Today: Mar 28, 2024

Preparing for online

Donovan WilsonReporter

As the academic year nears Thanksgiving break, students and staff alike prepare to go home and carry on with classes entirely online.

Due to COVID-19, the campus will not risk anyone going home for a week and then bringing back disease. Instead, everyone will work online much like last semester for the last couple weeks of the academic year.

“The university as a whole, and my classes in particular, seem a lot more prepared to enter online compared to last semester. Last year we were pretty much just thrown into it, but this year we know what to expect and we knew it was coming. Many of my teachers have already made their assignments and they have accommodated them to be done online,” said history secondary education major Adam Pelz, a junior.

In March of this same year, COVID-19 caused the world to enter a lockdown phase which sent the whole campus home just before spring break. However, rather than having the semester just end there, all classes resumed entirely online. The last couple weeks of this semester will run very much the same way.

Many students had difficulty learning and adapting to the entirely online model. This was due to the fact that most assignments were designed with a classroom element in mind and didn’t have time to adapt to the online model seamlessly. Professors had time this year to tailor those last few weeks of assignments to being online.

“I think everyone’s more prepared than last semester. I think last semester was harder to do because no one really knew what to do and it felt like professors were just giving work to finish the semester. I think this semester they will be more prepared as they know it’s coming and it’s going to be a lot better,” said nursing major Naissie Dumarsais, a sophomore.

Many classes this year, regardless of being on campus or not, have incorporated elements of online teaching in some way. Most on-site classes have an element of being a hybrid class, which means its partially online and partially in person. There are many teachers still teaching online-only and honing in on that skill.

“I was homeschooled all through high school, so all of my classes were online then. It’s not going to be much different for me than what I’ve been used to for the last four years. Coming here was an adjustment for me, the end of this semester is just going to get back to normal,” said history major Josh Schumacher, a freshman.

For a college freshman, it’s just entirely new to them but more refined than what students in college dealt with earlier this year.

One of the major issues with the spring 2020 semester was that a lot of students were suddenly without all the academic resources they relied on.

However, the campus has now entirely figured out how to move those resources online for maximized usage. A lot of the worries that students had the first time around have been considered and integrated into this new model of online classes.

Photo credit: Jessica Guerrucci

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

Latest from Blog