“On-Screen” Versus “In-Person” Learning Related Student Expectations and Apprehensions

Abstract

Instructors handling courses during the sudden onset of the Covid-19 pandemic had to display the Senge (1990) learning agility to respond swiftly to student concerns following the abrupt change from dorm and campus to home and screen. Based on 55 combined years of teaching in business management programmes, we believe that the real questions go beyond the in-person versus on-screen debate. The fortuitous circumstances provided an action research opportunity to deeper concerns through the lens of what Freire (1993, p.52) conceptualized as the “narration sickness” of the “banking concept of education” Data was collected via Zoom using semi-structured conversational interviews from twenty six under-graduate students majoring in Business Management from a college in Pennsylvania. Four sources of narration sickness - learning delivery, social isolation and loneliness, student disconnect from learning content and organizational-managerial process constraints – suggest that the debate goes beyond the in-person versus on-screen preoccupation. The four insights suggest that the mitigation of narrative sickness could be achieved through the organization of in class experiences which engage with the world through problem posing methodologies, dialogic modes of shared exploration, point of engagement autonomy and responsive agility, and an atmosphere of continuous experimentation and innovation. The design of learning engagements as dialogic opportunities transcending the teacher-student contradiction, and as an exploration of the world together with students as co-learners and co-creators of deeply compassionate understanding of problems, could bring the romance of learning back into the class room irrespective of mode of delivery. Narration sickness can indeed be mitigated.