Let’s be honest. Doing things online doesn’t work for all of us, and that’s okay. Even under normal circumstances, online classes can be challenging and our country is anything but normal right now. That being said, many professors and school administration members are doing their best to make their students feel as if this is a normal school year.
While it’s comforting to know that many professors understand the stress and anxiety that comes with trying to earn a degree during a pandemic, it would be easier to just admit that this isn’t a normal school year. It is one filled with new struggles that many of us have never faced before. It is confusing, stressful and just downright scary.
Speaking personally, it is hard for me to focus and keep up over Zoom, but I’m doing my best. I can usually use my laptop to take notes faster, but now my laptop is being utilized for Zoom lectures, so I’m taking notes the old fashioned way. However, every class, I always seem to miss something. In the past, when I’ve taken physical notes for my class, I have always enjoyed it when professors posted their powerpoints online so I can go back over them and fill in anything I missed. This year, I think that is especially important, and some professors are already utilizing Zoom’s ‘recording’ feature to record their lectures and repost them in case students miss them in addition to posting their powerpoints and even some lecture notes.
However, there are some departments and professors already announcing that they will not be allowing the recording of Zoom lectures. I cannot emphasize how wrong that is. I understand wanting your students to show up and do the work for themselves and that it may feel like recording your own lecture and posting it online afterwards is giving students a little too much leeway, but there is an actual pandemic looming over all of our heads right now. It would be far better to say that you gave your students all of the tools to succeed in your class and they failed on their own than to say that you were “gatekeeping” the information they needed but missed because they only had access to it for a brief moment.
While there are resources for students who may feel lost in class, many of them aren’t accessible to students dealing with other things in life like a full time job, family duties or even just the stress of a pandemic weighing on them. NSU offers supplemental instruction sessions, SI sessions for short, where a student who has previously taken the class can answer questions and go over the lectures. While I think that SI sessions are one of the greatest tools NSU has to offer, none of them are being recorded and many of them are only able to be attended if you’ve got nothing else going on. The Tutoring and Testing Center is only available during business hours, which is when most students are working at other businesses.
The only way some of us can keep up right now is by going over what we’re given by our professors, and while the powerpoints may be posted online, some professors go over specific examples during lecture. When students only have access to that information for a few fleeting moments, it harms us. What good does it do to keep information from students? The only downside would be helping us.
