The Virtual College Experience
Understanding college student productivity and focus while learning from home
INTRODUCTION
The Novel Coronavirus Pandemic led to swift and disruptive changes to the everyday lives of people all around the world. For most colleges, the Spring of 2020 marked the shift to online learning. Students left campus for spring break and just never came back. Colleges choose to move classes to an entirely virtual platform consisting of both asynchronous and synchronous classes to keep as many people safe as possible from this deadly virus. Many students both asynchronous and synchronous classes in their schedule. The main difference between these two class formats is that synchronous classes have a set time where students and the professor got together in a video conference of some sort, typically Zoom, and have lecture and section live. Asynchronous classes, on the other hand, have no set meeting time and students are given weekly assignments that they complete at their own pace.
On top of the physical and emotional stress of living through a global pandemic, the shift to virtual learning took a huge portion of the college experience away from students. Instead of physical classes, where students could interact with their fellow classmates before, during, and after class; students now spend countless hours sitting in front of their computers, where the only real social interactions take place in breakout rooms and over class message boards. Starved of the social and physical interactions of normal college life, student morale and mental health is very low, leading to a distinct lack of motivation and productivity. Yet, students are still chugging along towards their degree. This begs the question: how do college students motivate and maintain productivity while learning from home?
RESEARCH SITES AND PARTICIPANTS
This study used convenience sampling to gather four participants: two participants for a field observation, and two participants for an interview study. Gus and Kai were the participants for the field observation, chosen because they were already sharing spaces with me. This allowed me to physically visit the room where they spent their time while taking classes virtually. Victoria and Trevor, on the other hand, were my interview participants. Because the questions in the interview protocol were more geared towards investigating focus and participation and online class, rather than the physical space, it made more sense to do the interviews over Zoom to maintain social distancing guidelines. To fully understand the qualitative data of this study, a description of each participant and their learning from home habitat follows:
Gus Gomer
Gus is a twenty-two-year-old male from Wisconsin who is currently studying engineering at Shoreline Community College. He, like most college students in the state of Washington, is taking classes entirely online due to the Coronavirus pandemic. He has ADHD and is really struggling to focus on his classes while learning from home, especially since all of his classes are entirely asynchronous. He shares a “cheaply built” house with three other roommates and a dog. Gus has a spacious square room on the right side of the second floor of his house directly above the kitchen. Any time someone does anything in the kitchen, Gus can hear it. Out of the three roommates, one of them is addicted to heroin. Because of this, the dynamics in the house are quite strange and can be quite distracting when Gus is trying to get schoolwork done. As you peer into the room from the doorway, your eye is drawn to the floor in front of the wall on the right side of the room, where almost every inch is covered in car parts, trash, clothing, and other random small items. After the wall of clutter, the next thing you notice about the room is his desk. It is a large industrial table made from planks of pine and steel. He built the desk/table himself using welding and power tools. He also built the table top himself and stained it with a dark color. Then, against the adjacent wall, there is a dresser, a side table and a bed. Finally, the wall behind the desk is a lot of shelving. It looks like it was supposed to be hidden behind a closet, but the construction just never got there.
Kai Sanders
Kai lives with her roommate in the bottom unit of a two-story house in Seattle located two blocks away from the highway and approximately seven blocks away from the University of Washington — Seattle Campus. Kai lives in the back room of their garden apartment in the larger room. Kai’s room is right next to the kitchen and looks out into the backyard. Before entering Kai’s room, you notice a young man with a beard sitting at the kitchen table in the common space in her apartment, her boyfriend. He is sitting on a wooden chair, looking at a laptop. He also has a couple of notebooks and papers strewn across the table. They have been together since the end of their freshman year together. They had meet in a First Year Interest Group (FIG) an introductory class and scholarly friendship making sort of class. He had apparently spent the past two nights at her apartment and was doing his own schoolwork at the Kitchen table, while Kai worked on her own schoolwork in her own room (he is an engineering student at the University of Washington). Occasionally, during the observational interview, we would hear a couple of soft-spoken words coming from outside the room, which were the sounds of her boyfriend participating in his own classes in the next room. Looking into her room, from the doorway, you first see her desk, which is off to the right side of the door. The desk is an average size for a college student. To the left of her desk, there is a closet with no doors. Her closet has a bar with hangers and clothing hanging from it. The number of clothes she has hanging from the bar is minimal, with a fair number of bare hangers on the bar. On the next two walls there are two tapestries. Directly below the tapestries, she has placed her queen-sized bed in is it the right corner in the back of her room. Next to the bed is a side table and then a laundry bag. On the final wall there is a large dresser with a mirror sitting on top of it.
