University teachers must kick their dopamine addiction

Even experienced educators assigned asynchronous courses are becoming resigned to disengaged students and distracted learning. If only they could meet with students in “real time”, they privately assure themselves, their natural charisma and spontaneity would win the day, just as it always did before.  

These days, when faculty members lament the loss of learning in real time, what they’re registering, at least in part, is the absence of the pedagogical feel-goods to which they’ve become accustomed. After all, in a well-run asynchronous section, students are still learning plenty; they’re just not learning in a way that produces the visual and auditory cues on which presence-minded educators depend for that dose of dopamine at the end of a satisfying feedback loop.  

In an asynchronous environment, there are no students to laugh obligingly at our jokes as we crack them, to nod at a point well made as it’s being made or to raise an eyebrow to intimate the first inkling of a question. There’s no queue of eager interlocutors at the end of class to punctuate the teacher’s post-performance high. In this pandemic era, many asynchronous-only professors find themselves suffering from what amounts to withdrawal.

THE Campus resource: Asynchronous discussions − the how and why

Little wonder, then, that asynchronous learning has emerged as a target of convenience for disgruntled professors and educational alarmists. The devaluing of all things asynchronous has been brewing for years. While as recently as a decade ago, consumers might have expected to wait patiently for a necessary service, the cult of 24-7 instant gratification now casts call-backs and email replies as lukewarm, second-rate support. Businesses have started a bidding war for our attention, elevating simultaneity to false idol while successfully inventing, enabling and institutionalising a culture of impatience.  

Over the past two decades, educators have drunk generously of this same cultural Kool-Aid, shifting the most crucial learning tasks into class time to minimise asynchronous “homework” in a reflection of the dominant paradigm.

The calculation they make is a cynical rather than practical one; if college students are deemed intellectually or behaviourally incapable of completing rigorous homework without faculty supervision, then all essential learning must take place while the student is directly under the teacher’s thumb.  

Many of these same educators accept on faith the hokum pushed by higher ed administrators who imply that requiring substantial outside-of-class work risks a loss of retention rates and tuition dollars. Concomitantly, the nomenclature for measuring teacher effectiveness devolves to reflect industry preoccupations with the immediate, the in-person and the instantaneous.

Buzzwords and catchphrases such as “makes efficient use of class time” have become standard in course evaluations, not so subtly reinforcing in a generation of student-consumers the corporatist’s creed. Increasingly, evaluations of professors resemble those we render customer service agents staffing the world’s call centres, provided we are patient enough to hold for three seconds. On a scale of one to five, with five being very efficient, has the educator resolved our issue in a timely fashion? 

For me, asynchronous learning offers a belated, badly needed counterweight to the decades-long monopoly of simultaneity, and a welcome reminder that rigorous assignment giving, receiving and marking constitutes a time-honoured, intrinsically dialogic form of teaching. The asynchronous professor functions more like an author than a live-chat customer support agent, in that the most enduring authors earn their bona fides not just by offering ideas bound by time, but by a dialogue commenced and continued in the mind long after the book has been closed or the laptop powered down.  

Today’s presence-addicted post-secondary education pays lip service to concepts such as “critical thinking” and “iterative practice” while systematically depriving students of a full complement of asynchronous courses in which they can learn in their own time, in a comfortable place, at their own pace, in an economically sustainable fashion.

Asynchronous courses make degrees possible for working students who can’t afford to take three hours from the middle of their nine-to-five working day to serve at the pleasure of their presence-needy professor. The money they might have earned during those three or four hours, twice a week, over 16 weeks, helps them save for the tuition to take another course next semester.

THE Campus resource: Fostering multilingual discussion in asynchronous online classes

Synchronous learning turns professors into little more than charismatic salespeople whose effectiveness hinges on their ability to hold students’ rapt attention in the classic cult of personality. When we devalue or disparage asynchronous learning and learners, we surrender to the need to close the deal before the ink dries or the buyer changes their mind.

The cunning salesperson regards distance as the enemy; once free of the salesperson’s animal magnetism, the buyer, they know from experience, is better able to deliberate rationally. As previous generations knew well, there’s real wisdom in asynchronicity, in sleeping on our decisions. Whether the option being considered is a job offer, the purchase of a used car or the best possible thesis for a 10-page essay, time serves as co-teacher.  

While asynchronous coursework isn’t equally appropriate for all teachers and learners, we can all learn something from the space it creates for deliberative practice at a cultural moment ripe for reflection. While asynchronous coursework has freed many students from the expectation of immediate, easy answers to difficult problems, many professors persist in the culturally entitled belief that synchronous learning is and ought to be the gold standard, and in the frankly elitist notion that everything will be better when we return to “normal”.  

Properly valuing asynchronous learning means embracing a new normal. Seeing its virtues clearly is a bit like coming to belated appreciation of the quiet, introspective souls in our lives, those inclined to take a challenging problem away to consider it from all angles and then, in the fullness of time, return with a well-reasoned answer.  

Zachary Michael Jack is a professor of English at North Central College and a long-time faculty member in the Leadership, Ethics and Values programme. His most recent book is The Art of Public Writing.