NIH wonders: ‘should we keep meeting this way?’
This year has marked the first time in the NIH Center for Scientific Review’s 75 years in which review committee meetings have not been held in person. Instead, like many things in our current COVID world, their lives are online. As a result, the Center wondered what should they keep doing after the pandemic, and what should be scrapped. To address this, they surveyed over 3,000 NIH reviewers and an additional 230 scientific review officers. You can find a detailed description of the study here. What did they find?
In response to the prompts “Contributed to Discussion”, “Confident Voicing Opinions”, “Others Responsive to My Feedback”, “Clearly Communicated Opinions”, and “Comfort Voting Outside Range”, respondents overwhelmingly responded that they feel the same in online settings as they do in in-person. To the prompt “Attention Span Lasted”, respondents who voted that they felt the same were still in the majority, but those who felt their attention span was slightly less were close behind. Overall, however, both reviewers and scientific review officers preferred in-person meetings to those online (43% to 31%, reviewers; 44% to 36%, scientific review officers).
So, what does this tell us? In many ways, I wasn’t too surprised by this. I myself am working from home now, and at the time of writing this have been working from home for roughly nine months. At this point, I think we’ve gotten down a lot of the basics of Zoom (or Skype or Teams…). I, too, feel confident expressing my opinions in online meetings. I, too, feel others are responsive to my feedback. I, too, find my attention span to be diminished. And, I also would like to go back into an office at some point. I think what this is showing is the demand for ‘social presence’. In eLearning literature, social presence is thought of as “the degree to which a learner feels personally connected with other students and the instructor in an online learning community” (Sung & Mayer, 2012, p. 1738). Many in the eLearning community work to find ways in which social presence can be enhanced in online settings. What is often found is, despite improvements, there seems to be no substitute for actually being there. This isn’t true in all cases. For example, as the NIH’s study found, we can feel equally as if we can contribute to the conversation. But, maybe in the end we still are left to feel a bit unsatisfied. I know that that’s where I’m at these days, and it’s why I’m hoping for a day in the near future where I can make the trip back into the office (with a few work from home days worked in, of course :)
Sung, E., & Mayer, R.E. (2012). Five facets of social presence in online distance education. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(5), 1738-1747.