Structure and Community Can Be Powerful Methods to Address Student Isolation and Promote Learning in Online and In-Person Classes

I taught two courses this past spring, one on the sociology of policing and another on the sociology of social justice. To decide how to teach these courses, I reviewed some of the surveys that had been conducted about the undergraduate student experience during the pandemic and reached out to a few students on my campus to identify the challenges they had been facing. Two issues quickly came into sharp relief. First, students felt a strong sense of isolation. They were taking their courses alone in a variety of settings with little or no interaction with their peers. Second, students found it difficult to preserve their motivation and keep up with the readings in the absence of a schedule of regular assignments and synchronous class meetings. Some students mentioned that they were simply overwhelmed by other responsibilities and challenges, so if a reading or recorded lecture wasn’t tied to a specific assignment, they often had no choice but to invest their time elsewhere. As has been well documented, these issues have disproportionately affected minoritized students.

I wanted to organize my courses in way that would avoid these issues. It seemed to me that the key lied in creating a learning process that promoted collaborative learning and provided students with a fair and reasonable assignment schedule that incentivized them to keep up with the readings. The first decision I made was to teach my courses in a remote synchronous format. Synchronous class discussions would give us the opportunity to get to know each other and build a strong sense of community.

The next key component of the learning process was the assignment schedule. My classes met on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Students had to hand in reading notes every Tuesday for the readings that we covered that day. For this assignment, they had to answer 2-3 concrete substantive questions about the