By Vincent Nicandro, Aditya Khandelwal and Alex Weitzman

In the face of the current global pandemic, professors around the world have had no choice but to
migrate their teaching environments to Zoom. While faculty adjust to a new way of teaching, students
have had to adjust to a new way of learning. In the meantime, at Stanford, students have begun
requesting a new type of accommodation from the Office of Accessible Education: a letter that allows
them to turn off their camera during class.

Carleigh Kude, the Assistant Director for Disability Advising at OAE, reported that this type of request
has come from students in a variety of circumstances — not just students with disabilities:

We have students who are parents, whose children need homeschooling. We have students who don’t
have a room in which they can close the door. We have students who are couchsurfing, or students with
very personal home environments, and students across the world 13 hours ahead of time, who would
wake up their family if they talked. There are really an infinite number of reasons why a student would
be struggling through this [pandemic] and with engagement requirements right now.

The need for these accommodation requests stems from mandatory video policies in individual classes,
instituted by professors who are hoping to retain some level of normalcy in this very abnormal situation.
When asked why their professors defended such policies, students quoted a variety of reasons.

Ryan Lewis, a junior at the University of Southern California, notes, “My professor says seeing student
faces is more conducive to a teaching environment that fosters collaboration. He also says he misses
us.”

Joey Schwartz, a junior at Pitzer College, recounts, “I think it’s to check our behavior during class. Since
classes at Claremont Colleges are small, we’ve had to turn on our video during sections and language
classes for a participation grade.”

Most students report that their professors justify mandatory camera policies with some form of
surveying the classroom for participation, attention and sentiment check. But mandatory video policies
in class are not an appropriate solution to student attention — especially amid a global pandemic, when
the negative effects of such policies are clear. We ran a survey of 46 students across the country, and
two-thirds of our respondents reported they have been in a situation where they felt uncomfortable
having their camera on in class. When asked why, respondents said they were self-conscious about
being seen in class, weren’t in private spaces and/or didn’t want to show their current living situations.
Petrina Kuo, a senior and international student at USC, reported a confusion we’ve seen from several
other students regarding the consequences of turning off her camera: “No one knows what the
punishment is to have our video turned off. I guess the professor is going to reduce our participation
grade, or maybe they’ll call us out during lecture.” Kuo also believes that having video turned on is
counterproductive to the goal of learning in class, stating, “I find myself distracted with all my friends’
faces when I have my video turned on, especially since it’s been months since I last saw them in person.”

We saw this sentiment further reflected in the experiences of a diverse range of students. Anu
Khandelwal, a sophomore at Ashoka University in India, finds herself constantly peeking at herself or her
classmates during online lectures. “It is quite hard,” she says, “to not instinctively pay attention to all the
people I haven’t seen in months.”

With this transition to online everything, students have been forced to uncomfortably blend the
academic, professional and social worlds, and they now spend time in front of their screens much longer
than they normally would. This unprecedented amount of time on video has led to a phenomenon
called “Zoom fatigue.”

Zoom fatigue is exacerbated by the fact that video calls are very different than in-person
communication, and humans aren’t used to relying on video-based calls so heavily. Dr. Scott Debb, the
chair of the M.S. program in cyberpsychology at Norfolk State University (NSU), explained to us that over
Zoom, a large amount of body language is lost, draining energy from students.

“We’re spending a lot of mental energy filling in these non-verbal blanks, and it’s using up our mental
resources to pay attention, to figure out what we can contribute to the meeting,” Debb said.

In addition to the effort to fill in these “blanks,” students’ Zoom fatigue is intensified by the feeling of
being looked at while also looking at themselves. In an article for The Wall Street Journal, Stanford
communications professor Jeremy Bailenson reports that the “constant gaze” put on students in Zoom
settings can lead to heightened attention, but at a cost. Referencing an experiment at Stanford,
Bailenson notes that “the learners reported being very uncomfortable getting stared at for an entire
lesson.”
Other educators agree: in a recent Twitter thread, online learning and trauma expert Karen Costa
quoted research on stress induced by self-perception, stating that “Zooming with the camera on is like
having to stare at yourself in a mirror while also seeing everyone else stare at you. It’s like a mirror
squared.” The “mirror squared” experience can cause difficulties for those with anxiety, body
dysmorphia and trauma. With trauma even more widespread today
due to the crisis, Costa emphasized to us that it is especially important now to be sensitive and flexible
with students.

Debb added that students who are scared to publicize their disabilities are especially vulnerable. Debb is
a professor himself, and he has never enforced camera usage in his class. From the lens of equity,
enforced camera usage in class can be especially problematic for those from low-income backgrounds.
Not only might they be in a space they don’t want to broadcast to their peers, but they might have
existing responsibilities, especially during the crisis. Debb has specialized in researching the digital
experiences of minority students in particular, since a large percentage of the student body at NSU is
first-generation. He notes that “it’s a privilege to be a student that can dedicate every waking moment
to their studies,” which limits students with side jobs or other financial or family priorities from fully
investing in class attendance during the pandemic.

Guides published by the Center for Teaching and Learning at Stanford emphasize the need to “normalize
the many reasons students might prefer to keep their video off, such as poor bandwidth, not wanting
visual distraction, or not wanting to share their current environment.” Unfortunately, this
recommendation isn’t echoed in any resources or guides published by the Vice Provost for Technology
and Learning, nor has it been adhered to by all professors. From the survey, we’ve identified cases in
which professors called out students who didn’t have their video on, singling them out in front of their
fellow classmates.

Let us be clear: we’re not asking for a one-size-fits-all solution. There are classes where a lack of video
wouldn’t support a class environment, like small discussion-based sections or art practicums. However,
we strongly encourage professors to have empathy and understanding when it comes to students’
situations, and we discourage mandatory camera policies whenever possible.

When designing your course, ask yourself: What do I want students to get out of the class? Are videos
essential or even helpful to the learning objectives of your course? Can I do it some other way? Costa
recommends a range of other ways to keep students engaged, from using Zoom features like chats and
polls to foster discussion and feedback, to running asynchronous activities which can be submitted by
students without the use of a camera.
“We recommend gracious and flexible behavior from professors while we address case-by-case
accommodations. Be gracious to your students, but be gracious to yourself, too. This is hard on
everyone, faculty and students alike,” Kude advocates. “But students should also recognize that they are
adults, and should take a break when they need to.”

Melody Yang, Stanford ’21, agrees. “It’s not fair for us to be compelled to turn our video on, but no one
wants to be in this situation right now,” they said. “But when you have five-plus hours of classes and
club meetings in front of the camera, at the end of the day I’m so tired and don’t want to be here. I stop
processing.”

Although nothing is set in stone yet, departments are already anticipating a fall quarter that may be
partially or completely remote like this one. For this summer (and whether fall is remote or not), we can
only hope that we learn from our mistakes this past quarter so that everyone can have a better
experience in the future.