Of lost connections, lessons and virtues

On the first day of the post-pandemic class, I quizzed my students on the fundamentals of journalism. To my surprise, students were clueless or not motivated to step in to answer. Those who knew the answers were sceptical about raising their hands, assuming they would be wrong. The class became more extempore than a mutually engaging class.

I realised that students failed to recall what they had studied in the previous semesters. Clearly, the online classes had only temporarily filled the void and didn’t elevate a student’s level of learning.

When I probed, students came up with various answers. “I actually liked online classes as I could multi-task and earn money by having control over my time,” said one of my students from second-year degree. “It was zero learning,” another girl added. Many others said online learning was effective, and some disagreed.

The pandemic created many opportunities for content generation, and students with command over their language worked whenever time permitted — sometimes even during online classes as they didn’t need to switch on the video. For a few, it was necessary to work, and for some, it was to strengthen their resumes.

There has been a lot of screen consumption in the process. Some students marked themselves as screen addicts. Their attention span came down, making it hard for them to pursue anything with a focus.

When classes were boring, students switched to YouTube, Netflix, Tiktok, or Instagram reels, got engaged with the screen and lost track of time. This distraction has affected some students’ work quality, including assignments. Unless the topic is fascinating or the teacher employed some mechanism to involve the class maximum, the online class was a futile exercise leading to higher consumption of entertainment content.

Lack of social connection

Our houses were not ready to fit as classrooms. Many students didn’t have a private space to attend the class peacefully. There was a limited mobile internet connection, and it always cost high to go above 1.5 GB of data per day. Students couldn’t relate to their classmates as they had never met them for a couple of years.

Final year graduation students are seeking social connections when they are on the verge of completing the course. By the time they sat in the classroom this year, they were facing dilemmas in careers and higher studies. First and second-year students were just transferred from their schools to graduation, and a batch of students are graduating without really going through college life.

Adolescence is a time of hormonal turmoil. For every confusion or question, it is essential to seek answers. Any unanswered question might lead to personality or behavioural dents. Hence, the college environment, teachers, and friends play a crucial role in general awareness. The bridge to make friends, to form groups for life, is just snatched away by lockdowns. Students have lost the essence of peer learning.

Students remember better the things happening outside the classroom or beyond the college premises when it involves an experience. They must be taken on field trips, explore rural India, and figure out things for themselves. A change of place is an excitement for the brain, and the novel information converts into permanent memory easily.

By default, the school or a college includes members from diverse religious and caste backgrounds, thus offering cultural exposure.

A sense of tolerance is built in the physical classrooms, which online could never. We may speak at length about religious tolerance or cultural differences. But it’s the one-to-one connection that lets students explore it all.

The natural progression is hampered when the knowledge and information are quantified as online, recorded, or certificate courses. We make our social bubbles bigger the more we glue to the internet. We never see the other side of this world. We may get degrees but not the virtues.

The pandemic has changed the way we pursue our education. Despite the probability of increasing the weightage of resumes through extra work and online activities, one can’t negate the lost lessons of life.

(The writer teaches Broadcast Media at Christ University, Bengaluru)