By Alex, grade 8.
As governments issue quarantines and self-isolation in the face of the novel coronavirus, schools are forced to shut down and work entirely online. Both students and teachers are spending days at a time stuck inside, rarely leaving the house. Going to school has been replaced by logging into your PC every day. School now consists entirely of video conferences, with students staring blankly into their screens, while paying no attention to their teachers. While this change in lifestyle offers many advantages, it also misses some crucial aspects of actually going to school. E-learning gives students more free time, but sacrifices social interaction and opens up many opportunities for the class clown.
Online school has the advantage of a much shorter commute and travel time between classes. While physical school can be far from home, online education can happen without ever going outside, which, for many, is a huge improvement. This makes life much easier for students that live further from school, as they can sleep in. The time to travel between classes is also much shorter at online school, because students no longer have to pack up and walk to their next class, they just click a few buttons and they’re already there. Online classes are usually much shorter than regular classes, because teachers only have to assign the work and explain it, before letting the students go to work on it, rather than trapping them in one room for an hour at a time. Overall, the saved time is a huge advantage for online classes, as students have much more free time to do homework and to relax by watching some TV, or to have some fun with photoshopping their teachers.
While online classes can save time by removing the requirement to be physically present in class, this also makes it harder to socialize, as students have less opportunities to meet up with their friends. Students can easily meet up with their peers to chat or just hang out at regular school during clubs, lunches and events. However, e-learning removes these opportunities, making it nearly impossible to hang out with friends besides chat rooms, which pose many restrictions to socializing, such as the lack of physical activity, and that all the people are in completely different places. Many students rely on their friends to get through the day, as talking with them breaks up the monotone classes with some fun as classmates go to the park to play soccer or convenience store to buy snacks. In summary, online class sacrifices the students’ opportunities to socialize, as they no longer have a physical place to meet up.
E-learning opens up many new possibilities for pranksters. Many sites used for online classes have weaknesses that can be used for various practical jokes, such as sharing links to video calls in order to allow strangers to join, and using broken or corrupted text as answers to questions causing sites such as google classroom to distort the text. The video conference hosting company, Zoom, has reported having had to fix many security vulnerabilities as more and more people are using their service to host online classes. However, many of these problems persist. Many jokers have taken to giving their teachers faulty tech advice, causing their devices to encounter errors. A common example of this tech advice is that alt+f4 will raise/lower the volume, while it actually closes the video conference. These jokes may seem harmless on the surface, but they allow people to look into private conversations and prevent teachers from doing their job, creating a whole host of new problems. While these pranks can be disruptive, many video conferencing companies are implementing methods to prevent people from joining the meetings without permission, and schools are giving correct tech advice to teachers in order to reduce their reliance on the students’ possibly false advice. Overall, these security flaws are a major problem but they are expected to be resolved in the near future.
As all non-essential businesses are forced to shut down, and social distancing becomes the norm, school is replaced by a never-ending stream of video conferences, with the students paying more attention to social media rather than the ongoing classes. While this new routine offers a few advantages, it’s not very sustainable as a long-term setup. Online learning does save a lot of the students’ and teachers’ time, but it also makes it hard to socialize properly and opens up a lot of security vulnerabilities. Overall, this doesn’t work well for anyone, as students can no longer chat with their friends, and teachers have to put up with technology problems.