Videoconferences: Is this Not-So-New Technology the Future for Education?
By: Thomas Holt Russell
Tags: Spanish Flu, Zoom, Education, Coronavirus, Online Learning Platform

Let’s calm our eagerness until the proper foundations are put in place

Zoom is number 1 among free applications that provide videoconferencing. According to the DMR Website, the total number of Zoom users number over 200 million, and 90,000 schools are using Zoom. Shares are up 143%. And at a time when the S&P fell 11% in March of 2020, Zoom shares were up 44%. As noted in Forbes Magazine, Zoom had revenues of 623 million and profits of 25 million by the end of the fiscal year, which is January 2020.

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan did something smart and at the right time. During the coronavirus pandemic, he provided unlimited access to the first troubled region, China. That free unlimited access was followed by offering unlimited access to all areas that were hot with the virus, such as

Italy, Japan, and the United States. Additionally, he has covered 19 other countries with the same offer. Of all of the uses and convenience that video teleconferencing provides, educational use may be one of the most pressing issues not only for the present but videoconferencing may very well be playing an even more significant role after the pandemic is over. This is not the first pandemic that forced us to close schools.

During the Spanish Flu Epidemic in 1918, the Fresno

Morning Republican newspaper editor, Chester H. Rowell, wrote:

“One of the purposes of masks is to restore confidence in the people and to enable them (citizens) to safely to go about their usual occupations. We can suspend amusements, or even education, for a time, but we cannot suspend buying and selling without thereby suspending pretty much everything else.”

Even a little over one hundred years ago, the consensus on sacrificing or living norms was to keep businesses going, and death be damned. Officials lumped education with entertainment (amusements) as being more expendable. On the 7th day of the Spanish Flu, the first schools to shut down for a pandemic was all of the public schools in Selma, California. Selma implemented a quarantine that also included theaters, lodge assemblies, and church gatherings. Less than a week later, Fresno and San Francisco followed suit as outlined in Dispatches

from Fresno, an online series of articles dedicated to the Spanish Flu.

There is little data to tell us how the students of the closed schools functioned during the Spanish Flu. It does not take much imagination to figure that those students continued their work at home with little or no communication with their teachers, and that is only if they did anything at all. Technology has advanced far beyond the imaginations of the top science fiction writers of a century ago. So there were not many options for continuing to teach and learn during the school closures.

We have the proper technology to continue teaching and learning during a forced closure. Yet, it is still too early for us to assess how effective is our attempts to teaching and learning online. Even under the best of circumstances, teaching is challenging. Keeping students interested and

engaged is a real art. If you take force students out of the classroom and into their own home, that is a considerable challenge. And surrounding them in a worldwide pandemic adds another level of strangeness into everyone’s lives.

The question of the present: Is Zoom the answer to our education system during this pandemic? Zoom CEO Eric Yuan is the founder of the pandemic’s most popular video teleconference company. Zoom, just like Kleenex, Google, and Xerox, has become a generic term for their products. That means that Zoom is the generic term for videoconferencing. Yuan is the son of mining engineers from China’s eastern Shandong Province. Fast forward: he graduated from Shandong University with an applied mathematics degree and moved to California, where he first worked for Cisco. But after four years at Cisco, he started Zoom and the rest of Zoom’s history– is still being written.

People tend to rush towards the greatest and latest technology. Most of the time, those technologies answered questions that technology has already answered. People seem to be fascinated with the idea of new technologies and never research to find alternative ways to do a job that already exists. Videoconferencing has been around a long time. Over ten years

ago, I was a certified videoconference specialist working for DoD, and setting up secure videoconferences for the U.S. Army. Ten years before that, as a student at Colorado Tech, we participated in online learning governed by our professor. It was a little clunky, but we managed to sludge through the course, and it was convenient when compared to having to drive to the school. But as far as simple instruction and learning, there was much to be desired.

We have come a very long way since then. Technology has been able to make online learning a regular part of the educational landscape. No one thinks much about online teaching technology because it is so ubiquitous now. The significant difference during the pandemic is that instead of students entering into a purposeful learning environment, an environment with the proper

infrastructure and pedagogy to make online learning meaningful and productive, schools are now forced to teach online, but without the infrastructure, experience, or knowledge to make the training worthwhile. Many of the educators and school districts have no prior experience with teaching online. There are so many feel-good stories about teachers being resourceful and doing the work online, that it blinds us to the effectiveness of retrofitting lessons to be taught online.

