I’m currently in my third year of university and if you would have told me that I was going to be spending the entirety of my third year behind a screen and learning online, I am almost positive I would have cried.
It’s currently October and this is already not the school year I was expecting. I’ve spent the last two years on campus in Toronto having the time of my life, living with one of my best friends, going out every weekend and excelling in my academics. Now, none of these things are possible; I visit my friends as often as I can which turns out to be every few weeks, all bars and clubs have been closed since March and I am no longer excelling in my studies.
I thought online school was going to be a breeze, I was going to have all possible resources at my fingertips and have so much time to complete assignments, but that has not been the case. I am struggling more with online classes than I ever was with in-person classes, which was very strange when I first noticed it. I have lost all motivation to do homework, classes are just background noise and I hand in assignments the day they’re due. I have never been this kind of student, I’ve always been on top of my work and was committed to getting good grades but it’s taken me some time to realize that the world has changed a lot and I am in a completely different place.
At Ryerson, online classes are taught two different ways: synchronous and asynchronous. Synchronous classes require you to log into a Zoom call or just be online at certain times and are being taught by an instructor while asynchronous means that you log-on when you want and modules are released all at once or weekly however you don’t have to be online at a certain time. Most of my classes are asynchronous, which I was very excited about in the beginning, but now I wish they were synchronous. My motivation is already so low when it comes to school and on top of it there isn’t a certain time I should be online, so I tend to just forget about what classes and work I have when and all of my classes just mix in my brain.
I wish I had more synchronous classes because I feel like I would be able to create some sense of routine and maybe be more inclined to attend classes and do my work on time. I feel that there should’ve been an option for students on whether or not they wanted synchronous classes or not because every student is different. Some students are probably wishing they were in the opposite situation because of the way they learn and obtain information. Online school has impacted my grades as well. Before online school, I was an A student, all my grades were in the 80-90 range, but ever since the switch to online, my grades have been in the 65-75 range, which is very out of character for me. I did not expect the amount of work online school was going to require, some of my professors have also been loading students with more work than their required time slot. For one of my two hour classess, there was a nearly two-hour long lecture video, along with three to four thirty-minute episodes as well.
To say the least, these past few months have been a whole new adjustment. First, it was adjusting to life after the pandemic, now it’s time to get ready for the next year, maybe two. If this is how schooling proceeds in the future, I hope students get more of a say in how they want to learn.
To students that are in the same boat as me: it’s important to remember that it’s okay that you feel like you’ve changed. I mean we’re only going through a historic global pandemic, it’s no big deal — not. Times are changing and it’s okay that you are too, I definitely have, maybe not in the ways that I wanted, but I need to acknowledge that I am not the same person I was or the same student. It’s time for me to adjust to this new reality, because who knows how long it’s going to last.