Does Remote Learning Take Away From the Value of our Education?

The current pandemic has thrown all facets of public life into a proverbial meat grinder. Whether it’s restaurants, supermarkets, or offices, every establishment has been forced to adapt to the current climate in order to both stay alive and provide potentially essential services. While many of these places have managed to institute changes, such as mask rules and guidelines to maintain social distancing, there is one area where these policies necessarily alter the quality of the services being provided: higher education. Specifically, colleges across the United States are being forced to make a difficult decision whether to return to campus in the fall and, if this is the case, how to maintain a quality of education while preserving the safety of faculty and students. The answer to this is not entirely clear, as colleges are pursuing a variety of tactics in order to provide educational services. According to data collected by The Chronicle in a sample of 1,260 colleges, while 49% are planning for in person classes this fall, 35% are proposing a hybrid model, 13% are planning for completely remote instruction, 2.7% are “considering a range of scenarios,” and 0.7% are yet to decide on a course of action. By “hybrid” model, colleges usually refer to a system where a portion of students are in person while the remainder are online, however this can look different depending on the institution. At Harvard, this means that Freshmen and certain upperclassmen with special circumstances will be on campus during the fall while Seniors will switch places with the Freshmen at the start of Spring Semester. On the other hand, Northeastern is following a different variation wherein the hybridization is at a class level. All students are on campus but will randomly be assigned a schedule of when their classes are in person or online in order to ensure that no class is completely full of students and all present can maintain social distancing. On the other hand Georgetown announced that its fall semester will be completely online. This variety of plans largely contrasts with high schools, which are under pressure by the federal government to reopen in the fall, or else they run the risk of losing vital funding. In any case, what is not entirely clear is if colleges can maintain a degree of safety amid the pandemic. While some institutions are allegedly putting plans in place for regular testing of the student body and faculty, it will likely not be enough. Jean Chin, a physician for the American Healthcare Association, warned the public at a press conference that colleges cannot expect to be completely safe without mandatory testing every 2-3 days, which all but the largest, best funded institutions with their own medical centers are severely incapable of doing practically speaking. Hence, it is quite possible that a surge in cases may force some institutions to switch to a remote system mid-semester.

With a large percentage of colleges placing limits on socialization and the number of students in classes at any given time, there arises a particular concern among students and their families: money. Specifically, are students losing the quality of their education and thus not getting their money’s worth for college? This is an especially huge concern given that a majority of colleges have not announced plans to reduce their tuition for the upcoming semester, even if they switch to online instruction. There is an overwhelming concern among families that they are not getting the full worth of their tuition given that students will not have full access to office hours, the professors themselves, as well as many other in person peer tutoring services and other amenities that tuition supposedly finances. However colleges do face a dilemma in reducing tuition. For one, certain things in a college’s budget are fixed costs. Salaries for professors, counselors, and other faculty members still need to be maintained for the upcoming school year, as well as new programs and softwares they may need in order to perform remote learning at an acceptable level. Additionally, some colleges argue that remote instruction will not necessarily be inferior to in-person instruction. One of the best pre-pandemic examples of this is the Harvard Extension School, which offered professional degrees to students through a non-traditional path into the school. For many people, especially those who also worked full time, this was an excellent way to earn a degree from a world-renowned institution. Obviously, this is a different case as now even full-time students will be switching to a remote model, but it shows that in certain cases, remote instruction can be done properly. The key will likely be in maintaining access to professors and other resources for guidance outside of the powerpoints and textbooks. Hence, online office hours will become an increasingly important part of instruction for those schools with remote or hybrid instruction models. While colleges are trying to plan for the fall semester, it is important for them to consider both their successes and failures in remote instruction for the latter half of spring and summer semesters.

In a sample of 26 members of our youth community, ranging in age from high-school to graduate school and beyond, we surveyed them to ask about their schools and colleges plans for the fall as well as their experience with remote instruction. A majority of respondents were either entering their sophomore or junior year of college this fall, and a large percentage were still in high school. Of the respondents, an overwhelming 73.1% stated their learning institutions are offering a hybrid model in the fall with the option for students to learn completely from home if they choose to do so, with an additional 11.5% stating they would be going completely online for the upcoming semester.

What was interesting to see, however, was what students chose to do given their institution’s options. One reason that institutions may feel that they cannot lower tuition is that they imagine a large percentage of students will opt to take classes completely from home out of safety concerns, and doing so would cause them to lose important funding for other programs. The data collected by our team seems to support this claim, with 38.5% of respondents opting to take classes online regardless of their institution’s options with an additional 19.2% planning to commute, 30.8% returning to campus to either on or off campus housing, and only 3.8% certainly returning to campus and living there.

Finally, we assessed how learning overall was impacted as a result of the switch to remote learning recently. 53.8% said they “slightly enjoyed it” whereas 34.6% said they did not like it and 11.5% said they did enjoy it. By contrast, an overwhelming majority of students were not looking forward to a future semester online if they could avoid it with 69.2% of respondents stating they would not like the idea of returning to Zoom classes in the fall. We also compiled responses on a scale of 1-5 on how their learning was impacted by the switch to online school, with 1 representing an extremely negative impact and 5 representing a positive impact. As the data shows, the impact was overwhelmingly negative. While these results are generalized to our church, a fairly small sample size, it does illustrate that many students themselves feel they are losing out on an educational experience by way of online instruction. Whether that be due to their inability to meet face to face and interact with classmates and professors, or the fact that the effort required to complete their online class may have been staggeringly lower than it took to wake up and actually get to class on time, the fact remains that an overwhelming majority of students in our parish and across the globe have felt negatively impacted and less motivated as a result of this shift to remote instruction. Consequently, colleges will have to find new ways to allow students to engage with each other in these new models. Without widespread use of a new vaccine for COVID-19, these modes of learning will become a new norm, and the meaning of quality education may shift in the future. One thing is for certain, the young adults who lived through this time and had to continue higher education despite their options will have a vastly different educational experience from their colleagues who entered the workforce much earlier. How that will translate to their ability to adapt to adult life and learning beyond college remains to be seen. So, what do you think? Does this sudden shift to remote instruction diminish the value of our education?