In the first quarter of 2020, Zoom burst into our lives and onto the higher education institution (HEI) scene. Promulgated healthcare regulations led to the suspension of all on-campus activities and classes. In March, a state of disaster and a national lockdown was declared. Much like the rest of the world, South Africa’s educational system had been interrupted. Some universities were able to respond quickly and moved courses directly from face class classes to remote learning. Zoom, for better or worse, stepped in to address a teaching emergency.
This chapter is about my ZoomU journey during this emergency remote teaching, colloquially known as ERT. I intend to focus in on a very small “petri dish”. Namely the design and delivery of three workshops that I planned for a client. I intend to narrate my journey with ZoomU, while supporting lecturers who were shifting their mode of provision from on-campus seminars to online webinars.
Coincidently, as President Cyril Ramaphosa proclaimed the lockdown on the 23 March 2020, I’d been scheduled to run a workshop. A post-graduate centre had begun the process of shifting their lecturers and students away from their face-to-face workshops and towards online alternatives. They requested “professional development” for the whole staff. Later into the pandemic, they’d ask for assistance with teaching online. And now, as campus re-opens and classes resume, I’m intending to consolidate what was learned during the experience and enquire how this affect their future plans
Interest in this cloud-based peer-to-peer video telephony service grew rapidly. TENET signed an agreement that enabled eligible institutions in the higher education and research sectors to make free use of the service. Other institutions purchased their own enterprise license (or made liberal use of the 40 minute freebie). Soon, local academia had begun to use Eric Yuan’s trendy “techno fix”. HEI’s in South Africa had access to an all in one, easy-to-use, reliable and readily available software, suitable for desktop computers, laptops, smart phone and tablets and compatible on all major operating systems. A step up, perhaps, from the institutional LMS? Zoom had became one of the continuity solutions for the disrupted higher ed landscape.
Zoom was one of the many information and communications technology (ICT) services available to maintain “university” operations, even though no one was “on campus” or “in their classrooms”. Within the uncertainty of this time, this platform offered more than the casual conversations or “social talk” (Bleakley, 2021) that conferencing packages were normally used for, prior to the pandemic. Working from remote settings increased feelings of loneliness and social distance. Zoom seemed to offer familiarity and connection to colleagues who were disorientated and adjusting to change. Zoom, in the pandemic, altered the purposes that these mediated conversations. Due to Covid-19, campus pivoted online and the social communication features on Zoom could also be institutionalized. Platforms seemed to offer to
- students, access to an event that was perceived as “attendance”;
- the administrators, unlimited capacity to schedule meetings, arrange a timetable and venue logistics;
- lecturers, a presentation facility that permitted teaching to a class of students who were present.
Those who were looking for to teach a class in real time could make use of built in and embedded suit of tools. A lecturer could safely share their screen, thoughts and content, with the knowledge of security compliance. A variety of mediated interactions, supported by accessibility features and options, improved equitable participation and made the space a place of meaningful possibilities.
The screen, in the absence of physical perimeters (campus gates, fences, walls etc), became the boundaried space, an environment where staff and students could cluster and imitate familiar structures and rituals. Zoom packaged real time and rich interactions, and put “institutional turn taking systems” (interview, classroom, committee meeting) online a clone of “normal” or familiar every-day practices in academia (Bleakley, 2021).
Zoom had a range of features that supported social and institutional chat. Informal and formal turn taking exchanges were possible because of multiple user video and voice calls and group conferencing. The integration of web cameras, codecs and synchronous VOIP, compatible on a range of devices and operating systems, created a contingent space that drew in different actors and interests. Additional functionalities such as screen sharing, file/document distribution, a visible desktop, polling and whiteboards made it feasible for these actors to incorporate Zoom further into their online classes. Informal and two way class interactions were available via group chat and instant messaging offered a social back channel for less scholarly interests. Because Zoom also supported separate audio and video recordings, students, who might have missed class, could download a recording and review what they missed (Abdulkarim, 2021).
In March of 2020, Zoom’s corporate blog reported that more than 200 million participants, both free and paid, had made use of Zoom for meetings. Three months prior, the maximum number of users was 10 million. A remarkable global increase in usage.
