Full article available on the Chronicle of Higher Education. Excerpts below.
… I started thinking about how the LMS contributes to undergraduate stress last fall, after I noticed heightened student anxiety. I decided to sit down with my two undergraduate classes and ask what was bothering them. Students from a mix of majors and class ranks told me they felt overwhelmed by life. Far from being the best time of their lives, they said, college felt more like a hamster wheel of endless deadlines and stress.
… The generation now in college grew up interacting with constant notifications. The silence of the before times — the very notion of being routinely alone with one’s thoughts — is a relic of previous generations. Gen Z inhabits a different way of thinking of time, self, and knowledge. They are, as Jonathan Haidt has suggested in The Anxious Generation, the cellphone and social-media generation, and it is making them very unhappy.
Once they arrive at college, we add to the noise. The campus LMS trains students to see learning as a chore — something to do or dismiss as the notifications roll through the week. But there is a different approach, and I’ve been doing it in my own teaching with some success: Rather than bend to the relentless, fast-paced “reality” of the internet, let’s do the opposite in our courses and slow things down.
I try to create a quiet space both in class and in my students’ heads. I tell them I am trying to teach as a “slow professor,” inspired by a 2016 book on the subject. To teach as a slow professor, I explain, is to resist the pressure to speed through learning and rather to see a course as a story, or multiple stories. And I tell students that I’m trying to help them develop a sense of agency over their coursework, which can lessen their anxiety about it. In order to achieve those goals, I do the following:
- I talk about pedagogy in class so that students know the intellectual reasons behind how I teach, including the way I use the LMS. I mention the articles and books that guide my teaching.
- My use of the LMS is very sparse. I post the syllabus and take attendance on the LMS. For large classes I will also post grades online. In my seminars, I generally do not give grades during the semester, but provide lots of feedback on written work and give a final grade.
- The syllabus on the LMS has everything in that one document: dates, assignments, readings, etc., so students can scroll down and see all of it in one place. I do not divide up course content into modules.
- I don’t do notifications (i.e., students can’t even turn them on for my classes).
- I do not have online discussion questions or posts.
- I tell students to look at the syllabus on a Sunday for the week and to plan accordingly.
- In seminars, students must write everything in a paper journal (unless they have relevant accommodations), including their midterm and final. Students use the journal to write their reflections on the material both in class and outside of it.
- Instead of a final exam, including in bigger classes, I have students write a final reflection in class on an issue they learned more about, a concept they struggled with, or a reading they disagreed with.
- Sometimes I print out copies of an article for us to read and discuss together in class. It has worked very well indeed. That can’t be the only method you use because students learn differently, but it is a good option now and then.
- I check in with students frequently by asking them to do self-assessments and taking time to talk in class about how they are managing their time, work, and life.
- I have also brought in a recent graduate (who is now in our Ph.D. program) who talked about how to tune out the LMS.
… Professors and administrators must think long and hard about how we are creating the very anxieties we lament. Contemplation is a lost art in education, and our students are crying out for help to deal with all the challenges they identify as causing stress. Silencing the noise of the LMS and creating more space for reflection in our courses would be good educational practice for whichever century we are living in.