TYPE: CRITICAL WRITING/REVIEW
SUBJECT: SOCIOLOGY
A RESPONSE TO JEFFERY ALLEN SNYDER’S ESSAY
FORUM RESPONSE
EFFECTS OF CORONAVIRUS ON HIGHER EDUCATION
Covid-19 is expected to cause more troubling long term effects, including little funding to the public and adapting online courses. Due to the nature of the covid-19, the future is unbearable and unpredictable. It has led to the suspension of everyday life, but new measures have been put across to replace daily life. The coronavirus has affected higher education in the united states and the whole world at large. It has done away with the day to day norms, guidelines, and rules of all higher learning institutions worldwide. The migration of courses and degrees online will affect social mobility. Many higher learning institutions have responded to the threat with some measures which reduce cost, including offering fewer courses, reducing student needs and services, and hiring more workers in faculty. The tuition fee is raised. Learning institutions are predicting revenue losses this year due to the cost incurred in moving to learn online.
Universities and colleges educate 72% of postsecondary students while depending on public funding. Higher education is among the top budgets in the state. Due to the breakout of covid-19, it is positively affected. This is because the state funds were diverted to deal with the coronavirus instead of using them for funding higher education. Planning for a better future, most of the higher institutions leaders reduce new employees, introduce cutting off the benefits they get. Voluntary salary reductions for senior leadership have been announced by many universities, including Brown, Stanford, and Southern California university. Pension contributions have been suspended in other colleges like Sacred heart university and Johns Hopkins.
Online education is an essential matter in health measure of the public, but it will bring many drawbacks to institutions and students in the future. A student who is academically less prepared and those coming from backgrounds with less income mostly performs poorly in online learning. For higher education online to be successful, it is required that a lot of educational experience is offered. Personal interaction satisfaction to the student and it motivates the student to gain knowledge and eventually succeed. The lack of physical availability is one reason why online learning is not sufficient and should be resisted. The online education mostly has high drop-out rates, and students rarely earn meaningful certification. Online education might be better but not the best in terms of personal intellectual. Students can learn important content. Productive discussions on zoom or online forums are also possible. But it isn’t easy to express curiosity or excitement. It is harder to sense some other activities like if a student wants to ask a question, and he/she hasn’t put up his/her hand. This is possible in a live classroom. For potential learners who can’t access face to face education because it is too far away or challenging to do concurrently other tasks like childcare or a full-time job, online learning offers the chance.
Covid-19 will negatively affect the subjects to be studied. The consequences will affect all disciplines. There is evidence that due to situations and changes in technology, students become more interested in job prospects, making them not to choose humanities because they think that they are poorly paid jobs. Coronavirus will make students study subjects that they expect to have more practical than theory. Humanities are essential to developing our ethical reasoning and persuasive arguments. Coronavirus is a disease that needs critical thinking apart from medicine and public health.
As many people still doubt that online learning is a positive force, higher learning institutions will remain neglected and diminished. The big issue is the online education market value. Employees have a perception and believe that online certification of degrees is not the best than face to face degrees.
There are many opportunities to reduce the negative effects of coronavirus on higher education. Providing emergency funding to affected colleges, universities, and students, encouraging to reduce future cuts to higher education and tracking details of federal student loan guidelines. (Snyder)
Resisting distance learning
Changes in technology, such as online learning, have been adopted by many universities all over the country. Unless the distance learning technological change adopted due to covid-19 breakout is resisted now, it can threaten student’s and teachers’ interest. Online classes were necessary to reduce the disease’s spread and ensure both the students and teachers are healthy. But unless these changes are resisted now, they can become permanent. Online learning is targeted to fulfill management desires. Traditional classrooms have essential values that are not portrayed in a distant learning environment. Teachers form strong relationships with students while they are physically available to each other. Lecturers can know when students are tired or hungry.
Transmission of knowledge through learning is a complicated matter. The expertise people require a medium to pass knowledge to non-experts. It is not easy to perform some teaching activities through zoom meetings. A teacher cannot share a joke if he/she cannot hear everyone laughing. Students might not be attentive during online classes because it is difficult for a teacher to monitor physically. Learning new soft wares and adapting to the new method requires a lot of time. Student control and monitoring become difficult when classes go digital. University administrators are happy about distance learning since they get a lot of benefits from it. They spend money meant for other activities like athletics since they cannot be carried out with distance online learning.
Distance online learning brings the change in the protocol, and also a material reorganization of learning is required. It is a wrong belief by the department of education and educational foundations with the university regents that online learning is cost-effective and hence making university education more accessible to less fortunate communities. Online learning requires expensive software and hardware requirements, which leads to costly administrative, legal, and technical issues. Online learning allows universities to acquire more money by ensuring that a greater number of students pay lower fees. Universities are experiencing an increase in productivity as they learn new, mostly used software and hardware, and as they reorganize courses for remote instructions. Online learning allows managers for institutions to have several time goals for doing their own business.
When learning is done online, evaluation of students is easily standardized hence increasing chances that lecturers rather than faculty will determine what grade a student attains. This may undermine the partnership between the teacher and student, which is a factor of meaningful education. It devalues specific knowledge of human friendship in favour of what can be standardized and measured.
Resistance to distant learning measures in education needs the same tactics used on the factory floor to regain control. It requires a change in how we think and decide. A sophisticated technology based on the economy is characterized by the division of labour and trained management, which ensures its planning. (Sydney).
REFERENCES
Snyder, Jeffrey Aaron. Higher Education in the Age of Coronavirus. 21 May, 2020, bostonreview.net/forum/jeffrey-aaron-snyder-higher-education-age-coronavirus.