COVID-19, or coronavirus as everyone calls it, has very suddenly and severely disrupted everyday life for most people. The job-less population has risen to around 15%, and millions of students have been mandated to stay at home, rather than learning in a classroom. This is a difficult time for everybody, and in this essay I will shed some light on my experiences being a University student during the pandemic. First off, I will explain from my point of view the transition from in class learning to online learning. When we got back to school at the end of January, everyone was excited for a great spring semester. Coronavirus was still mainly in China, and the whole United States, especially the government seemed unconcerned, at least from the people's perspectives. The semester was going great for around a month, and then the threat suddenly got real. Teachers were unprepared, faculty were unprepared, students were unprepared for the complete unexpected life change ahead. Teachers had to rush to put classes online, learn how to lecture, and grade, all in an online setting. Some classes were much easier to move online than others, and that shows greatly in the quality of lectures and student assistance. Some of the difficulties I experience moving to an online environment were for sure in part due to the lack of training some of my teachers had in conducting classes online. Some of the teachers that had great lectures in person struggled to effectively teach until they got the hang of the online environment (a couple of weeks). Technical difficulties also plagued a lot of the lectures. Missing audio, handwriting that went off the camera view, and some errors in teaching that would have been caught by a student if the lecture were live. Some other challenges that I experienced were the increase in overall work/difficulty of work. I only experienced this in one of my classes, but it seemed that since we were not in person for him to check out understanding, the professor felt that it was necessary to give us more difficult problem sets, and at a higher frequency. Despite the present faults of online learning, there are some things that have worked well. One thing that I appreciate is the full use of the online classroom environment for assignments and such. Before this transition, my classes were more on and off in terms of using the online classroom. Some assignments would be posted on there with their due dates, and others not at all where we would have to just remember when they were due. This transition has made it so the calendar on elms has most if not all of my due assignments and quizzes which has been very convenient. This has helped a lot of people stay on track and I think it's something that teachers should keep doing even after we move back into the in-person environment. Another thing that has been working well is the convergence of students to help each other. Since everything has moved online, I have seen a surge of group chats being created on a per class level, so when people need help they turn to their peers for assistance. This has made it so students don't feel as if they are learning alone, which is a good thing since quarantine has halted pretty much all in-person social interaction. Some improvements that would help as a student would definitely be an improvement of online lecturing tools. An improvement in lecturing tools, i'm not sure exactly what, would allow students to be more engaged in the lectures and therefore have a higher chance of retaining the information presented. If we were forced to have another partial or whole semester at home, I would like to see professors as a whole be better prepared for online learning, whether it be online lecture training, or modifying their curriculum to better suit an online environment. Personally, I don't find myself doing too many things differently in a future online semester. I plan to keep doing assignments well ahead of time, and utilizing the available resources and help from friends. Overall the move to an online learning environment has been a pretty rough one likely due to the panic state as a result of the on-going pandemic. There have been many issues with online classes, but it may be possible to mitigate these in a future online semester with better training or preparedness.
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