The Transition to Online Classes: Two Professors’ Perspectives

This year has been like no other. Faculty have had the difficult task of transitioning their courses to an online format in a way that both engages students and accomplishes the original objectives of the course. In particular, professors who teach core courses and seminars in the Honors College at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) must take a unique approach to online teaching. The Honors College’s core courses offer a focused, in-depth look into unique topics typically not offered in the course catalog, and the instructors often employ distinctive methods to teach these courses. 

Two professors talked with us about their Honors courses and the transition to online teaching this year. Dr. Jeffrey Gore, who taught HON 127 Shakespeare Goes to the Movies: Film Adaptation in the Global Context in Spring 2020, is currently teaching the Honors Course HON 121 Utopias and Dystopias: From the Renaissance to the Handmaid’s Tale in Fall 2020. Another instructor, Dr. David Greenstein, taught HON 201 City at a Crossroads: Local, National, & Global politics in Chicago 1968 in Spring 2020 and is teaching the course HON 126 The Daley’s Chicago: From Midcentury to Global City in Fall 2020. Dr. Greenstein is from the Special Collections and University Archives department and often teaches Honors  courses regarding research surrounding Chicago’s history, while Dr. Gore is from the English department and teaches courses relating to literary analysis. 

In general, both professors have found a successful way to transition their courses online with certain adjustments. They even found certain benefits to the online format that they had not previously considered. For Dr. Greenstein, it was easier to interact with some of his students; office hours are much easier to attend via Zoom rather than physically visiting a location on campus. It was also easier to interact with students who would normally be rather quiet during classes, because these students found  it easier to communicate using chat in Zoom or other forms of online communication. Dr. Gore also noticed similar changes in his interactions with some students. However, although the overall transition has gone well, Dr. Gore says, “We could do our best and still accomplish a lot… yet a lot of times I find myself longing for life on campus too.” 

Dr. Gore brings up a sentiment echoed by both professors. While the online transition was smooth this Fall, both agree that there are aspects of the student experience that simply did not transfer well into an online classroom setup. For example, historical research, particularly experience with primary documents, is a central part of Dr. Greenstein’s class. Normally students get to directly interact with primary source material to do their research. “This was a fun part of the course,” Dr. Greenstein says, “because you get to touch all of the original documents.” Primary sources, such as Jane Addams’s letters from the Hull House Papers, are critical to understanding historical events and developing a relationship with the past. However, he notes that students do not understand what they may be missing with the absence of this experience. Fortunately, they still have access to a large number of scanned primary documents, so student interest in research and engagement in the course has continued.

Regarding student engagement within the classroom, Dr. Gore found a different kind of challenge. When classes began in Fall 2020, Dr. Gore realized that he had to make up for interactions that his students were missing. In general, as a professor teaching an Honors College core class, he found that many of his students were first-year students who had not interacted with each other before and could not form friendships with one another as easily as they had in an in-person setting. “I miss students making friends with each other,” Professor Gore says, remembering how those friendships facilitated conversations in class. Since he realized that he has been tasked with trying to build student relationships at a time when that was not easy, he has been facilitating this process during class. In class he interacts with his students by putting questions in the chat. After they answer, he will select a few student responses to facilitate a class discussion. Compared to his Spring 2020 course, this was a marked difference in student experience, because in his “classes last spring… they already had their friendships going.”

Professor Gore says  that the Spring 2020 semester required professors to quickly adapt their courses without much prior planning. Modifying a research-based history course that heavily depended on primary source documents was a challenge at first. Dr. Greenstein had to get creative in devising assignments that did not require access to UIC’s Special Collections library. Instead of a final project using primary sources, Dr. Greenstein cleverly created a project where students would find a way to record their experiences during a pandemic and create their own primary sources that others may discover in the future.  “Students had to collect materials that they thought could be relevant to future research about the COVID-19 pandemic, to donate to the university archives,” he explains. While “archives usually collect information related to people in power,” Dr. Greenstein notes  that his students analyzed underrepresented voices in history. 

His comment strikes a more political chord of classroom discussions in these times. While the nation is going through a pandemic, there has also been a tense political and social climate this year. Dr. Gore similarly reflected on the relevance of current events to his course on dystopian literature. In his current Honors class, Dr. Gore discusses dystopian novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Plot Against America, and 1984. All of these novels bring the audience’s attention to concerns regarding something very personal to each and every reader: the current. He has found that now, more than ever, “a lot of these novels lend themselves to current events,” and this relevance has been, an interesting thing to investigate with his students this semester. However, he admits that “sometimes my students are a little bit shy to talk about contemporary politics.” Professor Gore takes this into account and strikes a balance between focusing solely on the subject matter and making connections to current events. There may be cautiousness on the part of  minority students, he mentions, because “the public discourse…has not always been welcoming.” 

Overall, both professors have found that adapting their Honors College classes to the online format was successful. While there were certain challenges, Dr. Greenstein and Dr. Gore have found unique ways to engage their students and continue to meet the original objectives of their courses. In the abrupt transition of the Spring 2020 semester, some ingenuity led to creating distinctive projects which could not be replicated. Similarly, the numerous current events of this year provided a unique insight into the timely relevance of literature. While both professors certainly miss the benefits of teaching an in-person class which truly cannot be replaced by online teaching, they are quite optimistic about teaching their Spring 2021 Honors College courses online. After a semester of online teaching with prepared content, they are confident that their Spring 2021 classes will adapt just as well. As many students and teachers have heard in countless emails, these are truly “unprecedented times.” But with optimism, effort, and creativity, Dr. Gore, Dr. Greenstein, and the other Honors college instructors are well equipped to manage this transition.