Lessons learned from two semesters of online classes
Last year when the pandemic hit, everyone, including myself, was terrified. The thought of “how am I going to get through this academic year” didn’t even materialize in my head till months later. The immediate concerns were about survival. None of us had ever seen anything like this. Even my grandmother, who was staying with us at the time, had never seen anything like this.
But time went on and eventually it was time for the new academic year. It could be put off for only so long. For me, it wasn’t just the beginning of a new academic year, it was also the beginning of a new degree entirely. I was going to study what I had always wanted to study, Astronomy.
Needless to say, the inability to attend class or visit my institute had me very disappointed from the beginning. After all, there is nothing quite like sitting in a class and watching your professors and classmates collectively geeking out about your subject. It is a different sort of experience.
Nevertheless, we persevered. The first couple of months were riddled with technical issues, both on the side of the professors and the students. We were trying to navigate online platforms we had never used, professors were trying to figure out how to teach without a chalkboard. Some even went as far as getting iPads and Apple Pencils or Wacom tablets for teaching.
As the days went by, we developed a system and started seeing the odd benefits of online learning too. We were hardly ever late to class, we could go over our lectures multiple times if necessary to understand a concept, something that would have been either impossible for offline classes or would have involved recording on your own device which professors may have objected to. We were able to attend far more conferences and conclaves because everything was online. We could attend events hosted by other institutes that we couldn’t have in the offline mode.
Having said that, the downsides were many. We had to scan every single sheet of paper for any type of submission, be it for exams or for assignments. Aside from being tedious, it wastes precious time, especially during exams. The absence of libraries has been a major problem. We had almost no access to the usual textbooks (except the few that had been digitized and uploaded by the libraries) and no access to the reading rooms. Many students had to deal with a multitude of familial issues at home alongside their education.
Add to that the issue of a shortened semester. We lost about a month of our semester because of the pandemic. The uncertainty of the situation meant that the semester started late and an already condensed course was condensed to the point of being illegible for most. We had to rush through so many ground-breaking theories and discoveries, that after the semester was over, looking back I felt like the whole duration of the semester was a big blur of nothingness.
But as they say, what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. If one tries to find out the positives of this experience, there are several lessons in self-improvement that pop out. For one, this whole experience has taught most people the true meaning of self-discipline. Without an external schedule to keep you in check (after all, you may or may not attend online classes. There’s nothing stopping you from binging the lectures later on), it really falls on the student to keep themselves in check and get their work done.
From regulating their study schedule to adopting practices that will help productivity, if the pandemic has done one thing, it has made students self-sufficient.
Of course, as we have seen around the world, the pandemic has majorly helped the environment too. More and more people also shifted to a digital workflow to make remote education and work easier (including me). This implies that less paper was used and wasted. Governments and educational institutions learned that working digitally is a perfectly sound solution. This was especially eye-opening for more stubborn systems like we have in India. Change, especially positive change, arrives here slowly. The pandemic showed many offices here that going paperless didn’t have to be a pipe dream anymore. It could be a reality.
I am not saying that the pandemic has advanced the human race in significant ways because it has not. If anything, we have been set back by the host of problems it generated. Millions of people lost their lives and the effects of the loss and the trauma will live on for generations, perhaps. Millions, even billions more are struggling. People are in ten different kinds of pain. There are people who have lost jobs and homes. There are people struggling with their mental health who have lost their support systems.
But just so we can hang on to our sanity while this storm passes, we must be reminded of the good that came out of this horrible situation. It is not the light at the end of the tunnel, because we don’t know when the tunnel ends. But it is the light that illuminates the tunnel.
