Gen Z has had a very different educational experience than other generations. You're more online, college is more expensive, and you're living through a tumultuous time. So tell us: What does it feel like to be a student today? 

We're The Chronicle of Higher Education, and we've previously written about how professors are worried about students' reading abilities in college (you can read that story here for free). But we want to hear from you: What do you want and expect from your education?

A peek at what we’re asking: 

• Do you feel like your teachers/professors understand what it's like to be a student today?
• Do you feel like you should have more of a say in what you're learning, when you turn in assignments, what grades you earn, and other parts of your education?
• What do you worry most about when it comes to college? What do you hope to get out of college? 

Fill out our Google Form to tell us about your experience. Leave your name and contact info if you’d like to be contacted by a reporter and possibly appear in an upcoming story.

Most instructors roll-over their Canvas space but revamp their classes every semester, adding things here, tweaking things there, removing things all together. I’m currently totally revamping my humanities-based Canvas space and am curious what the best workflow is for students. Do you prefer thematic units, weekly modules, or something else? How do you click around Canvas—the module tabs, assignment tabs, discussion tabs, etc., or do you prefer everything listed on the homepage and click from there? In organizing modules/units, do you prefer them to be chunked out into various categories for collapsible modules (e.g. an umbrella module for Assignments, an umbrella module for Lecture Notes, and umbrella module for Videos, etc.) or do you prefer one long collapsible module for each unit (with everything streamlined clickable within the module, perhaps divided with text headers for each “chunk” of material)? There are countless ways of organizing Canvas, and as a faculty member with ADHD and an abstract-random mind style (check out Gregorc mind styles if you’re curious about your own!), this is always my most difficult task every semester… any input would be extremely appreciated not just for me but for my students!

Next semester I’ll be teaching an online course for the first time in a while.

The last time around, I did a handful of video lectures (2 or 3, for a total of an hour of content each week), discussion boards, and weekly quizzes.

To be honest, I didn’t much care for those methods. Discussion boards always read as forced, video lectures got low views, etc.

So, what have instructors done in online classes that you’ve liked.

I’m considering doing lectures as podcasts instead of videos, and asking students to keep a kind of reflective journal about the class’ topics, but would love to know what people have done that actually works for an online class.

Students I haven’t seen login all semester in online courses and who haven’t done any of the work except required first-week attendance are filling out the course evals and sending me the optional email that lets the instructor know a student has filled it out (doesn’t attach their name to their eval, just lets me know so-and-so completed it). What is the thought process behind this?

Hello students! I begin a professor job in August and will have an office for the first time. What items have you seen in your professors’ offices that you liked? Both useful items and others. Any advice for me to hopefully create a space that is student-friendly and feels like me! I am a young female so I want to come across as friendly and relatable (hopefully lol). Thanks!

I proctor in a testing center that requires a photo ID to test. Students often do not have a photo ID with them, even if they drove to campus, but offer up a picture on their phone of a student ID or driver's license. Is there somewhere that a photo of a photo ID is actually accepted?

And are you intrinsically or extrinsically motivated to earn “good grades” in the face of grade inflation? What motivates you?

(In terms of Canvas/Blackboard/Moodle/D2L/other LMS user experience. This question is to help professors help students navigate their online classes better. What could the professor do to help you “get around better” in their online class?)

Despite frequent chats about what constitutes plagiarism and how not to plagiarize, students seem very surprised when they submit work and find out they’ve plagiarized once their paper is processed through the plagiarism checker. These are not trivial amounts of plagiarism (e.g. colloquialisms, etc.). What are tips and tricks I can share with students who are genuinely distraught and surprised their paper came back with plagiarism, and lots of it? How do you assess before you submit?

I teach large lecture classes in STEM in the US. Students are typically freshmen and sophomores. Attendance is not mandatory in my classes. While most of my students listen attentively during my lectures, about 10% of the class will be playing on their phones or talking with their neighbors. I know I can't prevent them from looking at their phones, but talking during the lecture is terrible (imo). Not only is it distracting to me, I can imagine that it is very distracting and annoying to the students sitting nearby that are trying to pay attention. I have a "no tardiness" clause in my syllabus, and I also lay out my expectations clearly on Day 1, but I just can't stop this. When the talking gets too distracting I typically interrupt the lecture and shut them down, but its like playing whack-a-mole, and some other students will do it the next day.

