In 2020, many universities were reeling from challenges brought forward by COVID-19. By this point, most of us are probably tired of hearing about the pandemic that continues to haunt our memories. But it is still relatively recent — as the academic year in which almost all my classes were over Zoom or Panoptos is still fairly fresh in my memory, even though I am almost about to graduate. I will be leaving Binghamton University in a much different state than I had entered it in. All my classes are in person, most people don’t routinely mask anymore and I walk around a full campus with a plethora of events and activities. While I am happy that I had a chance to experience college without the loom of COVID-19, for this article, I want to look back to the innovations that came about during the pandemic that could still help in a supposedly post-pandemic world.
In the fall of 2021, the pandemic was mitigated to the extent that we were allowed to return to classes. I attended class in person for the first time in my college career. But the pandemic also gave us a new set of protocols that we have adopted into our post-pandemic lifestyles. While many aren’t using masks as routinely as they did during the pandemic, masks are still normalized as a safe and prudent measure. Tolerant attendance policies regarding illness are still considered by many professors a good idea to keep themselves and the other students in the class healthy. And Zoom meetings continue to be a perfectly acceptable option should meeting in person prove difficult. We still have these holdovers from the pandemic that we have adopted because they improve our quality of life. But one benefit that hasn’t been taken advantage of to the fullest degree is the lessons we learned through distance learning.
It is now very rare for a class to be recorded or conducted over Zoom. But is that necessarily a good thing? My situation often calls for me to return home to deal with family emergencies. Just this past semester, I had to miss a week of classes and I am still scrambling to bring myself up to date with the material. Because I often miss crucial information covered in class I am forced to piece information together from my classmates’ shared notes and sparsely worded presentations posted on Brightspace. During times like these, I can’t help but think about how much I would benefit from the option of having online classes. I am certain that having this option would be beneficial to accommodate all students in a class — whether it be someone like me, who is chronically absent because they have mitigating circumstances, disabled students who face more difficulty in actually getting to class or even students who spent most of their day before class working and cannot bring themselves to be mentally present in during the class itself.
This summer I took two online courses, and I underestimated the nostalgia I had for online classes. Even during COVID-19, I was a fan of the flexibility of recorded classes. These classes were helpful when rushing around with chores or work because I could still sit down at the end of the day and enjoy taking notes and studying from the pre-recorded lecture. I think this sort of flexibility would remain valuable if implemented now. Discussions that are more helpful in person can and should still happen in person. But having the option of remote discussion if necessary is beyond helpful for days when we need a little bit of flexibility, days when people might take the chance of missing class completely if they didn’t have the option to participate remotely. And if anything I would make the argument that they help us to be more present and engaging the next time we participate in an in-person discussion.
Professors may be reluctant to rely on recorded or online lectures due to historically poor engagement associated with online learning. I’m not advocating that online learning should, in any way shape or form, replace in-person learning. Instead, recording lectures and maintaining Zoom lectures should continue because they are meant to complement in-person learning. One study has shown that having online lectures available along with in-person classes had very little impact on in-person attendance. On the contrary, this same study showed that students who tended to receive high marks were the ones who supplemented their in-class knowledge with recorded lectures. After all, recorded lectures provide the perfect study tool to pause, rewind, slow down or double-speed the course content to a pace that is appropriate for the student.
Distance learning may seem like a thing of the past that I know many people wish to never hear about again. But, recorded lectures and bringing more class content online should serve as another tool that should be included in professor’s repertoires in order to better help their students succeed in their class. I think that a lot of professors at this University hold a lot of consideration for how to best accommodate their students and still engage in many of these practices. But I think it may also be the case that professors may allow some of these tools to be underutilized not knowing the great deal of benefits students would draw from them. Going forward, we should be more mindful in employing the best of different teaching methods we have experimented with in order to best accommodate all our students.
Kimberly Mourao is a senior double-majoring in psychology and philosophy, politics and law.