Phenomenology and Online Quality

Anthony T. Sovak,Ph.D,Director Quality Online Instruction, Pima Community College

Anthony T. Sovak,Ph.D,Director Quality Online Instruction, Pima Community College

Anthony Sovak holds a Ph.D. in English from Stony Brook University and serves as Pima Online's Director of Quality Online Instruction. Dr. Sovak is an experienced faculty mentor, a data-driven leader, and an adept consensus builder working to maintain, implement, and continuously improve the Quality Review process for online courses. He has served as a full-time faculty member, department chair and is an experienced online course developer and instructor.

In recent conversations about online quality I've been asked on several different occasions, “but what do I have to have?” In part, this is exhaustion talking. Faculty and administrators who want to give their students a high-quality online experience are pressed from all directions by a global pandemic, constantly changing college and government regulations, the fear of infection, and general instability. So when quality assurance practices feel like just one more hoop to jump through faculty just want to know the easiest way to get it done. I honestly get that. When quality conversations are conducted solely through one-and-done checklists or dispassionate rubrics it disallows the possibilities of meaningful conversation about what works best for your faculty and your students at your institution. I find phenomenology to be a useful tool at this stage of the conversation to help shift the perspective from abstract quality assurance principles to concrete questions, like “how will this improve the experience for my students?”

Phenomenology, loosely put, is the study of how we orient ourselves to the world around us. How do we inhabit an online classroom? Consider for a moment how we enter a traditional face-to-face classroom and what we see there. When we enter the physical space of a classroom, any classroom, we orient ourselves immediately to the surrounding. While we may have never been in that particular room we already have had experience with that form of the objects in the room. For the most part, every classroom in this country looks the same. In the front, there's some kind of chalkboard or whiteboard with a desk and a teacher. There may be a projector or monitor and there are rows of desks or small groups of desks.

“Students who have more time and better technology have less of a barrier to the classroom, the credential, and the social and economic mobility that comes with it”

Students rely on past experiences with those spaces so that they don't have to ask where to sit or how to ask for help, right? They simply raise their hands. But how to perform the simple act of asking a question, which is essential for learning, may vary in every online class a student takes. In an online class, some professors want you to email them using their college email, others are available by phone, chat widget, remind.com, or an internal learning management system. What if the question has to do with technology and access and not content? What is the turnaround time for them to receive an answer? This is true for each interaction from talking with the teacher, other students, handing in an assignment, attending lectures, taking a quiz, and so on. Instead of simply looking forward and watching a lecture a student may need to do any number of the following: navigate the Learning Management System for posted lectures, use a separate login to another publisher system, get a textbook, or attend a video meeting. The last activity is another rabbit hole as students might need to log on to a particular time using a particular software. Each software has its own proprietary system so navigating each becomes a learning experience too. As well, some software works better on certain hardware than others. When each interaction is slightly different for every class the cognitive load becomes multiplicative and it is a labor that is both exhausting and inequitable. Students who have more time and better technology have less of a barrier to the classroom, the credential, and the social and economic mobility that comes with it.

Online classes usually start as a blank slate. That environment can vary greatly based on who set it up, what their goals, expectations, and assumptions are for those spaces. And so, it is essential that we talk about our expectations, assumptions, and goals for the spaces to ensure that students don't need to relearn how to inhabit an online class every time they enter one. By beginning those conversations with your colleagues at your institution about what your expectations and your assumptions are for an online course you can begin to standardize the form of them so that you're online spaces mimic the spaces that your students are already familiar with or encounter in other classes at your institution.