So How’s Everyone Doing This Semester? Let Me Tell You.
Here’s What Students are Really Thinking About Online Learning.
The date is September 29, 2020. The entire world changed very suddenly for a lot of us almost seven months ago, and now we are sitting around hoping and praying that for some reason, thinks will get back to the way that they were come 2021.
Perhaps one of the groups of people that was most affected by everything going on amid the coronavirus pandemic is college students. The Class of 2020 officially had half of their senior year and their entire graduation derailed, and all of the classes succeeding them are now wondering if they will have to deal with more of the same.
Right now, we are about one-third of the way through our first semester “back on campus” and teachers are starting to ask for feedback. In which case the students in the classroom will reply with very vague and half honest responses of “I like in person better, but I guess it’s not that bad.”
The Truth is… We Don’t Like It.
Whether we are talking about a school that is doing entirely online learning, or doing a “hybrid” model, I can promise you that the students would prefer things be done the way that they were meant to be done. Face to face.
Let’s not forget that online learning isn’t really new at all at this point. We have all had the option to go to college online for a long time now, and in most cases it is cheaper to go that route. That should show us that there is a reason that students are still coming and paying tens of thousands of dollars to attend a school where they will be in the classroom.
There are actually probably hundreds of reasons for students to prefer their in person, physical location schools over online school. Each student is different, of course, and for each and every one of them, they could probably rattle off more reasons than I could fit into this article.
On that note though, allow me to dig into some of the benefits of learning face to face, and some of the issues we are having with virtual learning. Taking all of this from my own perspective as a student, and allowing you to draw the ties between everything.
The Benefits of Being on Campus.
1.) Social Interaction.
Social interaction definitely tops the list for myself and I’m sure most other students that want to be spending their time on campus.
College is really the opportunity for 18–24ish year olds to actually meet new people, make friends, and shoot their brains up with all sorts of feel good chemicals in the process.
College students are also at the age where they are looking to meet men and/or women. Let’s not ignore that. They want to fall in love, and they want to have sex. Maybe in that order, or maybe not. But for students, their college campus is like the jackpot when looking for people to hook up with.
2.) Structure.
At the tender age of 18, we still have absolutely no idea how to manage our day to day lives. Forget 18, actually… Most of us still don’t have this figured out by age 45.
Going to school in person provides students with a lot of structure that they really have no choice to work around. “Be here from this time to this time, and be here from this time to this time. We’ll tell you your next assignment in those time slots.”
I always think about this saying that I read back during my very first year of college:
The best thing about your first year of college is that nobody is telling you what to do.
The worst thing about your first year of college is that nobody is telling you what to do.
I have thought about this so many times ever since I read it, because it resonated so much with me at the time that I had read it.
When we are young adults, and going through these transitions in our lives, we end up in this paradox where we think we want more freedom, but then do everything that we can to get more direction and structure.
Virtual learning actually does provide us with more freedom, but that’s secretly not what anybody wants.
3.) It’s Real… ish.
Frankly, college is not the so called “real world” and you should not think that you have “adulting” figured out when you are an 18–22 year old college student.
Moving off to college does give you a better glimpse into real adult life than, well… rolling out of bed in the morning and flipping on a Zoom call.
Especially for those that actually move AWAY to college. It’s the opportunity to get out of your hometown and realize that there is a whole world out there.
You also start easing into other adult responsibilities like cooking your own food and doing your own laundry at college… although that’s a poor argument because there are much better ways to make that transition in your life.
Now Let’s Take a Look at the Problems with Online Learning.
1.) Technological Literacy.
The first and most noticeable issue that is being faced right now is the sheer amount of people that just can’t for the life of them figure out how to use devices.
- “How do I turn my microphone on?”
- “My webcam ‘isn’t working’ and I don’t know why.”
- “Professor, the assignment you told us was due today closed three days ago on Moodle.”
It seems like the obvious solution to this problem would be more training and/or more experience for people to use these technologies, but the real problem lies in something deeper.
The real problem is that teachers and students alike just don’t care enough to figure out how to do their jobs to the absolute best of their ability, and they know that they can get away with it.
So should we just get a lot more harsh toward people that don’t figure out their devices? No, not at all.
If anything, work needs to be done on making platforms easier to use, and/or helping people understand why they will benefit from doing things correctly.
This problem isn’t going away any time soon though.
2.) There is ZERO Clarity.
The new question for us students to be asked at family gatherings is “how are the teachers doing classes for school? Are they live? Are they prerecorded? etc.?”
The only thing more frustrating than having to answer the same question 17,453 times on each holiday is not actually having an answer to the question.
All of us students have some mixture of every possible way you could imagine administering an online course.
- Live web conferences.
- Pre-recorded video lectures.
- Being bombarded with YouTube links of material to watch.
- Long long chains of emails laying out our assignments for the week.
We are getting all of it, and it seems like absolutely no one has any idea which method is working best, or why they are choosing that method to begin with.
3.) Organization and the Limitations of Technology
No one is having a particularly easy time keeping everything in order in this online environment. There are tools out there to help with organization, but none of them can completely take over for us teachers and students.
That is coupled with assignments being set to close at certain times, open at certain times, etc. All while the computers seem to be doing most of the grading now, and the computers have absolutely zero capacity for empathy or understanding for the students. Thankfully real human professors still have the ability to override the computer in the vast majority of cases.
Like mentioned above, something about being in person and on campus just provides this sense of structure that you cannot get online. That goes for everyone involved, too.
This semester so far has been riddled with late assignments, assignments not showing up, email subject lines that were one letter off, and worst of all, math homework that was marked wrong because you rounded to two decimal places instead of three.
The Bottom Line.
This article is by no means supposed to be a fight against online learning, or one big long complaint about it. However the question does keep coming up of how students are feeling about it, and I know that none of us are giving this kind of honesty in the moment.
Hopefully having an awareness to some of the problems mentioned above can help move us in the right direction of solving these problems over the course of time.
It’s also important to keep in mind the fact that all of the traditional schools doing online learning and hybrid models this semester are really half-assing everything.
Right now it is most people’s expectation that things will get back to “normal” eventually, and realistically we do not know if that is true or not. That could have a huge impact on what sorts of actions we take to make the online learning experience more enjoyable though.
In closing, I think it is important that schools think about how to compete in an online learning environment if they want to see themselves stay alive. There are a good handful of schools that are already established as online schools, and they are much cheaper than most traditional colleges.
Move into the future, if online learning is still the only way to go, there are going to be a lot of colleges that need to bring their prices down drastically in order to compete.
Otherwise everyone will be going to a cheaper school, since everything is online, or they’ll be looking right over school and going into the workforce. Moving everything online has really taken away the little bit of value that traditional colleges are still clinging onto.
