Pluralism in the Online Classroom

• In Event: Pluralism Meets Pluralism: Ethnography, Decolonization, and Civic Engagement

Abstract

Online education, already an important part of higher education, was brought quickly and unexpectedly into focus as a necessary mode during 2020, thanks to the Covid19 pandemic. While higher education reels from the far-reaching effects of the pandemic, we are also provided with a unique opportunity to study how students of varying backgrounds and abilities are coping with the change to all-online education. While universities and colleges continue to grow their offerings of online and hybrid courses, in the wake of the pandemic, we have little collective knowledge of how these changed formats impact a variety of student outcomes. In this paper, we expand the existing research on comparing modes of learning and their impact on student learning environment, access for students with diverse backgrounds and abilities, and their feelings of belonging to a larger university community.

This paper presents the results of two rounds of a survey, each covering about 1000 undergraduate students enrolled in our introductory American Government political science courses. Our large, public, suburban university provides an especially good natural laboratory for studying the impact of online education on students in a pandemic, as it is not new to online education. It has long offered traditional face-to-face courses, hybrid and online courses and even offers some undergraduate and graduate degree programs entirely online. There is strong faculty development support for transitioning courses from in-person to online. Our student body is extremely diverse, across the areas of race, ethnicity, age, veteran status, varying levels of ability and our university also serves a large number of international students. As such, the university provides us with the best environment to study the impact of online education both on students who are well-versed with online courses and those who have never taken an online course before, until forced to do so by the pandemic.

In particular, students were polled on their primary reasons for taking or turning away from online courses, their perceptions of the content across these different modes and their experiences in online versus traditional classrooms with respect to expressing their individual voices, level of access, and engagement. We are interested in assessing how the degree of anonymity provided by online course formats and activities influences student engagement and ability to freely voice their perspectives. Does the comfort of writing without immediate scrutiny give students greater freedom to voice divergent opinions, thus increasing the diverse range of perspectives discussed in the classroom? Do students find these online spaces safer to engage with and learn from students with gender, orientation and ethnic or racial identities different from their own, or do the online courses simply replicate patterns seen in traditional classrooms?

Overall, this study aims to better understand the motives for students in choosing their course modalities and the potential benefits and challenges of different course formats.

Authors

• Tavishi Bhasin, Kennesaw State University

• Charity Butcher, Kennesaw State University