A new element in the virtual classroom

Key points:

One Friday night, while preparing for my fall courses, I heard my cell phone ring — twice. I noticed that the text message wasn’t from someone on my contact list, which meant it was probably from one of my community college students. I also noticed that I already had a text message history with the student.

The message read:

Hi sir, I hope it's not too late, but I have a video tutorial for your next class if you'd like to use it.

Seconds later, the follow-up:

It's 15 minutes long and goes over everything anyone who wants to make videos needs to know, and has a detailed look at our team and organization.

The texts were from Stephen, a student who had completed U.S. History I and II online with me last academic year when he was a junior in high school, 1,000 miles away in Texas. Our last text exchange, a few months ago, was about his final student recording project, a biographical research video presentation I call the Lest We Forget project.

It wasn’t my final project that got Stephen and his friends interested in recording videos for my classes. Last year, I encouraged my group of dual-credit high school students to get together and record videos of a New Deal-era project or site at the CCC or WPA and post them on our online discussion board. Some students in Stephen’s class rose to the challenge. Unexpectedly, they recorded and posted video reflections on the discussion board the following week and every week after that. The quality of the student recordings they submitted soon improved, even as high school extracurricular activities and family responsibilities pressed them for time. The number of classmates involved in the recording and editing process also increased, and the medium expanded to allow for unexpected creativity (serialized story lines, costumes, outtakes, etc.). For their final weekly discussion forum, they went to a quiet, casual restaurant, with cameras and microphones rolling, and discussed course-related topics ranging from Jimmy Carter’s legacy to campus protests over the fighting in Gaza over a 45-minute dinner. Most of the videos they shared were more than 15 minutes long and as polished as any YouTube video these students might watch in their spare time.

I’ve been asking online students to record and share their Lest We Forget presentations for twelve years. I’ve always found it risky to do so. When 4G cellular networks were still in their infancy, my rural high school students and their families sometimes struggled with bandwidth issues and storage limits on devices. Student recordings were sent through various family members’ YouTube accounts, and I inevitably served as impromptu tech support during finals week. I persisted, despite the inconvenience, because I needed to see and hear them knowledgeably and responsibly discuss the American past as a cornerstone of their learning. I also wanted to empower them to share that newfound knowledge about the selected American historical figure with the rest of the world. (The project took on new meaning beginning in the summer of 2020, when statues of several historical figures were desecrated and torn down across the country.) I always shared the strongest and most creative student recordings with my colleagues and friends at the end of each semester, hoping to pass on to them some of my optimism about the next generation of students.

I had entered Stephen's senior year last May, and yet there he was, emailing me. Another link to a 15 minute YouTube videoThree former students had teamed up for this new recording, and true to Stephen’s word, the bulk of the video is a carefully edited walkthrough of how his group had planned, filmed, edited, and uploaded all of those videos to our learning management system last spring (something I’m incredibly excited to share with my new group of dual credit students). The new video featured humorous references to some of their previous discussion board presentations, but also reflected on the real-life departure of one of their classmates (John), whose family had moved out of the school district over the summer.

At another community college where I teach, the learning management system’s suite of recording options has allowed me to make video recording of students a central method of assessing their learning. It would be natural to compare these student recordings to oral exams, which were more commonly used in higher education decades ago; “oral assessment” is how academic studies tend to describe discussion-based assessments of student learning that are being conducted virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, asynchronous, untethered recording of students seems to introduce a new element to the virtual classroom. In the hands of anyone eager to learn, a camera and microphone can become an inherently flexible and creative medium with which to demonstrate understanding. Surprisingly, it has also become a conduit through which many virtual students openly share with me their hopes, fears, frustrations, and genuine successes throughout the semester.

Despite the challenges presented by ai chatbots, writing remains a critically important method for demonstrating learning in higher education. But it is only one method. The videos my students have been submitting since 2011—thousands of skits, cartoons, documentaries, military reenactments, original music videos, etc.—reveal that we have a brighter future ahead for online education when we are ready for it. I suspect that future will be far more concerned with students’ expressions of genuine intelligence than with their use of ai.