As the fall semester starts, many of us are looking forward to returning to our daily routines and seeing our friends at the university, but some of us have concerns on how the semester will be conducted.

Plenty of professors have discussed the plan of having hybrid classes due to the pandemic, but this plan has potential to affect our learning.

Many of us like the idea of remote learning. Who doesn’t love to stay in pajamas, wake up five minutes before lecture and sip coffee in bed? However, the lack of environment is bound to take a toll on our learning. 

Some of us need an in-class environment in order to better focus, interact with the professor and other students and to hear and see the lecture presented clearly. These aspects of classes are what we tend to miss during an online course. Furthermore, the responsibility of showing up to class gives us more motivation to be there. Instead, with hybrid classes, we have more temptation to slack off and stay in bed, potentially tuning out or missing several class sessions throughout the semester. 

Although, we do need to acknowledge the severity of the pandemic, and respond accordingly. We need to take the appropriate precautions set by our university while on campus.

Another issue with hybrid classes is a major issue we encountered during the spring 2020 semester; the use of online platforms. 

Almost every teacher used a different platform for their online instruction. We students need consistency. We jumped from Zoom to Google Meets to Google Hangouts to Blackboard to Google Hangouts to Skype to GroupMe to…you get the point. We need to be on the same page as a university. Sure, some professors may have to learn a new application, but it’s worth furthering students’ educations. Nonetheless, we’re all here to learn something aren’t we?

Elaborating further upon the use of online platforms, professors should become competent in the application that they use to conduct their courses. Many stories have been told of the spring semester of professors’ incompetency in conducting courses online. This gave numerous students an added stress, which some of us find unnecessary. Jumping from platform to platform was a headache enough, but to try and learn from software that the professor doesn’t know how to conduct a class through is stressful. It tended to be counterproductive and distracted us from our focus on our education. Many of us, including professors, wasted more time trying to get a grip on online courses rather than learning the course material. 

If we can resolve these issues, we can find more success in the foreseeable future of hybrid courses and get back to a full focus on why we’re all here – the education that is setting us up for our future.