Covid-19 and other Fun Stuff

My first year of college has not exactly been normal, to say the least. I went from studying abroad in Ireland to stay on campus for about two months before Northeastern converted all the classes to online without much notice. Now everyone is basically going home because it’s not really necessary to stay on campus; however, I’m staying for now because I don’t want to waste money on housing and food. Plus having my apartment to myself would be pretty nice. The online classes seem to be going about as well as I expected. I’m in two lab classes, so online labs will be a little more difficult to understand because we will not have actual chemicals and specimens in front of us to work with. At least the more lecture-based courses will be roughly the same because many of mine are PowerPoint based, and some of the teachers can record themselves while they present. It will also be difficult to adjust to scheduling which classes are live online and which are just posted lectures, yet at least I will be able to sleep in more. I had 4 8ams before this transition, so I guess that’s a positive aspect of college now. With college writing specifically, it will be interesting to see how discussions will go. Obviously being in person would be better because responses will be more immediate and personally I learn better that way, but it would also be nice to look back at the discussions for reference in any future papers we work on. Peer reviewing will also be different, but the nice thing about Google Docs is that you can make suggestions, and video conferences will still probably work pretty well for discussions of revisions. Even though we don’t have them very often, group projects might be a lot harder because everyone is frantically moving out and in-person communication may not be possible. Overall, it seems like as long as we have more information, the classes will run smoothly. Without a really effective ability to ask questions online, we just have to compensate with more details in assignments so we have a better idea of what we are doing and might not be as confused. Peer revisions will definitely help in this aspect too. Personally, I just like to know exactly what I’m doing for assignments, and I get more worried when things are more up to my own interpretation. Nevertheless, as long as we have a good basis for knowing when things are due and how assignments should be completed, online classes should not be as daunting as they may appear.