Victoria Anderson
Victoria is a junior studying Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington Seattle. She really likes design and wants to be able to make an impact on her community through her design work. She is taking 17 credits in the form of four classes and one directed research group. She is taking: a synchronous python class, a synchronous technical writing class, a synchronous organization teamwork class, and an asynchronous anthropology class with a synchronous labs section. Our meeting took place over Zoom, a video conferencing platform, which means that we were chatting from two separate rooms. I was sitting in my living room, on the floor in front of my couch, while Victoria joined me from her bedroom on her bed. She lives in the house for her sorority with six other female UW students studying engineering. She has luscious blue walls that are tilted in a way that makes it look like she has an attic room. Along the wall there are four small mirror tiles hanging as well as a map poster. She was seated on her bed for the duration of the interview. The interview took place on a sunny Saturday at around 2PM, during a one-hour break between two sessions for a virtual conference for an engineering ambassador program that we had both been participating in.
Travis Argo
Travis is a junior studying Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) at the University of Washington Seattle. He is taking 14 credits through four classes. He is taking an asynchronous class about data and society, a synchronous class about physical prototyping, a synchronous python class, and a synchronous seminar about getting a job in the field of computer science. Our interview took place over Zoom at around 4pm on a Monday, after one of the classes we had together, and were chatting from two separate environments. I was joining the video from my computer desk in my Seattle apartment, while he attended the interview from his family home in South Seattle. He was sitting at his computer desk, which had three monitors set up on it. Behind him, there was a window with long curtains that were tried at about window height to keep the curtains off the floor. Adjacent to the wall with the window on it, there was a tall bookshelf. Next to the bookshelf there was a large bulky light, which looked like it belonged in a fish tank, and perhaps may have in fact ben from a fish tank, that gave off blue light. He was sitting in a rolling desk chair that looked about mid-range as far as desk chair quality goes. He had a pillow wedged between his back and the chair back, which means he was probably getting a little bit uncomfortable from sitting all day. He also has a light that gives off blue light next to that bookshelf. He has a pillow on his chair behind him back. His bed is to the right side of the window, but you cannot see it in the camera. During the pandemic, he re-arranged his space. At the start of the pandemic, he had a large bulky bookshelf on the wall adjacent to the windows, where there is now the blue light. When he does not want to attend class with his video on, he will cover his web camera with a post it notes and set a virtual background to an image that make it look like he is paying attention. The thing is, there virtual background pictures were all taken while the bookshelf was still there, so when he turns this fake virtual background off, it looks like the big bookshelf moved. Not many people notice this discrepancy though.
METHODS
This study consisted of two field observations as well as two interviews. Each field observation had the same main goal of understanding how students set up their rooms, a space where they are now spending almost all their time due to the shift that made classes entirely virtual. Because Gus was the only entirely asynchronous student in this sample and he was uncomfortable with me observing him while working asynchronously, I was only able to conduct a basic observation about the space he takes his asynchronous classes from. This included quiet observation of the room, as well asking him a couple of questions about specific items and oddities I noticed. During this observation, I sat on Gus’s desk chair which had been made from an old car seat, to get a basic understanding of his space. Kai, on the other hand had synchronous classes, which allowed me to sit in and observe her while she was in a quiz section. Kai’s observation began with a general overview of the space she was in, while Kai waited for class to start. Then, when her class did not begin on time, because her quiz section TA did not show up, the observation switched to watching her as she tried to figure out where to attend/watch class another way. During this observation, I sat on her bed and mostly stayed out of the way, asking an occasional clarification question. Although the flow for each observation was slightly different, the field notes were taken in a similar fashion. While observing I took jottings and short notes in a pink a4 notebook. Beside me, I had my stopwatch running, so that I could mark the time approximately every 5 minutes to understand the ebb and flow of these observations. Then, I translated the jottings into ethnographic field notes.
