Life As A Student During A Global Pandemic

There are both positives and negatives that come with the new university arrangements at the moment — an online environment as a result of the pandemic.

Lectures and tutorials are now all available online.

During the years of studying business as a much younger student, I remember always feeling guilty about the fact that I never went to lectures.

These lectures usually consisted of an hours commute to Wollongong to sit in a lecture hall with hundreds of other students for about 3 hours, while you listened to a lecturer speak. It was in my final year where I decided I may need to attend lectures so that I could feel more confident come exam time. I quickly threw those plans out the window after an attempt of attending a 3 hour lecture in which I may as well have stayed in bed for.

My attention span is about a few minutes long when I’m listening to something I’m interested in, and about 10 seconds flat when it’s something I’m not interested in — this is not a joke.

I attended all of about 2 lectures in a 3 year degree because I wasn’t capable of keeping focus, so I just never bothered. At the time I put it down to laziness, but it was never laziness, it was just a lack of interest.

And even if I could maintain focus for some of the lecture, I was almost always guaranteed to lose about 2.5/3 hours of valuable information that came from the lecturers mouth. So, I chose to stay in bed.

My marks were never great as a result, although I did manage to pull off a few good marks in my final years, as I doubled down on self teaching. Still though, not a very effective way to learn.

With this new arrangement, there is no more commuting an hour each way to sit in a hall full of yawning individuals while we listen to someone read off a bunch of PowerPoint slides.

Everything is now recorded and posted online for you to consume at your own pace. The problem I found with the old style of lectures was, if your brain didn’t want to work during those 3 hours of lecture, it meant you lose valuable content and you don’t get it back.

Now, we don’t have that problem. You decide when you want to tune in, when you feel your brain is most up to it. In regards to time efficiency, there is no doubt this is better.

I do however miss being on campus, especially in the case of tutorials — smaller classes with more face to face interaction with a teacher. These were valuable moments throughout your semester, and not having face to face access with a teacher where you can touch base once a week is difficult, although the uni is doing a good job at compensating for this with weekly consultations.

There are both positives and negatives here, and it is hard to measure and compare my performances from back in the day (Pre-COVID), to now.

However, I will say that I saw this coming. It was only a matter of time before everything went digital, and this applies to everything from corporate work to Telehealth.

Universities have been uploading content on the web for quite some time now, and more of it is becoming free of charge.

One of the worlds top ranked universities in the US — MIT, upload courses on their website in which people have sat and completed and have been offered jobs as a result by big companies like Google and Microsoft.

If we are now able to sit full university courses online without even attending that uni, it makes me wonder what else is to come.

Free tertiary education for all?
A reduction in university costs?
The collapse of certain educational institutions?

I suppose only time will tell.