Entry 15: Infusing Empathy into Digital Pedagogy

Date: June 24,  2025

Quotation: “When we focus solely on performance metrics, we risk treating students like data points not people.”
Reference:
Voth, C. (2025, June 16). 7,000 cases of AI cheating among university students just the ‘tip of the iceberg’. E&T Magazine. arxiv.orgedweek.org+5eandt.theiet.org+5theguardian.com+5

Why I Included This:
This article stakes a claim that massive AI-cheating might reflect broader student stress and disconnection not laziness. It echoes my Module 3 peer Bryton’s observation: rigid metrics can obscure real support needs.

When I read this article, I didn’t immediately focus on the number. What caught my attention was the sentence about students being treated like data points. That line stayed with me. It made me pause and think about how often I have relied on checklists, rubrics, and analytics to understand where my students are. While those tools help with structure, they can sometimes make it easy to lose sight of the learner behind the screen.

The article gave me language for something I have sensed in my teaching. When students stop submitting assignments or seem disengaged, I have often responded with reminders or extra resources. I haven’t always considered what might be happening underneath the surface. The stress, uncertainty, and pressure they are carrying may not show up in the LMS, but they affect everything.

This made me think about our course discussions on the risks and limitations of digital assessment. Timmis et al. (2016) talk about the importance of considering equity and fairness when designing assessment in online settings. I see now that fairness is not just about giving everyone the same thing. It’s also about noticing when students need something different, and creating room for that to happen.

Going forward, I want to be more intentional about how I design assessments and how I interpret participation data. Instead of asking why a student didn’t complete a task, I want to ask what might be getting in the way. I want to create assignments that leave space for reflection, connection, and process not just polished products. I also want to think more about how feedback can support confidence, not just correction.

This entry ties into earlier reflections about digital stress and emotional labor, especially Entry 10. But where that entry focused on the demands I carry as a teacher, this one shifts the focus to the emotional realities students bring into our shared learning space. If learning is relational, then assessment has to reflect that relationship too. I am learning to look beyond the data and to keep students’ humanity at the center of my practice.