The current global pandemic has been challenging for people from all walks of life. As a student, there are unique challenges that comes with learning in an online environment that many students and faculty have never experienced before. My experiences learning in an online environment has been far from smooth sailing. For me, I far enjoyed the structure and familiarity that came from learning in person. While online does allow the flexibility to watch lecture videos at any time and focus on certain classes whenever one pleases, this flexibility could be self-destructive and lead to major procrastination. In addition, sometimes professors, aware of this very flexibility, post their lecture videos at times that don't align with students' chosen schedule. For instance, I had one professor that would post their lectures sometime in the afternoon on the day we would have lectures. This inconsistency makes following a consistent schedule very difficult and promotes, in a way, to procrastinate on watching lecture videos. Admittedly, though, lecture videos can come with many benefits. Being able to watch, rewatch, pause, and rewind are a great boon that comes with online. And for the professors that may talk a little slow, watching at increased speed can make the class much more engaging and bearable.

It's also heartbreaking to see how online affects teachers as well. With so little time to prepare and transition all of their learning material to a new online format, many professors were simply unprepared or underprepared. Online quizzes administered through elms has been a nightmare, as one of my professors has put it, for many of my classes. There has been many times where I have not been able to scan and upload my work in time before website kicks me out. In addition the UI for elms makes the problems for elms impossible to read. All this causes frustration for both the students and the professors. Many student forums contained students addressing their discontent. I have seen a lot of posts on piazza for one of my classes calling administration of the class disastrous and "unacceptable". I feel for the professors during this time because they must be just as frustrated, if not more, of the current situation and the challenges of managing a class and administering tests. I was a teaching assistant for introduction to arch

A lot of the stress of this semester was mitigated this semester by the fact that there was a pass/fail option. In the following semester, hopefully the classes will have all adjusted by then so that the classes go smoothly enough that, in the case that there is no pass/fail option, learning and exams can be done as well as possible. To that affect I greatly appreciated my Linear Algebra class because the tests were open note and over the course of a 24 hour period. I honestly felt like I learned a lot from the class and did it all without feeling extremely overwhelmed like in some of my other classes. For the next semester I would suggest having exams with ample time to complete them and with a difficulty that is on par with previous semesters. I think raising the difficulty of tests to combat academic dishonesty is completely the wrong move. If anything, an action like that only punishes those who study normally and take the test. I believe next semester many classes will learn from their mistakes and be able to adapt their expectations and their course structure to more fit the needs of online classes if we happen to have to have another semester of it.