Ana Dias, Department of Mathematics
In the Fall of 2020, I was happy to have my request for accommodation to teach online granted by the dean of my college. Unfortunately, that initial joy was not indicative of what I was going to face during the semester. Teaching online seems to have somehow caused students to have a bad perception of the way I was treating them, which was a first for me in my eighteen years of CMU. Not that I have not faced challenges in teaching, but they are usually of a different nature. I am consistently noted by students as treating them with respect, and comments in the opinion surveys often include the word “nice” in reference to me.
In the Fall of 2020, the words I received by email were not that positive. In fact, some were downright disrespectful. I had communication problems that left me frustrated to the point of desperation. As you know, chats, emails, and discussion boards are the primary communication channels in online courses. Most of the time, those tools are text-based. And although my syllabus explicitly said, “It is often hard to tell the emotion of a text-based message. Respect others. Like all communication and discussion occasions, use your professionalism and talk to others with respect,” some students seemed not to have “gotten the memo”.
I am very grateful to CIS for listening to my concerns and for offering to try to help me in this problem that, to me, was of a nature different than those tackled by CIS. I was advised to see “tone and various other things as items we have a chance at controlling.” CIS read my syllabi for the following semester and suggested I make them a little more personal by offering some thoughts on why I teach my courses the way I do and what I love about the subject matter. Working with CIS during that time of hardship helped me put it behind me and get ready for the present semester. And although I do not have empirical evidence about the effect of the specific changes I made to the syllabus, just the process of having support in preparation for the new semester was immensely important to me.