Working and Learning Remotely: Does It Work?
By Jennifer Robinette
I board a flight in the morning and then another in the mid-morning. My commute takes half a day by air. I live approximately 300 miles from where I work, with close family ties and relationships. I love traveling to Dillingham to work in person. When I am not working there, I am working and learning from home. I moved from Tampa to Dillingham because I wanted to get back to Alaska. My first born, Charles, and I lived with my Grandma for about six weeks before I found a place to move into with Charles and his dad. I started falling in love with it. I was not born and raised with a subsistence lifestyle and I felt its magic working on me and I felt seen and understood for the first time in my life. I’d get these profound feelings of belonging from being in the right place at the right time. After my grant-funded job ended, I found another one just in time. I started working for the Ekuk Village council. The Ekuk Tribe is a displaced tribe that was moved from Ekuk to Dillingham in the 1960s when the school shut down. I got to spend the summer days flying to Ekuk during salmon season and I fell in love with that place and the tribal members. I felt really fortunate to have a job that was both in an office and outside. The job came with the benefit that further education was encouraged.
Remote school has been around for quite some time. I remember students posting mail for distance delivery. That model seemed geared to very disciplined students. Colleges and universities began offering more remote learning opportunities during the pandemic with an increase to 98% learning online options in 2020. Before that, it was about 28% remote learning. Alaska has the highest rate of online students at approximately 68%. UAF statistics show that 30% of all credits before Covid were online – now it is up to 45%. Continuing education in rural areas has really benefited from remote learning. I began remote learning when I lived in Dillingham in 2011. Even when teachers and professors were stationed there, they were offering the class to the wider Bristol Bay community and would hold class online as well as in person. I was initially skeptical about online learning. I thought the classes wouldn’t be as rigorous, challenging, or interesting as in-person classes. However, my experience has proved otherwise. For me, this has been a game changer for raising kids while earning a degree. I can live and work where I have the family support I need to focus on school and work, knowing that my kids are cared for whether they are with me or with my parents. In fact, students retain 25- 60% more information with online class compared to 8-10% information retained in the classroom. I don’t need to live in Fairbanks to earn my degree and I can raise my family in the community I like. When I was younger, I was a little too caught up in other things to really enjoy community life on campus. As I look back, I would tell myself to enjoy those other things, make friends, and be a part of campus life. However, now that there has been a big move to online learning and teaching, things have really taken off and have become much brighter for me.
I moved from Dillingham to live closer to my parents. The Ekuk Village Council administrator called me up to help with a problem they’d run into. I started working remotely for the first time in March 2016 in a temporary, part-time position. As time ticked by, I started filling that role full-time. I’ve worked remotely for almost seven years now. Currently, approximately 26% of Americans work remotely at least part time. The growth of working remotely over the past five years has risen 44%. Not to mention, remote workers are 60% more productive.
I knew online work and learning was possible with the type of work I was doing with the technology that I was familiar with. In a normal year, I am writing grants and managing projects I won funding for. I traveled to Dillingham and Ekuk regularly for either administering projects and doing research for the next project needed, like erosion protection or the new landfill. I work for a tribe in the environmental program. For the first three years or so, I had a fear that I’d get fired for living so far away. Then it switched from fear to guilt because I know that living in the local area has a positive economic impact, which I was not contributing to. However, it was pointed out to me that the tribe was indeed happy with me because I knew their environmental priorities and I worked well independently. It has been easy for me to finish projects from a distance. During the pandemic, I was unable to travel in for work; I came up with other projects instead. The first one was an emergency kit sent to every tribal member’s household. You should have seen my garage! It was packed to the ceiling in boxes for a weekend, until I labeled them and sent them out in batches of seven, which was all my car could haul to the post office. The next one was a subsistence care package. Tribal members got a choice in beading, gardening, hunting, berry and plant harvesting packages. All were sent out. By this time, I felt really disconnected from the tribe and the land. I have recently accepted a remote job from Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and now Ekuk can hire locally.
Although I’d been traveling more often to Dillingham and Ekuk, there is a disconnect. Covid, the initial catalyst for the big spike in working remotely, and going to school remotely, has really left lots of people hurting. I see tribal members still recovering socially and I believe there are tribal members I worked closely with who are ready for an Environmental Coordinator to work locally. We also lost an administrator just as the news of the pandemic was spreading. In a short period of time, our bookkeeper, who was living in Kansas, was hired as a remote administrator. At the time, it seemed like a smart idea, as so many organizations started having employees work remotely. However, having two employees of a three employee pool working from afar disjointed our small tribal community.
I’ve also seen the other side of the coin when remote work doesn’t work for someone. They don’t trust their employees who also work remotely. There is a misunderstanding about the amount of work they are demanding of employees. Some personalities just don’t know how to share responsibility and adding distance can add stress to those challenges. I’ve noticed that some will take on more work than the day can allow for, leaving them working late into the night and feeling resentful when no one notices what they do. One thing I struggle with is asking for help. When I do work in person, I do better at talking through what I am capable of doing and what I can’t, and from there, it is easier to ask for help.
With all my experience of working and learning remotely, I have to say that it has prepared me to keep moving in this direction. Agencies, colleges, and other places are allowing people to continue to work remotely and learn remotely. I have my training for this, and now I can move into a place where I am able to work on behalf of more tribes from home.
Some key things that will make a remote worker and learner the best they can be: an interest in what they are learning, good reasons why they're learning or working remotely, connection to the land and people they work for, trust in those working out of sight, and a healthy learning/work life balance.
Works Cited:
https://codesubmit.io/blog/remote-work-statistics/
https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/online-learning-statistics/