Li, Pitts Examine the Impact of COVID-19 on Teaching and Learning

In their September 2022 publication titled “Against ‘Flexibility’: Tightening the Cage of Academic Rigor with Instructors’ Responsibility and Rationality,” Turner College management information systems faculty Yaojie Li and Jennifer Pitts examine challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to academia.  They explain that the pandemic required additional work from instructors, as the transition from face-to-face instruction to online teaching meant that they had to reorganize learning resources, record videos, deliver virtual lectures, and set up virtual office hours.  At the same time, instructors were faced with infection issues for themselves, and domestic distractions and interruptions, all of which led some instructors to reduce student workloads and offer grade leniency.  In their paper published in Information Systems Education Journal, Li and Pitts refer to this phenomenon as “instructor laxity,” and note that it tends to undermine teaching quality while hindering students’ motivation to pursue academic rigor with enthusiasm.  When encountering instructor laxity, students understand that they can do less or avoid work with minor or minimal punishment (e.g., lower course grades and course failures) because of the loosened course policies implemented by instructors.  When they choose to do less, as many did, “student laxity” emerges.  Given that it originated in this case as a response to instructor laxity, “collusive laxity,” or laxity that exists in both teaching and learning, results.  Even where instructors adhered to strict and rigorous learning requirements and assessments amid the pandemic, a phenomenon Li and Pitts refer to as “instructor strictness,” some students avoided these rigorous learning requirements by using the pandemic as an excuse.  Engaging in such behavior virtually ensured that instructor strictness discontinued.  This result is categorized by Li and Pitts as “discontinued rigor.”   
     

The study offers instructors two methods for avoiding these types of situations.  The first is to devalue the valence of laxity.  This requires an intervention by a series of self-consciousness and self-suggestion when they are conscious of their environment (e.g., how the pandemic influences the learning context and learners) and of themselves (e.g., how should we adapt to this situation).  Another method – extending the psychological distance, includes more practical strategies and tactics.  Here, instructors can manage the hypothetical distance, imagining that an event is likely or unlikely. For instance, if one wanted to become a responsible and respected professor among students – high teaching evaluations, good word-of-mouth, and self-value actualization, then he or she would avoid laxity while moving toward strictness with extra effort. The unlikely circumstances, such as failure to gain tenure or cutoff, will drive an instructor to pursue a high quality of instruction.  Instructors can also “manually” gear the temporal and spatial distances toward strictness rather than laxity. For example, using self-imposed deadlines and schedules.  From this, instructors can visualize future events and detailed procedures to accomplish the goal.

Information Systems Education Journal focuses on information systems education, including (but not limited to) model curriculum, outcomes assessment, distance education challenges, capstone and service learning projects, security, and information system research toward educators.