Zooming in to class: Virtual and in-person learning at Westminster College

Several students hang back after a playwriting class with Dr. Nate Leonard.
Several students hang back after a playwriting class with Dr. Nate Leonard.

When Nate Leonard stepped in to the classroom Thursday afternoon to teach his playwriting class at Westminster College, he knew some of the seats would remain empty.

Instead of trekking onto campus and up the stairs to grab a seat beside masked and socially distant peers, some of Leonard's students stayed home. But that doesn't mean they missed class.

Leonard still had to teach the virtual students and keep them engaged through a computer screen - a difficult juggling act educators across the country have found themselves experimenting in. For Leonard, Westminster's recent technological overhaul made it a little easier.

The college has outfitted 18 classrooms with Zoom Room technology - each has microphones and cameras to help students learning remotely see and hear what is going on in the classroom and screens mounted around the room where in-person students can see their remote classmates.

Before the system was introduced with cameras, microphones and big screens, virtual students were relegated to an iPad screen, strategically propped up to have as much of the class in view as possible. Due to the pandemic, students might have to stay home if they are sick or in quarantine.

"It's very easy to forget about them," Leonard said. "It's also very easy for them to just check out - for them to feel disconnected from what's happening in the class."

After his first taste of the new technology, Leonard, an associate professor of English, called it "immensely better."

"They can hear everything we talk about in class and they can participate in discussion and all of that kind of stuff," Leonard said. "It's really cool - and that's really what the system is kind of really for, this ability to integrate virtual participants with live participants at the same time."

Large sound strips serve as microphones and speakers.

"The microphones are actually able to isolate and track different voices in the room," Leonard said. "It adjusts the volume so that the person who's virtual can hear everybody."

A handful of students gathered in the classroom after Leonard's playwriting class agreed Zoom Room method was an improvement to the traditional Zoom call.

Student April Sita said she was the one on the computer screen earlier in the semester, before Zoom Room was implemented. The circumstances weren't ideal for learning.

"It was so hard to hear people speaking just off the iPad and when I was Zooming in - everyone was in-person and I was Zooming in - trying to hear people was impossible," Sita said. "It makes it a lot easier to interact with our classmates who are on Zoom. It feels like they're almost in the room."

Generally, outcomes for virtual classes tend to be lower than in-person education experiences. But Leonard said it hasn't been as bad as he feared.

"What we've seen is in the classes that we've been offering the last two semesters, I wouldn't say that our students are performing as well as they normally do, but we're not seeing the type of horrifying failure rates that we might have expected to have," Leonard said.

Leonard said the new technology helps address one of the struggles of virtual learning.

"There's this tendency when people are in Zoom where they feel invisible," Leonard said.

It's harder to get virtual students to engage and participate in class discussions.

"When you have live students, they engage and in some cases that actually encourages the virtual students to engage," Leonard said. "It's easier to get that kind of back and forth a little bit in this type of environment than it is in a pure Zoom environment."

Coming in to the pandemic and virtual learning, Westminster had an advantage - through the Digital Blue program, every student has access to an iPad.

"Digital Blue basically saved last semester," Leonard said. "And this semester, I feel like the pandemic has pushed us to use those devices in an even more full, complete way."

Leonard has been involved with the Digital Blue initiative for years. He said equity was one of the main reasons behind the move to ensure every student has a device.

Leonard said technology initiatives are sometimes more about saving money than education.

"What I love about the iPad stuff we're doing is that it's not about that at all," Leonard said. "What it's about is adding functional depth, being able to do things in the classroom that I couldn't do before, giving me options in the ways that I teach that allow me to engage with students that's better and more effective."

Leonard said Westminster's efforts to ease the difficulties of juggling in-person and virtual learners represents a greater commitment to education.

"What I really think is great about this technology, but is also great about what Westminster been doing generally on this front, is that we've really tried to lean into the idea that we're trying to deliver a liberal arts style education through an online medium," Leonard said. "We're trying to do it in a way that really replicates what our standard classroom experiences is like. I think that's been a lot of what has made it successful."