Covid And Higher Education Obtaining a college degree is one of the most straightforward ways to increase a person’s quality of life. A college graduate’s lifetime earnings are vastly higher than those who don’t achieve a college degree.
Thanks to Covid, the way students approach college is entirely different from a year ago. Seldom classes are held in person, and very few students have traveled back to campus to engage in the wholesome experience that colleges provide.
Covid And Higher Education
Online learning is happening as the last resort. Students who thought lectures couldn’t be any more boring before the pandemic are eating their words after spending two semesters with online courses and limited interactions with their peers and professors. Of course, not all students feel the same way about online learning, but it still has a long way to go before it can meet the needs of a majority of students.
Teachers aren’t the type of people who coast through their work. At all levels of education, teachers are finding innovative ways to engage students through online mediums. Students and teachers have realized how they took in-person learning for granted. Covid And Higher Education So much of the learning process depends on the personal connection students and professors make. This is why people have such a visceral reaction to the best and worst teachers they had as a student.
Online Learning Is Getting Better Because of Covid
Many colleges offered online courses before the pandemic, but students generally preferred in-person sessions. Now that Covid essentially removed the option for in-person learning, students are becoming accustomed to the new learning format.
Trying to mimic in-person learning online isn’t as simple as turning on the computer. Teachers have to be more engaging than ever to sustain the attention of students. Students have to muster up the motivation to keep attending online courses, which is difficult. Online learning doesn’t have a track record for retaining students, even within a single course.
Teachers are beginning to receive training and becoming more comfortable with the switch to online learning. That being said, there is still a long way to go for teachers to create online learning that rivals teachers and students sitting in the same classroom.
The Education Industry Is More Agile Than Ever
If you were to tell any school administrator before Covid that they should be ready for an event that limited students’ ability to come to school, they would have laughed you out of their office or told you it would be impossible to transition to online learning at a mass scale. It truly is admirable the way schools across the world were able to continue teaching students.
The transition to online learning does have its limitations. Students pursuing their master’s degree are better positioned to transition to online learning over third-grade students. Online learning also requires students to have access to laptops, which isn’t guaranteed in low-income areas. Covid And Higher Education
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Students in wealthier areas were able to transition better and lost less instructional time than students who had to share technology or couldn’t get sufficient Internet access. Schools struggled to secure laptops ahead of the recent school year due to Covid restrictions and the increased demand for Chromebooks and other cheap laptops.
Online Offering Will Last After the Pandemic
Even though online learning isn’t everyone’s favorite method, there are plenty of students who found online classes preferable to meeting in person. As schools attempted to meet their students’ needs, they experimented with different course offerings to find methods that worked. Some classes mimic their in-person counterparts by meeting at a scheduled time and having weekly homework assignments and a similar pace for all students.
Covid And Higher Education On the other hand, some classes dumped all of the material into a drive and let students learn at their own pace. This method, popular for massive open online courses (MOOCs), gives students with tight schedules the ability to learn during their free time. This proved especially rewarding for dedicated students who had to take care of family members or work to keep food on the table.
Students Are Trying New Learning Methods
Many MOOCs are free, but students may have to pay for the badge or certificate of completing the course. Online coding bootcamps are taking online learning to the next level. They condense tech skills into sessions that last between three and six months (or completely self-paced) and allow students to gain entry-level positions as software engineers or web designers.
Online coding bootcamps are seeing a surge in Covid And Higher Education enrollment as parents, career changers, and ambitious people want to gain employment in the one industry that seems to be surging during the Covid pandemic.