Covid and learning

    The Covid-19 pandemic has made a lot of things a lot more difficult, a main difficulty being the way we learn. Moving almost everything online has been a challenge for everyone, and now that I have experienced both within this pandemic, I believe that learning in college classes online is much harder than learning in high school classes online. Not to say that learning online in high school isn’t hard. I think the stakes are just much higher in college, so it makes it much more scary and almost exhausting. I’m going to base this response around the difficulties of online learning in college. 

     First off, Covid-19 has done anything but provided an equal opportunity for learning. I have even faced some of these difficulties first hand. Coming in to UK, I was provided a “free” iPad to complete my school work. I came to realize that even with the iPad I still need a laptop which I do not own at the moment. Consequentially, it had become increasingly difficult to complete some of my online labs, take notes, multi-task during lecture zooms, etc. I currently do not have the money to pay for a laptop right now, and I am sure this is an issue for many other students. There absolutely should be a hardship clause for education during this pandemic and not just for this reason. 

    I have found for myself and others that learning in college online is almost equivalent to teaching the content to yourself. This makes it much more difficult to complete homework and other assignments in a timely manner because teaching yourself is known to take a lot longer than being taught to in regards to retaining specific important information that you didn’t know before. I know that for at least most of the general chemistry classes at UK there isn’t even a zoom lecture. The class is what they call ‘asynchronous’, so we are instructed to watch videos that “teach” the content, but there is one big problem with these videos that I and many others have experienced. There is not way to ask questions during this type of lecture, AND there are questions that pop up in the middle of the video about the content you learned 10 seconds before that you must answer before moving on to the rest of the video. And it gets worse... IT IS GRADED. This makes it extremely hard to maintain a high grade in these classes because it is really hard to answer some of these questions right after you have learned the content without being able to ask questions while you are doing it. There aren’t usually many questions embedded within each video, so if you miss one or two, you are already at or below a 50% for the assignment which really shouldn’t be an assignment because it is supposed to be a form of lecture for the class. 

    Other issues come into play when we look at people with ADD or ADHD. A lot of times it is extremely difficult for these people to sit in the same place and stare at the same monotonous screen all day. It makes it extremely hard to focus and therefore increasingly difficult to retain information. And, I assume this isn’t just an issue for people that have learning disabilities or anything else.

    It is really almost enraging seeing many other countries being able to continue with face to face classes because their governments are doing better at keeping the virus under control. I hope that the US will be able to start to control things better so that we don’t have to suffer from the many difficulties of learning and teaching ourselves online. I am afraid that it may make this generation less competitive for careers in the future, but then again, maybe we are developing more individual skills that those before us didn’t have because we are learning more independently. This is something we can’t really predict right now; I think we will have to wait and see what the results come of this.