By Megan Chan

On February 3rd 2020, all Hong Kong schools entered online distance learning in an effort to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Zoom learning hasn’t changed much in the year since, and it doesn’t seem to be leaving any time soon. 

It hasn’t always been a smooth ride, however — though teachers have tried to set up effective communication with students about what works and what doesn’t, such efforts have continued to cease as the school became more settled with its online routine. There remains a lot left unsaid: ineffective strategies that students were afraid to bring up for fear of causing conflict, teacher behaviours that seem to be underplayed when brought up, or just observations made a little too late. 

27 students spoke their mind on what they wish they could tell their teachers about online learning in an anonymous survey. Here were the most popular responses:

1. Zoom breakout rooms aren’t helpful

Zoom breakout rooms have become a beloved online feature for teachers who wish to simulate the typical in-person group discussion environment. Rather than conducting the entire meeting with all participants in one space, meeting hosts may create smaller rooms to allow multiple ongoing discussions at once — a feature incredibly handy in making group work possible online. 

However, many students reported a negative experience with this feature. “Most of the time, putting us in randomly assigned break-out rooms is absolutely pointless,” noted one student. “In my experience, no one speaks 90% of the time.”

Zoom breakout rooms don’t cultivate fruitful discussion so much as awkward silences and blank stares. More often than not, it only takes a few seconds before all cameras and microphones are shut off for the duration of the entire conversation, leaving nothing accomplished: “My friends and I usually find ourselves in a room where everyone’s cameras are turned off, which makes it hard for us to even discuss our topic.”

Making breakout rooms productive, however, doesn’t have to be a futile effort. Some students suggest creating bigger rooms to combat the problem, while others believe groups should be more carefully constructed: “Students work best with people they're familiar with. Let students choose their own breakout groups to best ensure work efficiency, optimal communication (rather, communication at all), and the best chance of getting something done… don't mess it up for the students who actually want to do something. Let us choose.”

2. Be kinder with your workload and grading — online learning isn’t easy for anyone

School has always been difficult, but it’s become notably more challenging as a result of the pandemic. Unfortunately, the toll of online learning on mental and emotional health, as well as the efficacy of learning over Zoom, has reflected poorly on student performance. 

“Students’ grades would plummet during online learning, especially if we have been running back and forth between Zoom and on-campus school for more than half the year,” one student points out. “I’ve seen lots of teachers being unbelievably forgiving in the interim semester and then suddenly grading (very) strictly, causing dramatic plummets in students’ grades.”

The homework load has also been harsh. “Teachers give homework nearly every lesson, which piles up with the other subjects, as well as giving similar due dates. For example, having them due in the same week or due the very next day/lesson.” 

“It is very hard to learn through a screen, as it is hard for us to understand, as well as the teacher's teaching going too fast, as people are all in different phases of learning. It is harder to reach for help as well, as it is not face to face, and it is harder to explain problems through a screen.”

The adjustment to online learning has been especially stressful for older secondary students, whose COVID-impacted grades entail long-term consequences. Despite the school’s emphasis on the insignificance of grades as an indicator of success, many students remained worried about how COVID may have thwarted their plans: “If universities see the sudden plummet in our grades, they would think that we’re either strange, or not adaptable, or even not smart enough (as almost all they care about is grades, this can’t be denied, and we hate them for it).”

Though there are numerous reasons for why teachers want to keep the online learning environment as similar to normalcy as possible, many also wish for more understanding when it comes to matters like grades and workload: “Teachers could either be more forgiving in grading like they were in interim or understand the current situation with online learning and its obvious effects on students — especially those who are not gifted academically or just forced to study all day in order to achieve 7s.”

3. Be punctual

Students are expected to attend their classes on time, and so should teachers. Though the occasional tardiness is understandable, students were quick to point out that a student being late doesn’t affect anyone else except themselves, while this is rarely the case for teachers. “Some teachers show up late and expect us to stay behind to make up for the time that they caused us to miss,” explains one student. “It would be different if it was after another class, but this often happens during the last lesson, just after the lunch break.” This problem also interferes with the school’s one hour rule, which mandates all classes last only an hour to allow twenty minutes for resting between subjects. 

Punctuality is especially important in instances of in-class assessments that cannot overrun over their allocated two-period slots — not only should teachers be starting the call on time, but they should also be swift in introducing the assignment and maximising working time for students. Punctuality is also important with in-class activities that require some form of prior preparation: “Subjects like PE should give us an earlier notice if we had to workout for that specific lesson so that we could prepare beforehand.”

4. Don’t expose students for unfinished work

Not being able to teach face-to-face has posed several problems, the most glaring of which is a lack of possible follow-up actions for students who fail to complete their work. However, the days of silently pulling a student aside are over — with everyone meeting in the same room, having teachers declare the dreaded list of students is no longer a rarity. In fact, it has become a common practice for teachers to call out students during online class, whether that be directly by name, calling them into a separate breakout room, or screen sharing a list for all to see. As if it weren’t bad enough already, these students now have the blessing of a twenty-something pair of eyes on them. 

“Some teachers fail to recognize that not all students feel comfortable being exposed for not completing something in front of the entire class,” one student writes. 

“It usually causes extreme anxiety, humiliation, and shame — sometimes it feels like they're doing it for this reason. Even being removed and put into a separate break-out room with the other late students can be embarrassing. 