There was no single “right” way to shift educational provision away from campus. ERT was about “surviving in a time of crisis with all resources available, including offline and/or online (Bozkurt, 2020). Zoom (or any one of the approximately 20 other online conferencing platforms*) had gone from an occasional novelty to an edtech necessity. ERT had brutally introduced HEI’s to an innovative and digital experience of space. ZoomU allowed HEI’s an environment to meet service delivery expectations. Universities could feasibly close their gates. Displaced staff and students were able to work from home in an alternate space. Just as “Google” entered the lexicon to denote a web search, so “Zoom” became the eponym in higher ed to represent a synchronous online gathering of students and academics.
ZoomU’s growth in popularity was accompanied by an increasing growth in global uncertainty. Emotional trauma and cognitive discomfort led to a desire for structure, control and epistemic coherence in this shifting and flickering space. The seminar format offered a certain academic familiarity. A few scholarly events broadened visible use cases and allowed further consensus to emerge about conditions wherein this niche model may be used. A comparative search using Google trends and the key words “webinar” and “seminar” shows interesting shifts (see image). There’s a massive surge in interest in the keyword “webinar” at the end of March 2020, when lock down measure were announced. Later on, Google trends reveal how Zoom fatigue and pandemic burnout resulted in a steady drop in use of this pandemic pedagogy. In HEI’s where technological infrastructures were available, the initial period of the lockdown was followed by a marked period of emotional fatigue, a sense of overload, stress and burnout. Digital divides, physical and material limits and insufficiant digital pedagogical expertise and shifting this the responsibility across to teachers. They could not go further.
The word “webinar” is a “neologism for a seminar that is offered online” (Garner, 2010). At its simplest, a web-seminar happens online over the Internet, rather than offline in a traditional classroom. (Gegenfurtner & Ebner, 2019). In contrast to a lecture, where information is conveyed by a lecturer and received by student, a seminar (and by inference, its online equivalent, the webinar) sets out to develop an understanding via a flow of exchange between participants.
Whether it was a substitute for the lecture or seminar, Zoom’s offerings unconsciously resonated with academic actors and interests drawn from the global HEI constituency. Zoom’s popularity was reinforced by the ritualized norms of “teacher talk” and “student listen”. The webinar confirmed the accuracy of Conway’s Law – “organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organization”. Isomorphic forces would shift classes online, but ultimately, isomorphic forces would create a copy or clone, and not introduce any meaningful large scale change.
The webinar came about as a result of a continuity crisis, an intersection between of software providers, decision makers, academics and practitioners. Zoom’s in built functionalities drew colleagues, peers or classmates from different geographic locations together and co-located them in an imagined class or virtual campus. This was a solution that offered efficient and accountable mechanisms to address concerns about academic continuity. At its best, ZoomU became a place for teachers to be more present, to make distance disappear an opportunity to design remote experiences where class members might gather, connect, share and learn differently. At its worst, ZoomU was a contractual obligation, filled with dull monologues, directed at passive, isolated and lonely students. No matter which way it is seen, Zoom metamorphosized from a niche within business communications to a globally accepted format, known as the webinar.
* Adobe Connect, Apache Open Meetings, Avaya, BlueJeans, ezTalks Meetings, Google Classroom, Google Hangouts, Google Meet, GoToMeeting, join.me, Life Size, Loop Up, Omni Join, Pexip, Polycom, Ring Central, Skype, Star Leaf, Team Viewer, Vidyo, Webex, Zoom.
[2] Zoom Blog https://blog.zoom.us/a-message-to-our-users/
This is an excerpt for a chapter that I am writing entitled “Designing the Webinar”. It’s about how conferencing technology became ubiquitous during ERT and how our practices were shaped by platforms. It’s about how (with hindsight) might we take on the challenge of instructional design and enacting a suitable teaching methodology.
Abdulkarim, A et al (2021) COVID-19 lockdown and remote attendance: A review of some online pedagogical resources
Boskurt et al (2020) A global outlook to the interruption of education due to COVID-19 Pandemic Navigating in a time of uncertainty and crisis
Garner, B. A. (2010) Webinar https://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28FOBonlanguage-t.html.
Gegenfurtner, A. & Ebner, C. (2019). Webinars in Higher Education and Professional Training: A Meta-Analysis and Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials.