by Madison Rafter
With the rapid pressure on the education system to produce an online curriculum due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many students have been complaining about the lack of organization and communication from their professors during this transition. While many students were asking for a switch in format with the increased risk of coronavirus, it seems now that many have changed their minds now that the new learning system has been put into place.
The suddenness of the transition may have affected how students perceived this change in instructional mode. As professors were not prepared to have to transition so quickly into a new method of learning and were caught off guard by the declarations of their universities and/or state governments, so were their pupils. Many college students are also feeling the struggles of teaching themselves. Even with doing the assigned readings, it is difficult to keep up on assignments, quizzes, and discussion boards for upwards of four classes for full-time students. As a result, student bodies have been petitioning for the opportunity to transition to pass/fail grading systems due to the struggles of online learning. This is no isolated incident among higher educational institutions either, as all levels of education are struggling with this new adjustment.
One third grade teacher I interviewed, who spends her time on Zoom once a week wrangling in the children, said that she cannot teach the kids in the conference calls because the kids cannot sit still and are distracted by one another. The teacher’s biggest concern was the physical inability to see if individual students were actually learning as she stated, “with little kids you need to look at [their] faces and adapt your learning. You teach to kids, not a book or lesson, and if you look at them you can see if they understand or are overwhelmed. But when not physically in front of them I can’t help them.”
But it is impractical for the teacher to teach them one-on-one. In response, the school district provided curriculum for the students, but many teachers feel that the packet provided insufficient learning information for students and parents. The third grade teacher mentioned earlier also wants people to understand, as she says, that “all teachers are at different parts of the curriculum, so [teachers] can’t just go by the blanket curriculum given by the district. Everybody teaches at different speeds due to different needs in their classes. It’s not one size fits all.”
More unnecessary work is being unloaded onto teachers and professors as they have to adapt their curriculum to each set of students, whether it be in different academic years or different sections of the same class. Individual sets of students understand things differently, and it’s the job of the instructor to make sure they’re each being taught effectively. Some students, such as those on the Instagram page cppconfession, where students confess to being unable to finish their work due to courseload and a lack of connection with the professors, who have struggled to adjust their instruction accordingly.
Online classes designed for such a format, such as summer and winter classes, can be beneficial for students who cannot make it to the physical location or have other commitments during the scheduled time. This is not the case for classes that were face-to-face just a couple of weeks prior to the transition. That is because they were meant to be taught with discussion elements, such as literature classes, or to be more hands on such as laboratories and other practical courses with hands-on elements. Education during the coronavirus pandemic has been a universal struggle due to a lack of preparation, but hopefully this will be a lesson for everyone to be better preparedness in for similar situations in the future.
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