space where they are living right now. This unprecedented social intimacy may have unknown effects on their emotional well-being, and an asynchronous class lets them receive lecture information without that intimate reciprocity of audio and/or video from the place that’s currently home to them.

Asynchronous classes have pedagogical benefits too. They allow students to literally “pause” your class when they are confused or need a break, something only possible in their dreams for in-person and synchronous online classes, which go at a pace not set by them at all. Also, the technology requirements to take in an asynchronous class are lower, and this is therefore more accessible to more students. Watching or downloading a video can happen on the most basic internet-capable devices. Asynchronous lectures can even be mailed on DVDs, or transcribed and printed out with captioned graphics as needed. They can also be closed captioned for accessibility. 

What have you learned so far teaching under these conditions?

You need to set up mental scales of your own, to weigh out and determine what really matters to you, and what is best for you and for your students. I’ve spoken with many individual faculty members at several universities while consulting on this topic, and in every conversation, we’ve decided the best option is to offer some combination of both synchronous and asynchronous offerings in a class. This is not necessarily ideal or superior. It’s just one way of trying to maximize the benefits of both options, while using each to cover the shortcomings in the other. Perhaps thinking through this example will help you refine your own plan as we look ahead to more of this sort of course design, of teaching classes online that were slated to have taken place in person.

An example of “doing both”

Suppose you were scheduled to teach your class twice a week, Mondays and Wednesdays, 10:00 am – 11:15 am local time. For this example, you can now meet synchronously (live) Mondays and Wednesdays at 10 am local time, for about 30 minutes. Keep it briefer to minimize the fatigue that results from too much continuous video conferencing, for them and for you. After revisiting your course’s learning objectives and determining what’s most essential, cover the associated lecture topics live, interactively. Remain, or reclaim if you’ve steered apart, the community that you were before everything shifted online. Invite your students to your live classes assuring them of both your accompaniment and your realization that they likely have new burdens and expectations. Use some simple measure of classroom participation (i.e. three short questions that you introduce throughout the 30 minute class, and that can be answered typing on a smart phone); offer them some various live office hours each week, and teach your class. Give them whatever is most important for your course.

What about those students who cannot make it to the live classes? There are valid reasons. If at all possible, do not expect them to share the reason with you. Asking them to justify why they cannot attend your class online, when they had not planned to be an online student right now, is a bit unfair. Trust your students when they say they cannot make it to your synchronous class. Their reasons may include time zone difference, lack of technology, no free space in their home, no quiet space, less time to be a student because of shifted family responsibilities such as caregiving, etc. Some are working jobs to make up for parents’ lost wages now. Some are homeless because student housing was their solution for where to live right now. For students who have never had an online class before, they might have anxiety about how it all works. There are many reasons why one might not be present for synchronous classes.

The solution for them is simple. Record those 30 minute live classes, and make them available to those who cannot attend at the regularly scheduled class time. Make sure they can complete the same simple measure of classroom participation in a way that is no more or less taxing whether one is live or one is watching the video later. Make sure you follow FERPA regulations and basic copyright laws for recordings, and that you only make public your own face and your own thoughts. You can also restrict access to these videos with passwords, time-limits and other means depending on your platform. Check with your institution for these details. 

Which option is better for you and your students?

That is the question we have answered on the fly, and may be reconsidering as we look ahead to plan future semesters, and only you can answer. I am in favor of the “doing both” option as in the example above. I have had the most success with, as have faculty I’ve helped figure some things out. As the saying goes, your mileage may vary. No matter the option you go with, do your best to be truly present with your students, and to let them see that, either as they make eye contact with you themselves, or otherwise when they see you offering your accompaniment as they view the recording later. If you are choosing to go strictly asynchronous, do what you can to connect with your students and to allow them to share the experience of your class with one another. One pro tip: Talk to the camera, not to your screen, to convey eye contact. It is worth practicing this skill.

You are probably doing great. If possible, consider synchronous classes such as in the example, with a recording offering a comparable experience for the students who cannot get to the live class. If you offer no synchronous classes, try to have some optional synchronous time in general, whether that’s office hours or something else. You’re reaching out through the physical distance between us, to show them that you care about their learning and their struggles. 

If you are personally juggling too many unforeseeable stressors, or you need to do exclusively asynchronous instruction for whatever other personal reasons, that is valid, My hope is that you find nothing but institutional support for you doing the best that you can. If you are struggling with the fatigue that comes from too many video conferences, all while trying to hold your concerns about the world and your loved ones in check, please hang in there and be kind to yourself. You are not alone either.

This article is reposted with edits from an original post made 3/11/2020

Erika Sanborne is a TSP Graduate Board member who has received various awards for teaching and often serves as a teaching & technology consultant for faculty and graduate instructors. Her research interests include the life course, race, and religion. Her favorite course to teach is statistics.

Many of us are a week or two into teaching a suddenly-online course that we had designed to teach in person. Having taught about 50 undergraduate class sections in person, and about 50 undergraduate class sections online, I am duly familiar with both options. To be clear, when I have taught the same subject online and on campus even during the same semester, they are very different courses. Yet here we are with this current situation, so let’s deal with it as best we can. In this write-up, I’m inviting you into “round 2” following all the big changes you have made in the past few weeks to get to this moment.

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Jessica A. Cebulak and John F. Zipp. 2019. “Using Racial and Class Differences in Infant Mortality to Teach about White Privilege: A Cooperative Group Activity.” Teaching Sociology

White college students often struggle to understand, recognize, and learn about white privilege. Many students prefer a “color-blind” approach that denies racial inequalities altogether. Although there are other teaching strategies that try to overcome this, too many simply shift the conversation to inequalities in social class. These strategies fail to address the complicated relationship between race and class. As a result, students struggle to understand, for instance, why affluent, well-educated Black women still have higher infant mortality in the United States than low income, poorly educated white women.

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