Remote learning was not how I envisioned my college education. Zoom school made going to class in your pajamas a common occurrence. I’m not saying that I ever slept during class with my camera off and microphone muted, but it wasn’t uncommon in less engaging classes.
Looking back, the classes I wanted to sleep through mimicked a typical, pre-pandemic college lecture. I found that the classes were engaging , when my professor took a chance on doing something different. Professors turned courses that would usually have been boring lectures into classes that felt more like book club meetings.
Even exams, the bane of many a college student’s existence, changed; many of my professors adapted their exams to think less about recollection and instead focus on using the material and analyzing its impact. We were not just putting what we were learning on paper— we were utilizing it.
That being said, some things did not translate well to online learning — like science labs— but I found many aspects of online learning at the very least had the potential to work well.
Now we are back in the classroom, but the experimentation that we all engaged in over the past year-and-a-half disappeared. It seems that once we walked back into the classroom, we silently agreed to go back to hour-long lectures and even longer written exams.
I was surprised that many of the classes I was taking from my bedroom were more engaging than the classes I’m sitting in this fall. Foolishly, perhaps, I thought both educators and students had learned that listening to someone lecture for an extended period of time was an outdated and ineffective way to share information. I thought educators learned, as a result of the pandemic, that regurgitating facts, equations and lines of poetry is not the extent of education.
In coming back to campus, we have returned to the tired ways of pre-pandemic teaching— professors lecturing and students cramming until finals. The remote learning experiment is over, and it is time to return to higher-ed as we knew it two years ago.
Though I may be sitting across from and next to my classmates in a lecture, I feel farther away from them than when we were hundreds— if not thousands of miles away on Zoom— but discussing the readings in a breakout room.
This midterm season, I am more worried about acing my exams than actually delving deep into material. Remote, open-book exams were not any easier than in-person, closed-book exams; but they did force me to pay attention to what I was learning in a more meaningful way.
I often find myself in classes wondering: if this class was online, how would it be different? For over a year, educators had the opportunity to try something new, because a half-baked activity was better than sitting silently in front of a laptop. These experimental activities from remote learning are still available to us— so why not integrate them into the physical classroom?
Remote learning was not perfect. But if it did nothing else, it proved one thing: higher education can be different, and it needs to change.
