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Teaching Tax During a Pandemic Is No Easy Task

Posted on Nov. 30, 2020

Tax law and accounting professors faced daunting challenges getting up to speed on a whole new way of teaching thanks to the coronavirus, but they’re already discovering new techniques that could persist for years to come.

Tax professors who spoke to Tax Notes relayed their experiences adapting to new technology, tools, and expectations, and offered their judgments about what they like — and what they could do without.

For Donald Williamson of American University’s Kogod School of Business, teaching online just isn’t the same as in-person classes. “It’s not as much fun,” he said.

Omri Marian of the University of California-Irvine School of Law was even more blunt: “It’s [expletive],” he concluded, although he acknowledged that the fall semester has been going better than he had expected. Even so, “nothing replaces human interaction in class,” he said.

Meanwhile, ever-present challenges with technology and the general, low-level feeling of anxiety over the pandemic on the part of both students and teachers led Kristin Hickman of the University of Minnesota Law School to adopt a new mantra for herself this semester: “Be flexible, be forgiving, and go with the flow.”

The Human Factor

Part of what Williamson said he loves about his job is getting to know his students, saying that after over 35 years of teaching, he knows people “all over town because they used to be students in my class.” An online-only environment isn’t conducive to developing those personal connections, he said.

Online learning is also far more draining than teaching in person, for both students and faculty, several professors said.

Professors have had to decide between teaching their courses live or in prerecorded lectures, and initially it seemed like teaching live would be a no-brainer and much preferred by students, Williamson said. But that hasn’t been the case, in his experience.

“Students go comatose; they get Zoom fatigue,” Williamson said. “Your attention span on Zoom rapidly deteriorates, more so than [in] a live class.”

Marian echoed that concern, sharing that having to maneuver between the lecture and checking to see if students have questions has been exhausting, even though he teaches only one or two classes each day. “After two hours teaching on Zoom, I’m beat. . . . I can’t imagine what it’s like for students doing it for six or seven hours a day,” he said. “And this is tough stuff! It’s a lot of doctrinal material to absorb.”

Williamson said he’s settled on the “asynchronous” lecture format, in which he prerecords his lectures in roughly eight-minute segments. He said that forces him to be more structured, but added that even so, trying to distill something like the foreign tax credit basket rules into an “eight-minute sound bite is a little tough.” It also doesn’t lend itself well to a question-and-answer format, he said.

Like Marian, Williamson said teaching live online proved to be more draining than teaching in person. He said that while he can handle doing an all-day, in-person continuing professional education event just fine, he’s just as tired from that as he is from teaching a single online class. “The command of your attention, staring at your screen constantly, being on the edge of your seat — it wears you down,” he said.

Marian said he initially considered using a hybrid format — prerecorded lectures, followed by in-class time to solve problems — but it didn’t go over well. “I recorded two lectures. Then I watched my own lectures, and I couldn’t stay awake,” he recalled. “So I figured I won’t inflict that on my students.”

That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, or even done well, Marian continued. “If I had the time and the money to record the lectures as I imagined it, it would be awesome,” but that would require a production company, he said.

Clinton G. Wallace of the University of South Carolina School of Law was cautiously optimistic about how online teaching is going for his students, remarking that while things have progressed fairly smoothly so far, he’s worried it will start to wear on them soon. Students are missing out on real, in-person interaction, and that becomes more pronounced as the semester drags on, he said.

“I realized in a way I didn’t before how social law school is for faculty and for students,” Wallace said. “We all spend a lot of time talking to each other and in each other’s physical presence, and that’s a big part of the experience. It took that being taken away to realize how important that is.”

Hickman said her law school is offering a mix of in-person and online classes, in part to offer students at least some opportunities to interact. “Law school is such a communal experience,” she said, explaining that the connections students create provide support during the academic challenges of school while laying the foundation for a lifelong professional network.

Learning Curve

The pandemic hit midsemester and caught everyone unawares, but professors at least had some time to regroup and get up to speed before the fall semester started.

For Marian, that involved his university putting professors through a sort of summer boot camp during which they spent dozens of hours learning how to teach online, how to use different platforms, how to record and edit video, and more. “It was all kinds of things that you never imagine that you’ll have to learn when you go into the profession,” he said.

This semester, Hickman has found herself teaching in a ballroom that her school has rented from a nearby hotel to allow students to be adequately distanced. The ballroom has worked out great, she said, although she added that she has “a little difficulty reading some of the name cards in the back.”

To accommodate students who aren’t comfortable with or able to attend the in-person setting, Hickman said she uses a system in which the lecture is streamed on Zoom and all students, both in person and online, have Zoom open on their laptops. A teacher’s assistant in the back of the room monitors the video feed of the class, and if an online student has a question, the assistant raises her own hand. Then Hickman calls on the assistant, and the assistant gives the go-ahead to the online student to pose the question via Zoom.

