As most San Jose State classes remain online for the Fall 2020 semester, students and professors say remote teaching has hindered the quality of instruction.
Justice studies senior Sydney Sandoval said her professors’ technical difficulties routinely divert the class who all have to wait and offer support through Zoom before the class can start.
She said she has noticed a double standard between professors and students, with professors saying they will not accept technical difficulties as an excuse for late work yet they can't even operate Zoom.
“It's annoying when professors have the ‘I will not accept technical difficulties as an excuse’ attitude but they can barely start class on zoom,” Sandoval said over the phone.
Some professors said they are also unhappy about the suspension of in-person teaching.
Julia Curry, a Chicana and Chicano studies professor, said even with the support offered by the university, professors are struggling to adjust to remote teaching.
”The university is doing what they can publicity-wise to say ‘Look, we had faculty take this instruction so everything is great, we helped them’ . . . but it's not really seamless,” Curry said over Zoom. “You may have a great laptop, but if you have bad internet there's no way around that.”
Curry said her colleagues have faced struggles with teaching through Zoom since last semester.
“In March when professors were first transitioning, I was in the [Instructional Research Center] and about 14 or 15 professors came in asking ‘What is Zoom and how do we do it?’ ” she said. “It made me feel really bad for them because they didn't even know what Zoom was.”
Professors also said they have to spend more time on lesson planning to ensure they are ready to lead online lectures because they have lost access to campus resources.
“Now I feel like for a 40-minute lecture, I have to do like six hours of preparation as far as setting up slides, working out the scanning with my phone and then transferring and making sure everything is okay,” Curry said. “I can't just use the department scanner or just go to the library and do the work that I need to do and I’m sure that's true for everybody.”
However, Yoshimitsu Shimazu, a world languages and literature professor, said over Zoom that professors have no other choice but to learn to teach remotely.
“We were all forced to use online teaching but what can we do? We do what we must to survive,” he said. “We got Zoom training over the summer but that was also virtual.”
Shimazu said he has been teaching at SJSU since 1999 and was the first professor on campus to teach Japanese online. He then conducted a study from 1999 to 2004 on the effectiveness of online learning through his Japanese classes.
“[In the study], I found that students did better with in-person classes. They were less likely to drop the class and received higher test scores,” he said. “Online testing is ineffective, humans cannot be tested on the quantitative level like that . . . I feel bad for the students still paying so much money, [classes] should be in person.”
According to the SJSU Bursar’s Office website, SJSU has made no reductions to tuition fees this semester compared to last Fall semester.
California State University Chancellor Timothy P. White said during a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee hearing on July 7, that classes may remain online until the end of the academic year.
Erica Diaz, political science and Chicana and Chicano studies senior, said she is not looking forward to the next semester of online classes.
“It's frustrating because distance learning is so hard for me,” she said. “Just knowing that there’s another semester of it makes me dread next semester.”
