Georgetown, like most universities in the US, is currently delivering its educational mission largely through faculty and students using internet-based platforms. Canvas and Zoom, supplemented with various social media tools, have replaced face-to-face class meetings and in-person faculty office hours. There are currently no face-to-face ongoing class meetings at Georgetown.
Returning students, those who experienced in-person classes through mid-March, had a chance to meet other students, form social and intellectual bonds. Entering students in the fall, however, don’t enjoy these past bonds.
Thus, there are special issues for new students, both undergraduates and graduate. They enter a new culture, foreign to their prior experiences. Most know no one else entering the university at a similar level. These students are now taking courses, mostly from their own homes, via remote learning platforms.
Georgetown mounted wonderful efforts to create a virtual New Student Orientations for both undergraduate and graduate students. All the academic and nonacademic components of the University were presented; the Jesuit values were communicated; the spirit of the university was relayed by students in diverse programs. Breakout rooms of students were used to help prompt some bonding among students. Student mentoring connections were made for some. Student clubs had virtual fairs to help welcome new students to their organizations.
But, hearing from new students and, sometimes, their parents suggests that we have more work to do now that classes have begun. We need more to counter the tendencies for new students to feel isolated in their homes as they pursue their studies by themselves.
So, what can faculty and students do to enhance the boding among us that normally occurs through face to face contact?
On the faculty side, we have great insights from CNDLS observations of the course of the Spring instructional experiences and their knowledge of the pedagogical literatures regarding online instruction. The website here is filled with ideas about how to build community: giving students agency to help guide their learning, sharing responsibility with students in collaborative activities within the course, designing group assignments in a way that has clear roles for each group member, having faculty actively participate in student discussion boards, having a real presence with repeated feedback to students; scheduling office hours with individual students; reaching out to discuss individual student concerns/hopes/anxieties; incorporating “well-being” exercises into the beginning of classes; openly seeking identification of what concepts/lessons didn’t work for students. A key message is to mix up the activities inside a class meeting, for example, eschewing the 2.5-hour lecture as unsuited to the medium, and seeking multiple ways inside each meeting to tackle the material.
In our surveys of students, all evidence points to the fact that the impact of the instructor on the engagement of students is even more important in remote learning versus in-persons instruction. Faculty can greatly decrease student feelings of isolation. Having faculty use course exercises to increase the bonds among students and between students and faculty can be powerful tools to address isolation.
On the student side, new students can reduce feelings of isolation by their own actions. Reach out to other students in the class; form your own study groups; find a buddy in the class with shared concerns. Students who reach out to faculty to discuss not just the class but their other interests will discover caring adults who want them to succeed. The faculty are filled with wisdom about how to navigate studies; they are there to help students in that navigation. New students need to know that many others in their entering cohort also seek closer ties with fellow students. For shy students, it is difficult to reach out, but it’s clearly worth the effort.
Over the decades, Georgetown has accepted into its programs cohorts of students who form deep interpersonal connections that enrich their lives. We are the same community as before COVID-19; reaching out to each other to seek those traditional connections needs new methods, but we can do it.