Presence and Integrity in Online Learning

• 02/12/24

Grush: Then what about the end of the class? There must be ways you incorporate the theatrical idea in closing… not only for the day, but for the entire semester.

Campbell: Yes, of course. This does extend all the way from the integrity of the moment to the integrity of the whole course.

I will always end a class meeting by recapping a little bit of what we've learned that day, and then telling them that I hope the rest of their day goes well and I look forward to seeing them again on whatever the next meeting day is going to be. And I ask them to take care of themselves.

All these little rituals give the experience integrity. We are there. We are who we say we are.

All these little rituals give the experience integrity. We are there. We are who we say we are.

Grush: Then what about the actual end of the semester?

Campbell: Ah! The digital gift day! I originally came to this particular ritual at the end of the classes when were fully online because of the lockdown, in the spring of 2020.

We were all living in a lot of uncertainty. It was a frightening time. It was a time when we had seen a major disruption in the ordinary course of things in our classroom meetings.

I thought that there had to be a way for us to celebrate and mark the conclusion of our time together as a class. I thought about the course of study we'd completed as having its own kind of integrity as an experience. We all went on this journey together. And we made it to this moment, this time when we disembark from the good ship Zoom and go forward in our lives.

So to try to make the moment as memorable as possible, I put together a kind of a highlights reel, as we used to call them, a little video that I would be able to share with the class that would trace the whole experience that we had over the past 15 weeks.

I wanted this farewell to include more than just my gift to them. I wanted the students to be involved as well. So I kind of rolled it all together into this idea of a digital gift day. The last day of class, we would all come together for our last meeting, and during that meeting, we would have a kind of online party. And we would all bring presents. What would the presents be? Each of the students would bring what I called a digital gift that would be a way of saying "Thank you, and fare thee well." Not to me, though they could do that if they liked. But the primary focus was for them to say thank you to their classmates. They have been there, truly present, for you. This again gets back to the idea of integrity.

The students responded in amazing ways. Many of them would bring their pets, lots of cats, and so there were many comments in the chat that started off with "Aww." A few dogs, the occasional guinea pig, stuffed animals, posters, action figures… Sometimes people would write little poems. Then at the end of it all, I would play the highlights reel, the little digital gift video I had made — the movie of our time together that says, "Look how far we've come." I want them to know that I may have been the director, but I'm not the play, and they're not simply the audience. We created this semester-long experience by being together, present to each other.

These are just a few of the ways I've tried to amplify a sense of presence, to be where and who we say we are, and make integrity central to what I try to do in my work online in teaching and learning.

[Editor's note: Images courtesy Gardner Campbell. You can view a recent end-of-semester movie posted at Dr. Campbell's blog site.]