“It’s a little goofy, a little clunky, but it works,” Hickman said.

Wallace said he’s adjusted to the new normal by relocating his typical in-person office hours to a new location: his backyard. “We sit in chairs like 15 feet apart, we bring our tax codes, we stack up the books, and just go at it,” he said. “It’s actually gone pretty well.”

Marian’s version of office hours is a post-class Zoom session in which students who want to talk about something wait in an online waiting room, and then he lets them in one by one. Under this method, more students attend office hours than did with normal physical office hours “by orders of magnitude,” he said.

Accumulating Problems

For some teachers, it’s not one specific issue that makes teaching during a pandemic a challenge; it’s the accumulation of minor problems that create a new, heavy burden.

Hickman explained that just getting to her hybrid in-person class is a challenge by itself. Working from home, she has to pack up all her belongings every time she leaves for class, and that includes packing a small suitcase that includes two laptops, a mask, textbooks, earbuds, various electrical cords, a backup of her slide presentation on a thumb drive in case there’s a glitch, and more. “I go through a mental checklist before I leave the house,” she said.

Before class begins, Hickman said, she needs far more time to set up and test the audio and video equipment to make sure it’s all working properly, and then she has to take it all back down at the end of class.

Another bother for Hickman is that she wears earbuds while teaching so she can hear students on Zoom. Unfortunately, because in-person students also have Zoom running, if an in-person student asks a question, she hears that student, but there’s also a time delay on the earbuds creating an echo because it’s being picked up on Zoom as well.

“It requires a much higher level of focus” Hickman said, noting that she has to stand still with her eyes closed just to comprehend the speaker. “So it’s all kinds of little, stupid things like that just make things so complicated.”

New Virtues

Some tax professors are finding that the new teaching format does have its virtues.

Wallace said his corporate tax class is “well-suited” to the new technologies he’s using for remote learning. For example, he said that in an in-person environment, he would typically have his students work through problems together in class, which often involves drawing diagrams and writing up solutions that a student then has to replicate on the whiteboard at the front of class. “That can be slow and feel a bit coerced,” he said.

But while teaching online, Wallace said he’s been using a shared online whiteboard that the students are all logged into and that everyone can interact with. “It’s smoother than the in-person version with a physical board, and at the end of class, I can save it as a PDF and share it,” he said.

Wallace noted, however, that the benefits of using some of these new online tools and platforms in his corporate tax class probably wouldn’t translate well to other types of classes that involve discussion of more abstract concepts, like constitutional law.

Marian likewise said there are some aspects of online teaching that are praiseworthy. He’s found that using polls during his online classes has helped keep students engaged and facilitate discussion on why students chose specific answers. Marian said his classes also often involve the use of data analytics or natural language processing platforms, and being able to share his screen online lets students see exactly what he’s doing in the program and vice versa.

Marian has also found that reading the tax code in class is easier when everyone can see on the shared screen what section he’s reading from, adding that the program he uses for the code has helpful features, like quick links to definitions of terms and the ability to highlight things. He also pointed to Zoom’s breakout rooms, which allow him to break his class into small groups to work through a problem together. In an in-person class, that can be noisy and distracting, but that problem disappears online, he said.

Many more professors are recording their lectures now, according to Marian, and that takes some of the pressure off, because students can go back if they miss a class or didn’t understand a topic. He said he recorded his lectures pre-pandemic anyway, but noted that he can see that students are accessing his recorded lectures much more often now than they did in the past.

Williamson even suggested that the positive aspects of the online approach to teaching could result in it being the future of graduate education. Unlike the undergraduate years, which are as much about education as they are about transitioning to independence, most graduate students just want the degree, and online school is undoubtedly an efficient way of transmitting information, he said.

Coming Attractions

As students and professors navigate the new normal during the fall semester, they’re also looking ahead to what the spring semester might bring.

Williamson said the Kogod school has decided to go all-online for the next semester, with the exception of one of his courses that involves partnering with a low-income tax clinic to prepare returns. His school is also completely ditching the “synchronous” teaching format in favor of recorded, asynchronous lectures.

Marian said that his university had initially planned to hold class in a mix of online and in-person formats in the spring semester, but recently made the decision to go online-only. 

A decision to hold classes in person should be made only if there is a “serious on-campus component,” according to Marian. To bring them back for just one or two tax classes a week would have been unfair to students, many of whom are currently living at home or elsewhere and would’ve had to relocate before the semester began, he said.

In the meantime, Marian recommended that teachers try to make the best of the new situation and take the time needed to make it work well.

“Yes, it sucks, but think about what you can do with the online platform that you couldn’t do in class,” Marian said. If teachers can do that, he said, “it will give you a little bit of satisfaction that you at least do some things better.”

Follow Jonathan Curry (@jtcurry005) on Twitter for real-time updates.

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