Unlike the two unique field observations, the two interviews followed the same semi structured interview protocol. These interviews took place over Zoom and were recorded using their cloud recording feature. The interview consisted of questions based in four sections. It began with questions about college students including questions about what the student is studying, college year, number of credits, as well as their goals and motivations. Next, there were questions about synchronous classes including background information about the format of the online classes, the benefits and drawbacks, and stories from their virtual classroom experience. It then transitioned into more details about attending virtual classes including descriptions of what it looks like to attend virtual class for each student, signals and prompts that cause a student to engage or participate in class, and how the expert ace of class hand change with the switch to online classes. We concluded the interview by discussing how students focused in virtual class including recounting times when they have felt both focused and unfocused, changes in focus with the switch to online classes, what type of distractions they encounter, and what the biggest obstacles to focus have been. After each interview, I read through the transcripts and made them readable, so that they would be ready for analysis.
Using a modified grounded theory approach, I began my data analysis. Using my research question “how do college students motivate and maintain productivity while learning from home?” as a guiding light, I read through my observational field notes from Kai and Gus as well as my interview transcripts from Travis and Victoria and began to make codes. I ended up with codes in three main categories, each with a set of subcodes. First there is the General details about participants and their space which consists of the codes: workstation detail, class detail, participants background, work versus relax areas. Second there is focus (or lack thereof) and meeting class goals, which consists of the codes: methods of focus, mental barrier to focus, accountability for getting work done, distraction from focus, feelings about being distracted. Finally, there is virtual classroom culture and how it differs from in person, which consists of the codes: participation, breakout room variation, technical difficulties, frustration, online teaching skill level, pre-recorded lecture habits, zoom camera etiquette and habits, class community building, exceptions made because of the pandemic, and class attendance changes. These codes were then used to create memos about general themes that were found in the data. These memos were turned into the findings included in the next section.
FINDINGS
Through coding and analysis, four main themes were discovered: separation of spaces, decrease in accountability, widespread zoom burnout, and the varying degrees of virtual participation.
Separation of Spaces
The biggest factor to consider when thinking about the space a pandemic student occupies is how they attempt to create a separation between their “working spaces,” where they are productive and get things done, and their “relaxation spaces,” where they can decompress and rest. Each student had distinct areas in which they relaxed or were productive, but these spaces were manifested in different ways. Gus, for example, has “two chairs: a chair for focused work and a more comfortable chair for gaming and relaxing. The chair that normally faces his monitors is a relaxation chair.” (Gus, 222–223) Gus also has his monitors set up so that “they could very easily be used as a TV with a good view from the bed.” (Gus, 260–261) Kai on the other hand had two tapestries that “seem to serve as a bit of a divider for her bedroom, as they cover all the wall above where the bed touches the wall.” (Kai 217- 219) She also has a galaxy light simulator that sits on her dresser. She likes to turn it on when she is relaxing in bed. (Kai 231–2) Victoria has designated her bed as her relaxation space. Usually, when she is in classes, she tries to stay engaged in a chair with her camera on, but when she is feeling super tired and does not want to participate, she will sit in her bed with her camera off. (Victoria 133–135) Thus, students transformed a place that used to be mainly for relaxation into a space where they spend almost all their time due to the shelter in place orders set by the coronavirus pandemic.
