This week we talked about the impact that covid-19 had on the education system, and how it forced classrooms to shift to an online learning model. This online learning model opened up the doors to new opportunities for various types of synchronous and asynchronous learning. While this model allowed for a new flexibility of learning, it also came with many drawbacks such as a lack of social connection, or a lack of a familiar structure.

I was lucky, because I avoided “Zoom school” through my degree. I started my degree in 2015 and paused in 2018, not returning until 2021, after the pandemic had shut down classes,  and the world had started to adjust to a new system of learning. But as a result, I developed a unique perspective of only seeing the before and after of exclusively online learning, rather than during. I saw a pre and post covid world of education and how the university had changed its structure of lecturing, and assessing work. I was very lucky because I was not one of the online learning Guinea Pigs, but rather, someone who got the hybrid learning in the years after. Here are some of the main things that I noticed:

  1. Access to material changed

Before covid, if you were sick, you had to reach out to another student to learn what information you had missed in class. You needed to collect their notes, or meet up with the professor in their office hours to catch up. However, after covid, the University became more understanding of students missing class. A majority of Professors realized that they could make their lectures accessible to students who had to miss their lectures via Zoom recording, or even just posting their lecture slides online.

  1. Assessment had changed

The shift to online classes mean the end to in-person exams as we know them. Because students could no longer sit in a room and write an exam that was guarenteed to be written completley from memory, the assessment methods had to change, and those changes stuck even in the years following the return to in person classes. From the time that I return to my degree to it’s completion, I took 24 courses, and only ONE of those had an in-person, question-based exam, three had in-person final essays, and the other 20 had a variation of either a take home exam, which was essentially an essay prompt that you had between 3 days and a week to complete, or, simply a final essay due during the exam period.

Photo by Nguyen Dang Hoang Nhu on Unsplash

Overall, I think it was definitely something that I had to get used to when I came back to school. While I initially hated the shift from in-person exams to online essay based exams, I think that it actually helped my grades and allowed me to have a stronger grasp of the material, especially in things like History and English degrees. It allowed me to actually engage in the material and ask questions, rather than memorize simple facts that would leave my head just a month after the exam was over. In addition, having access to lecture slides and recordings has been an amazing development for me. While at times it gave me a weak excuse for why I was skipping class, it was also an amazing resource for studying, and allowed me to stay home from class if I wasn’t feeling great, without the stress of what I could be missing. I think it was a much needed shift in how we think about accessibility in the classrooms, which ties perfectly into next weeks topic…