My view is not coming from someone sitting on the sidelines and playing armchair quarterback. As an education administrator and former high school STEM teacher, I have a great interest in the way education is administered to students. I recently had a conversation with a colleague

about how she was doing with teaching online. She told me, “Great.” But when I probed further, her idea of great was not so great to me. She simply put information online, and the students received their information there and turned it in. There was very little real-time collaboration. If needed, she could always speak to them on an application like Zoom. However, since they are

still in the process of building the capabilities for this work for school districts, this on-the-fly. Zoom meetings have a long way to go to ensure students are getting proper and substantial training.

New York Governor, Mario Cuomo, a sort of canary in a

coal mine when it comes to possible issues all communities may face during the

pandemic addresses the problem directly in a recent briefing;

“Schools are necessary for a large-scale business reopening. So, you really can’t get to a maximum phase 2 without opening schools. Many school districts are talking about summer school. They are talking about summer schools to make up for lost time. We’re going to have a real problem. Remote learning, I think is going to be one of the lessons we learn. Remote learning is great in concept. We had to jump into it with both feet, and we didn’t really have a chance to scale up for it.”

If learning was sufficient, there should not be an effort to “make up for lost time” in the coming summer. There should also be an understanding that this is not just a New York problem. When the pandemic is over, some of the contingency planning we are doing in education will remain in

place. So, videoconferencing will continue to grow. However, we have an obligation to make sure we do not fall in love with the technology itself and feel that this is the wave of the immediate future.

We have a significant issue that our education system needs to address, and that issue is privacy. This week CNET outlines issues with Zoom, such as Zoombombings, that include racist language and child abuse. Zoom videoconferences are not end-to-end encrypted despite the claims by company officials that they are. Additionally, Motherboard reports that Zoom is leaking email addresses and photos to strangers. Parents will not want their kids using Zoom or another application that has not addressed these issues. Yuan stated that the program allowed users to log in via Facebook, but Zoom removed that code.

As students and teachers are learning to use Zoom effectively on-the-fly, Zoom is also making improvements on the fly. They have improved virtual backgrounds, and they added a default setting for teachers that locks their students’ screens so that they can’t hijack the lesson as a prank. Also, Zoom has a feature inspired by consumer apps that touches up faces and lighting. For college-sized classes, they are working on a tool that would make every student’s video appear as though shot from the same angle.

My main issue is this: We put too much faith in technology. Some educators think that technology releases them from the responsibility of their duties. This outlook arrives out of a loss of confidence in human judgment and subjectivity, and believing technology can do it (or anything else) better. Our society has devalued the job of a teacher. It has replaced it with a dependence on artificial intelligence and deep learning and investing our trust in technology over our common sense. This is the main reason I consider myself a Luddite. I consider myself a Luddite not because I mistrust technology; I consider myself a Luddite because I do not trust the use of technology by humans and further because humans outsource their responsibilities, duties, and subjectivity to technology. I am sure Zoom is a viable option to teach online and there interface is the next best thing to actually being in the classroom. But my concern is more towards the curriculum and structure of teaching online.

The solution is not taking everything you do in the classroom and transfer it to online instructions. There are students that need extra instruction, there are students that are not on task, there are other students that, through no fault of their own, do not fit into the cookie-cutter approach to instruction that other students thrive in. We are still having trouble dealing with these students in a traditional setting. Having them online does not make the task easier. This will take time to address the pressing issues. If educators currently think that Zoom is a godsend, that is fine. However, I only want to point out that we have an incredibly long way to go before we can expect online learning to be a viable alternative to classroom teaching.

Using applications like Zoom will not make a lousy teacher a good teacher. The technology we use cannot solve all of our problems. We still have to use all of our human attributes to make decisions and use technology as an aide to our best practices. Applications like Zoom work best when teachers prepare to put in the same amount of work that will be conducted in a physical classroom setting. It seems we did not do a great job in handling the Spanish Flu over one hundred years ago. But what is worse, we seem not to have learned all of the lessons from that pandemic of 1918.

As for American education, pragmatism tells us that online teaching, learning, and other engagements will grow. If we collect as much data as possible and correct the problems that we find, we will not only help ourselves when the next global pandemic arrives, but we will also eliminate the need to pat ourselves on the back just because we have a sudden technological paradigm shift and are treating fairly old technology as something that will save education. We are only building a rickety bridge that will take us from our present school closures during the pandemic to school openings by next fall. Instead, we should make this inconvenience an opportunity to build a robust and comprehensive infrastructure that will improve our education system. Creating an excellent infrastructure will benefit our American children well into the future.