Decrease in Accountability
Students note that although they had distractions during in person classes, the ways in which they are distracted has shifted dramatically with the move to online learning. One student, Travis, noted that he used to fall asleep a fair amount during in person classes (only for a few minutes at a time, sometimes multiple times a day), but since the move to online classes, he finds that he no longer sleeps because he is distracted by a lot more things such as homework for his other classes, Reddit and YouTube. (Travis 64) Travis noted that because he had three monitors, his intense distractions during class was camouflaged. Even when he was not paying very much attention to the class. He slyly claimed, “when I’m looking at other shit going on, [I’m] distracted, but it looks like I’m focusing at the same time. So that’s the beauty of it.” (Travis 160–162) This led Travis to take less notes during online classes. (Travis 168) It is very difficult to gauge productivity and focus when you are looking at a blank square with their name in it, or at a tiny video feed of just their face. The virtual world has fewer physical indicators of focus, and they are hard to see; this creates far less accountability towards actually paying attention in virtual class. Another student, Victoria, noted that in person, she used to not use her phone when she was in smaller classes because she is terrified of authority, but now, during virtual classes, she finds herself using her phone more even in the smaller classes because she “feels there’s way less consequences now.” She also noted that she’s on her phone during class because she wants to be doing anything but learning from home (Victoria 141–147) Although she is more likely to show up to all of her classes because attending class is as simple as clicking a button, she finds that she spends more time on her phone during class.
Zoom Burnout
Each student has different ways of keeping up with their schoolwork and remaining productive while feeling the burnout involved in having entirely virtual classes. Gus gets his motivation from the creation of clean workspaces. When he looks at his desk he thinks, “that is a proper desk” and it motivates him to get work done. (Gus 187–189) Gus also uses a stimulant called nuvigil to help him focus, because he has ADHD (Gus 235). Kai keeps focused by using a pile of small scraps of paper, which she used to keep track of the work that she has due for all her classes. Each slip represents a different class, and she lists the assignments on the lines below.” (Kai 186–189) Despite keeping up with their assignments, student engagement in classes is way down, probably because all classes take place in essentially the same space, a student’s computer, rather than being located in different buildings all across campus as is the case when classes are in person. Not one, but two participants from this study struggled to fully remember their class schedule even though I talked with them during the fifth week of a ten-week quarter, a point where, had the classes been in person their schedules would have been fully memorized. Travis could not list all of the classes he was taking without looking at his canvas page. (Travis 32) Victoria had forgotten about a weekly class meeting because it had been cancelled for the past two weeks for various reasons including election stress and an exam. (Victoria 36–37) This is a clear sign of the burnout that students are facing as online synchronous classes continue to be the only way to attend class during this pandemic. This burnout also occasionally affected class attendance. Victoria, for example, would leave classes prematurely if she felt particularly burned out, due to being stressed out by other things, or if she was having a bad mental health day where she could not stand to be at her computer anymore (Victoria 71–75) If these classes were in person, there would be some motive (and a change of scenery), but in the modern era of virtual learning, it feels like I must sit through it and the phone is a ready distraction to help alleviate the pain and stress of being stuck at your computer for school all day every day (Victoria 149–151)
Decrease in Participation
The consensus for the experiences in online classes is that they are not as interactive, because there are less opportunities to interact with other students. (Travis 62–3) The switch from on campus learning to holding classes entirely though video conferencing software has wrought havoc on class participation. Many students taking online classes never have their camera on, and some only turn it on for short periods of time. In most classes there are typically under five students with their camera on, no matter how large the class is. Yet, in some classes, the only person with their camera on is the professor. For Travis, “sometimes, no one turns their camera on or participates, it’s only me, but in their classes, more people turn the cameras, which is kind of nice.” (Travis 95) Travis stated that “I feel bad for the instructors sometimes when they are staring at a blank board. Sometimes it’s easier to interact and have a productive class session that mimics the tradition classroom experience by having my camera on” (Travis 100–103) For Victoria, in her “smaller classes, it’s me and like one or two other people who will turn on their camera, but most people are willing to participate.” (Victoria, 42–45) This highlights a strange new culture in the classroom, students who are too shy to participate with their video on or to use their voice but are willing to participate through the chat. Victoria finds that although in the main session most cameras are off, “in breakout rooms, most people do turn on their cameras, and I keep