Technology To the Rescue: When Pandemics and Academics Collide (LABP)

I joke a lot around my family about how COVID-19 saved my college education, but there's a little bit of truth in that. 

With reverence to the horrible effects and negative outcomes of the recent pandemic, the experiences we were able to learn from during this challenging time were inevitable. I think that's just a part of human nature -- we tend to take what we can and do our best to make it into something good.

This especially applies to college students. 

Before COVID, a lot of things were normal that didn't meet much speculation. Blowing out birthday candles, holding a menu in a restaurant, giving your grandma a hug when you visit her from out of town without a second thought...

It never occurred to me that the classroom experience might be one of them.

I personally hit a couple of different demographics when it comes to my student role in college. I have a learning disorder, and I'm a commuter. 

For reference, my experience in the College Classroom has been a little bit difficult, especially before. It wasn't until the pandemic that I realized what an incredible role technology has when it comes to inclusiveness and accommodations for it's population of people similar to myself. 

Being able to review live lectures, for example, is something that totally changed the game for me -- and I can only assume for many others as well.

ADHD makes it difficult for me personally to absorb information in a lecture-focused class. I take good notes, and try to manually store important information away while practicing being present. Sometimes though, my inattentiveness can be very impairing. Despite my "want-to," I've sat in many classes where I wasn't able to really apply the things that I'd tried to learn in my work, because I had such hard time registering the information in the class.

Recording lectures with a sound recording app or device is great -- until there's information being shown simultaneously on the PowerPoints or dry-erase boards. And the PowerPoint doesn't ever get uploaded, and the professor doesn't allow their lectures to be recorded. 

Tech like Zoom seems to be the remedy to this issue, and I wish it would have carried over into the semesters that followed the Pandemic. 

Because for someone like me with ADHD, being able to go back and revisit the class without too much sensory overload from external factors that come with being in the classroom was a huge blessing. Being able to pause the lecture and learn at a pace that benefitted my learning style is the only way I passed Intro to Linguistics. (And many others.)

Not only that, but the ability to catch up when you can't physically be in the classroom was another incredibly beneficial factor. 

As a commuter, getting to class is hard sometimes. Even without life happening -- getting sick, car trouble, or anything else that causes us to shift priorities at the time, it was a privilege to be able to attend my classes from home if so needed. 

It made me think about what it must have been like for new moms who didn't think they'd be able to get their degree until a few years after the baby had gotten older. For people who's entire families might rely on a single car. For the immunocompromised. For the people who only rely on putting in their own hours and their own income to be able to afford their education, and feed their families.

I'm fortunate enough to be able to take away a small, positive experience from something that was so horrible for so many people. I wish we hadn't stopped evolving something great that came out of something so awful. I wish we hadn't returned to "normal" one-hundred percent. 

Was it difficult to learn a new technology? Of course, it always is at first. I admit I don't know enough to speak to, for or against the financial aspect that colleges endured during this time. But -- I had held out hope that this would be something that colleges strived to evolve. 

We were shown how easy it is for technology to break some educational barriers, and make higher education accessible and inclusive to an even wider pool of students. And yet, it seems like normalcy is creeping in and slowly stripping those opportunities away as more and more classes do not continue to utilize technology resources like Zoom.

Without turning this into an opinion piece, I only wish to shed light on some of the incredible opportunities that technology like Zoom can bring to the classroom. How it can benefit so many people in so many unexpected ways. 

Like everything, there are good and bad aspects that come alongside new technology within education. However, in the future I'd be pleased to see the classroom alive with the evolution of technology, using it for the betterment of students and breaking barriers of education like nothing else really can.