Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly all activities invaded the online domain, education included. Even today, several countries continue to enforce lockdown measures preventing schools, colleges, and universities from operating at full capacity. Initially, the hard pivot to online learning in a matter of weeks brought with it unprecedented challenges — from professors scrambling to make their lecture content Zoom-friendly to students trying to focus despite sitting in front of the screen for hours on end.
As with all new paradigms, some were motivated to subvert the effective use of the internet to transmit knowledge. One of the earliest accounts to emerge was school children in Wuhan, China, downvoting a homework app to remove it from the app store; although the app continued to remain available, it was a coordinated and innovative effort to display student agency during a confusing (and possibly frustrating) time.
The sudden rise of virtual classrooms opened new avenues for disrupting learning and teaching. Numerous features of online video conferencing services were introduced or modified in reaction to misbehaviors, such as students renaming themselves in class to cause distractions. Anecdotally, there have also been students who use creative virtual backgrounds to appear to be present in class — but that’s only if they have their videos on. Appearances can be deceptive and pretending to be in class when you’re actually not can be construed as creative resistance (or finding new ways to resist learning in physical or virtual classrooms). In fact, falsifying attendance (and getting away with it) seems to be rather ingenious.
Early on, security and privacy became areas of contention as well — for the first time, students and teachers encroached into each others’ personal spaces, and consistently so. The option to turn off the microphone and/or video was used frequently by students, not a novel behavior but certainly a counterproductive one. Ask any professor how it felt/feels to deliver a lecture to their computer screen with no feedback whatsoever!
Remote learning also permitted the more obvious form of resistance to learning: cheating. Owing to the removal of institutional constraints, both physical and psychological, students may have experienced greater freedom to resort to conventional forms of academic dishonesty. Oftentimes, scarcity fuels creativity, and in a way, students in virtual classrooms had the latitude to cheat the way they wanted, be it contract cheating (paying someone to do your assignment), sharing assignments, or even plagiarism.
Original harm occurred when exam proctoring started getting outsourced to third-party organizations. Stemming from a hyper-surveillance and distrust mentality, students (at nearly all levels of education) were required to take exams in exam-like settings — even from home. Online proctoring, at times, entailed switching on the computer camera to find a complete stranger at the other end, entrusted with the task to surveil your behavior during the exam. Often reframed as a state-of-the-art monitoring solution, it is easy to empathize with the students at the receiving end of such observation. However, when the proctors are sexual predators, it yields a recipe for novel disaster.
Female students at an Indian management school were victims of inappropriate comments via third-party proctors during their online exams. The breach of conduct was so severe that some of the perpetrators took advantage of having the students' personal details to contact them outside of the exam session. It is clear that this kind of inventive harm has dire psychological effects. But have we been too quick to adopt online tools, which, under the garb of benefitting the online classroom, actually detract from not only learning but general well-being?
Coping with online formal education is a difficult task for all stakeholders involved. As we evolve with the changing face of education during the pandemic, it is important to consider that dark creativity can spring up in the most surprising of ways. This means that it is necessary to be more mindful of unintended consequences emerging from uninformed, hasty educational policies.
(This article was first published on Psychology Today on 3rd February 2021. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/dark-creativity/202102/virtual-classrooms-bring-opportunities-darker-forms-creativity)
Hansika Kapoor