There are better ways to follow up with students than calling them out in front of the entire class and making them objects of spectacle. 

“Always opt for private messaging/non-face-to-face confrontation if you need to tell a student to submit their work on time. Publicly exposing and interrogating them in front of the whole class causes anxiety you can't even imagine.”

However, teachers should also keep in mind the strain online learning can have on students’ emotional and mental health, which in turns affects their discipline and motivation regarding schoolwork. Making them feel humiliated or as though they have failed only exacerbates the problems rather than fixing it.

5. Don’t pressure students to talk or turn on cameras

Mandating cameras to remain on in all classes was an understandable move — it generates student accountability, focus, and keeps them visible much like typical school does. Most students can keep their cameras on with minimal hassle, but it becomes a genuine problem for students who feel as though their excuses are too personal or won’t be taken seriously. 

For some, it’s an issue of technological limits: “It's annoying when you tell us to turn on our cameras. Sure, yes, you see our faces when we're at school, but turning on my camera is absolutely destroying my computer to the point where anything is practically unusable. If I'm trying to type on google docs, it takes seconds for words to actually start appearing. Not only is the computer practically unusable, but the computer itself is also overheating. I can probably make an English breakfast using my computer as the frying pan.”

For others, however, the reason is far more private. Turning your camera on in a video meeting can make one feel as though their every move is being carefully watched and judged, no doubt worsened by the live video of ourselves lingering on every screen corner. “Zoom anxiety” remains a dilemma for many students: “In an online learning environment, students would feel frustrated, even scared, to leave their cameras on throughout the entire lesson (especially when doing speeches or presenting in class)..”

“As teachers, there is also a possibility that there are a couple of students that have social anxiety problems, and I think these students should have more exceptions like presenting only for the teacher at another time, or just recording their presentation outside of school. This can also apply to all students.”

Similar reasons could be extended to microphone usage: “Please don't be offended that no one opens their microphone to reply to you, we really want to but we don't wanna embarrass ourselves by the sounds of our siblings crying in the background.”

Making the options available, being understanding, and presenting yourself as someone approachable and communicative helps students feel more comfortable not only when engaging in class, but to speak up when they have valid reasons not to. 

6. Make classes more interactive

It seems that lectures and worksheets have overpowered the spectrum of online class activities. “My online experience this year has been a lot more dull compared to last year. None of the lessons have been interactive. All of my lessons this year have either just been answering questions/doing work, or the teacher reading off a slide show the entirety of a lesson. 

“My attention span is so short with this and it's not an effective way of learning. Last year some teachers used interactive slide shows, polls, questionnaires and softwares like Pear Deck. I’d like to see that again this year.” 

Simply put, students don’t feel engaged when relegated to passively absorbing information: “it gets boring and hard to focus listening to teachers drone on and on for one hour straight.” Luckily, many accessible online teaching tools have sprung up amidst the year of online learning, providing far more possibilities for what is possible in the classroom. Beloved classics like Kahoot, Padlet, and Quizizz encourage students to be more engaged in their learning by creating a playful environment that actively calls on them to participate. Other resources like Parlay, Peardeck, and fun in-class games, among others, have made occasional appearances in the past and certainly seem welcome to appear more in the future. 

7. Independent work should be prioritised

The earlier reiterations of online learning protocol put much more emphasis on independent learning: work would be assigned at the beginning of every day or week, and students were responsible for pacing themselves when finishing their work. Live lessons were scarce at once a week, leaving students to their own devices for the most part.

This has since changed, with live lessons being mandatory through all eight periods every day with the intent of best resembling a typical school day and preventing students from slacking off on work. This change was not well received by all: “I find the online lessons unnecessary for some subjects because all we do is read the instructions and work on our own, which we could also do in our own time instead of having to have our camera and sit in front of the computer for a whole hour,” comments one student.

Another elaborates that “teachers shouldn't use the whole online lesson talking and they should set independent work for the students to do instead. It's hard to work on the call itself because it feels pressuring so it would be much better if they let us go off the call and set the deadline for the task to the end of the day. They should discuss the relevant concepts that will appear in the worksheet for some part of the call and also not read directly off the slides since they will be given to us anyway.”

For others, staying on the call poses a technological issue as well: “Running Zoom in the background is torture to the computer. What's the point of keeping us in the Zoom call? At that point, we just want to concentrate on what you assigned us to do… you already email us and our parents if we don't hand in our work, so that's a good drive to keep us working.”

Online learning is tough for students as much as it is for teachers. There’s no denying the extra effort teachers have taken to accommodate classwork to fit our unique circumstances, and, for that, many students remain grateful. However, the student experience still vastly differs, and the pressure and unpredictability of our situation have massively impacted the way we approach our learning. 

“Encouraging communication” falls short when it comes to expressing student frustrations, in large part because mostly this requires direct confrontation of a teacher, if not multiple teachers, that could result in futile changes or negative, long-term consequences. And when these concerns are brought up, it can feel as though they are easily dismissed as an irrational, spur-of-the-moment opinion. 

The aforementioned list of statements is important, yes, but it only covers the tip of the iceberg. Don’t expect students to come to you with their problems — make that option available. Create a safe space where students can voice their concerns without feeling as though they would receive repercussions. Create online, anonymous surveys for students to submit feedback on teaching. And above all, be open to constructive criticism: we want our education to be meaningful as much as you do.