Claritta Khoury | Staff Writer
As the world was easing back into its pre-pandemic habits, in our collective joy, it was easy to lose sight of how pandemic era measures shook up the world. Even after everything seemingly went back to normal, Covid still left a trail in its wake. After pandemic-era measures revolutionised the traditional way of education, some parts of education remain online. Right now, as university students, the Covid years are still haunting us.
When Covid struck, everything turned to the virtual world. Classes, activities, businesses, etc. all became accessible through small devices such as our smartphones or laptops. Now, long after everything supposedly turned to normal, some of these activities remained stuck in a time many of us would rather forget. Some classes in university are now permanently offered online or asynchronously, clubs and societies meet via Zoom or Webex, and some businesses opted to eliminate the cost of rent and go fully remote.
While these changes mean accessibility: working on your own time, replaying lectures if you didn’t understand, and meeting clubs from wherever you are, and although that sounds like a utopia – a perfect world where you create your own rules – it is surely proving otherwise, especially in Lebanon.
As a part of university programs worldwide, not just in Lebanon, a few classes are still being offered online. Yet, after sitting behind a laptop screen, staring at Zoom’s “your internet connection is unstable” message for a good hour, and trying to puzzle together what the professor is saying, the average student starts to tap out. In Lebanon, watching interactive lectures is impossible, downloading PDFs and PowerPoints takes years, and anything held online is futile. Putting all the nerve-wracking trouble that comes with online classes in Lebanon aside, these types of classes in university lack the connection between the professors and the students since asking questions and going to office hours becomes harder. How is one supposed to ask a person they’ve never seen or met for help? Students that already have trouble reaching out in person due to anxiety disorders or various other reasons would thus have a much harder time.
Similarly, students are encouraged to branch out and join clubs at university. While offering these activities online lowers transportation costs allowing those who live far away to join, it lacks the very ethos of student life. Clubs and societies mean getting to know a large number of people; they mean getting involved and getting your hands dirty. They mean building the soft skills you would need in your career. However, as some clubs opt to meet online, students sit behind their laptops with their mics muted and never get the chance to form proper connections – even with the peers they work with. They’ll know names, and maybe voices, but not faces. They’ll work alongside people for 2-3 semesters towards a common goal, but never be able to even smile and nod in their direction in real life.
That begs the question: should everything really be constricted to our little machines? Should we have access to whole classes and activities online? With such relatively new technologies rise new potential problems. What will the education sector look like after ChatGPT? In an instagram poll conducted by the ‘aub.crushes’ account, a whopping 67% of AUBites said they’d use ChatGPT to solve their assignments. Would new technologies adapt to this issue? Will the education sector change to become fully in-person again and revert back to the traditional way? Or will our lives be constricted to our little machines? If the world came down to just the individual and the machine, talking to it, living through it, learning from it, and staying on it, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the world today is described as a dystopia.