mine on. I participate a lot because no one else really does.” (Victoria, 88–91) As people become more accustomed to Zoom (and probably more desperate for social interactions), the culture around Zoom becomes more solidified in the concept that “if you are in a breakout room, you unmute yourself and turn on your camera. And I think that that’s like becoming a little bit more universal and that’s made it easier as well.” (Victoria 128–130) Both Travis and Victoria are motivated to have their camera on for similar reasons, to replicate the real Zoom experience. I find it strange that the two people that I interview seem to have their camera on a lot, yet most students still keep their cameras off for the majority of synchronous classes. Students seem to have two main motivators for participating and focusing during online classes. The first being the fact that it is “still paying full tuition for the classes for basically doing Khan Academy online. So, I might as well get the most of my learning experience.” (Travis, 133–135) The second being out of respect for the professors, because, again, students are paying to be there to learn from these professors. (Victoria 54)
DESIGN IMPLICATIONS
More than anything, the findings of this study show how truly desolate the social arena looks for college students during the pandemic. Normally college life is typically filled with some of the most social interactions in a student’s developmental life. The decrease in social interactions, which impacts student focus, seems to hinge solely on the new limitations of the era: being stuck in your house due to the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the limitations of engagement that video conferencing services provide. These struggles highlight a key area for design improvement: how to make virtual interactions feel more real, and how to encourage student social interaction despite the barriers presented by online learning in the pandemic. This is a huge design opportunity for software industry professionals as they continue to create software and programs that will facilitate face to face interactions despite not being together in person. Some solutions such as Remo aim to mimic the in-person space by creating a bit of an RPG Pokémon-esque experience. This still utilizes video conferencing though which still limits the degree to which you can interact with other people and participants. Based on the truly astounding burnout that students are feeling towards Zoom, as well as the new standards of attending big lectures without your video on, the methods that are based solely on interaction over video camera seem to be a bit naïve. By understanding student focus participation and distraction, engineers can attempt to build classroom environments for better focusing for students.
This research could also be used to inform the creation of curricula for future online classes, because it is very apparent that we probably will not be back together on campus until at least spring quarter 2021, but more realistically, students will not be back on campus until the fall of 2021. This research on what is distracting to students, and how students handle their focusing while learning from home, could be vital in making changes and accommodations to current class formats in order to be better suited for the online world. This could be through changing the class format from asynchronous to synchronous, changing the type of projects and assessments being given to students, and changing the way that students interact, or even by creating new methods and forums for class participation.
CONCLUSION
The swift and disruptive changes that rocked the world at the start of the novel coronavirus Pandemic had caused intense drastic change in the way that college students attend class. Students moved from in person classes to virtual classes to taking either asynchronous classes or synchronous classes online from their home. Starved of the social and physical interactions of normal college life, student morale and mental health is very low, yet students are still chugging along towards their degree, which led the study to explore this question: how do college students motivate and maintain productivity while learning from home? This study found that focus and learning from home was drastically impacted by four factors: the way in which student separated the space in their home to have distinct areas for study and focus as well as relaxation and decompression, as well as the decrease in accountability that students feel during virtual classes, focusing during class while it is online, changes in what it means to participate in class, and the large effects of zoom burnout. These barriers to focus seem to hinge on the new limitations of the era: being stuck in your house due to the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the limitations of engagement that video conferencing services provide.
The biggest limiting factor of this study is the small sample size. These limited results make the overarching results of this study less generalizable. This study may also have been slightly limited using Zoom as my main platform for interviewing, especially because the physical space seems to have a large impact on the productivity of a student while learning from home. Although I am content with my research question, in further iterations of this study, my interview protocol would contain more questions about the separation of space. Because way that space is divided seemed to have a very large impact on mental health, which is a huge factor in pandemic focus. I would also increase the number of participants and solidify the field observation protocol so that it is only while the student is getting work done for a particular class.
