In today’s day and age, there has been a wave of new lifestyle changes that the whole world had to adopt due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the biggest changes happened in the education sector, where the world has shifted, in a matter of months, from a traditional in-person model to a new and uncharted online model. To say that educational institutions have made a seamless transition to online learning would simply be a display of utter ignorance. Although online learning has helped in slowing the spread of COVID-19 within our communities, it has also created a number of sociological and psychological disparities that negatively impacts students’ educational outcomes. These disparities consist of a lack of collaboration and collective learning among students, the development of mental health issues by students who cannot meet the rigid demands of online learning, and the inequitable access to education.
First and foremost, online learning has created an atmosphere that lacks a sense of student collaboration for the purpose of their greater learning. Like any other aspect of life, schools are, at their core, a community. A blogger in the HuffPost states that “communities are helpful to join or create because they provide support to the individuals who are impacted by the daily stress, struggles and chaos of modern life.” In the context of school, belonging to a community means having a support system that helps students cultivate their ability and capacity to learn through the collective knowledge of their peers. Learning from others ideas also introduces a range of original information for students to build off of rather than resorting to heaps of information on the Internet that students can only see and be overwhelmed by. The problem with using the Internet and its search engines stems from the fact that they diminish our ability to focus and think both intensively and independently as noted in an Atlantic article titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” From personal experience, the advent of online learning has pushed us further away from the benefits of communal thinking present in a traditional school environment and instead, has moved us closer to becoming incredibly reliant on infusing our thinking with stagnant information found on the Internet. In order to combat this issue, it would be prudent for educators to implement serious group projects into their curriculum that almost force students to work together rather than hoping for students to engage with each other in small groups during online class.
Furthermore, online learning has unleashed a surge of mental health issues among the online student population. Although teachers have been trained to become more culturally responsive and inclusive to their students as mentioned in a book called the “Culturally Responsive Teaching & The Brain” , they lack heavily in recognizing and addressing the mental and emotional well-being of their students. They do not realize that students have a life outside of school and that sometimes, their school life may not be as important as their personal life. Therefore, as students are being “constantly bombarded” with endless online assignments, a new study has found that 32% of students have stated that their mental health concerns have worsened since the transition to online school according to an article published in the Miami Student. With no end in near sight for online learning, the long-term effects of stress and anxiety could manage to bring these students to their breaking point and cause damage not only to their mind but also their academic and professional future. It might be the job of educators to educate first, but it has increasingly become their job to also take care of their students when, especially today, they are battling crippling mental health conditions.
Finally, online learning has sharply deteriorated the presence of equity in education. In the status quo, students of low socioeconomic status and students of color have fallen victim the most to the inequity of online education. In an article titled “Virtual Learning Means Unequal Learning”, the author describes a juxtaposition of a wealthier student receiving additional help from a tutor to supplement their remote learning compared to an impoverished student who can barely focus and learn in school due to a lack of proper technology and parental supervision. These occurrences shine light on the interconnection of socioeconomic status and quality of education. It seems as if the level of education a student receives relies almost entirely on the wealth of their families. Additionally, a USA Today column titled “Don't Let Online Education Turn Into the Next Crisis that Hits People of Color Hardest” outlines how a disproportionate number of African-American and Hispanic students are not able to fully access an online education which does not even attempt to acknowledge the difficulties that they experience at home (lack of digital literacy, limited access to technology, etc.). This shows how the online school system was not designed with the less fortunate students in mind. The online model today may seem to be capable of educating students in a perfect world, but the world today is far from that. In order to ascertain that students have the same opportunities for academic success regardless of their socioeconomic and racial status, educators and administrators must realize the struggles that students from these demographics experience on a daily basis and lay down measures (free internet for all, 1:1 school laptop ratio, etc.) to accommodate these students.
All in all, even though online learning was implemented to address concerns over a deadly global pandemic, it has led to a wide range of serious issues in the education system that must be addressed and fixed including: a lack of collaboration among students, the development of mental health concerns by students who cannot keep up with the pace and intensity of online learning, and the inequitable access to education. Solving all of these problems requires a multi-faceted approach that our educators are definitely capable of as long as they consider their most important assets: the students themselves.
Document w/ footnotes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g590VtPh7lkhiuhTegS3at2ZKvFMcUyveZcvCdElML4/edit?usp=sharing
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