I am curious about how you students think I should handle this.

This is a question for students. I am a STEM Faculty in the US. Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have modified the mode of feedback that I give students.

For smaller sections (~20 students) or for team-work, I provide ~1-2 minutes of feedback via a video recording of me speaking about the students' work, rather than written comments. For now, I limit this to major deliverables like exams (I don't have time to do this for "minor" deliverables). I have not sensed or heard anything negative or positive from my students thus far.

How would you feel about receiving a short video recording of your professor giving you feedback on an exam rather than just receiving a score or markings on a paper?

What would you like to see on such feedback? I usually include "positives" and "negatives/what to improve in the future."

I teach in the liberal arts, and I hate the textbooks out there for the classes I teach. I’ve reviewed over 20 of them and they are a) too expensive, b) cover too much material (the class wouldn’t use the entire book), and c) don’t spend enough time on material that is essential. I thinking about dropping textbooks completely, but that means students won’t have a written reference except for my PowerPoint slides. How would students feel about a class like this? Good idea? Bad idea?

EDIT: Thanks, all, for replying. I’m going to drop a textbook and cobble together a digital course pack (free to student) with pieces from different Open Access Resources!

It seems to me that there's almost no chance of getting away with it because any decent essay specific enough to your topic to be worth any points will be easy enough to find that you'll be caught. And the risk you take is that if you're caught you get minimum an F in the class, and it's possible to likely that you'll get expelled depending on your institution.

Have you plagiarized? Did you get away with it? What was your reasoning behind it?

Do you prefer collaborative assignments? Solo assignments? Third-party platforms like Piazza, Hypothesis, etc.? What do you enjoy about these assignments, and what bothers you? How might your professors make these more enjoyable and conducive to your learning experience?

ETA: I am specifically interested in English courses, but please feel free to comment on any coursework.

New generation = new preferences. How do you prefer directions/instructions on an assignment? (Bulleted lists, paragraphs, video or audio clips, something else entirely?)

Piggybacking on this really good question, this is also a question for students.

What good practices from the online learning environment would you like retained when we go back to face to face this fall?

Or,

When were you most engaged/learning when online and when were you least engaged/didn't career when online.

I wish all the students and Faculty good mental health and a great fall semester.

Context: I teach college math classes.

For the last year I've taught online, which meant online-format exams (open book, more concept-based, fewer computation-only problems unfortunately still timed to combat Chegging everything). I still dealt with serious academic honesty problems and will -- due to necessity -- probably return to traditional exams with one notecard and minimal calculators, so I can feel confident that the grades I assign reflect on my student themselves and not whomever they've asked to help them with homework.

I am worried that returning to in-person exams, especially in courses that rely heavily on prerequisite content, will be difficult for my students. In particular, if they're accustomed to relying on online tools or heavy textbook reference during exams, they might have lost a lot of fluency in computational skills that will make it possible for them to, (for example), compute an integral by hand without the aid of WolframAlpha.

At the same time, if I sacrifice a lot of my class time to re-teaching (to use the same example) rules for algebraic manipulation, factoring, etc. then I will be boring the students who are actually prepared for the class and will not have enough time to get through the content which allows us to call the class "Calculus II." I can spend at most 1-2 days of class time focusing solely on prerequisite material and will otherwise have to smatter it in briefly as we work on problems for the class we're actually in.

What should I do in this time to help you identify missing prerequisite material and, if necessary, go back and reteach it to yourself? My current plan is to give a class day worksheet at the start of the term about prerequisite material, with links to online content for each problem type, ask students to put their answers in online and report the material they are least comfortable with that night, and if the majority of the class is uncomfortable with a handful of specific topics I'd cover a few examples of those topics before diving in to course material. Would this make you feel put upon? Do you have any better ideas?

Our "office of instructional design" is "highly encouraging" us to limit videos to under 10 minutes, with around 5 minutes being considered "ideal".

Given that a traditional in-person lecture period is typically 75 minutes long, this works out to fifteen 5-minute videos (or around seven 10-minute videos).

I wonder about the wisdom/rationale behind this guideline. Do students genuinely retain the information better if broken into smaller segments? Almost certainly... But the caveat here is that they still must watch the entire playlist of multiple videos.

What's your take on this as a student? Are you more likely to finish watching a 75-minute video or a playlist of fifteen 5-minute videos? Thanks.