Incivility in Online Classes

The odd semester for the academic year 2020-21 at IIT Kanpur commenced on the 1st of September in an unprecedented completely online mode of instruction. All the courses of this semester are being hosted on the ‘Hello IITK’ platform, powered by mooKIT, wherein all the necessary announcements, recorded lectures, assignments and other materials are released by the professor. Apart from this, courses have an allocated discussion and tutorial hour every week hosted on Zoom allowing the students to discuss their doubts with the professors and tutors in real-time.

The sudden shift to the novel teaching methodology on a large scale has presented an utterly new spectrum of difficulties – both logistical and technical. While the challenges are being tackled by the professors and teaching assistants to provide a smooth learning experience, the alarming number of instances of misconduct and indecency by a handful of students in online spaces have made the journey increasingly irksome for them and for the majority of students trying to pay attention.

Zoom has a feature that allows call participants to annotate the screen shared by the presenter. While this feature aims to achieve a collaborative environment, some students have found inappropriate uses for it. We have screenshots from multiple classes across all batches where students have drawn random stuff to disrupt the flow of the content being taught. In a few cases, people wrote words on the screen with the clear intention of disrespecting the professor and expressing their discontentment with the course content. In one specific case, a student drew the outline of male genitalia on the screen while the professor was teaching. 

The messaging option on zoom has resulted in excessive spamming by students on completely unrelated and irrelevant topics wherein they directly address the professor and ask them to divert their attention to problems like unbanning PUBG. 

On a more serious note, in a tutorial being taught by a female TA, a student asked the TA on the chat to turn her camera on and give a better explanation using facial expressions. While this text could be well-intentioned, the perception and reaction on social media attributed it as a laughing matter. 

In a few instances, the medium of verbal communication was utilised as well. Few students ask doubts completely unrelated to the course content or academics to waste time, leaving professors confused. There have been incidents where a student has hurled abuses and insolent statements directed at the professor, asking them to “shut up”. In one class, participants could hear something which reportedly sounded like a noise sexual in nature coming from a random profile present there. Whether it was intentional or not is debatable.

The veil that allows students to get away with such actions is the anonymity that Zoom can offer if you simply change your name. Multiple such profiles have been observed in classes with names formed with abusive and offensive words. There have also been instances of students changing their profile picture on Zoom to lewd photographs. 

Some classes have also witnessed disruption by people not from IITK who infiltrated the discussion after a friend of theirs gave them the link. While the identity could not be ascertained but links were shared only on closed forums so it may be speculated that the aforementioned ‘friend’ here is a part of the student community.

Instances like these not only damage the experience of the online semester but also talk volumes about the need to start a conversation on civility in our campus. While the lack of civility is a very general problem, it has amplified and managed to enter our classes in the current scenario due to the lack of accountability. The institute has not yet released a structured set of repercussions for acts specific to the online semester, however, the general rules against misconduct in offline classes are still applicable.

Credits: Ankur Banga, Aditya Trivedi