How to ‘Online Student’… From an Online Student!

Friends, are you in your Zoom box, staring at the Hollywood Squares of Students, wondering how it’s all going? Are you on the verge of panic as you push your ramblings through the keyhole of the Tardis, wondering WTF is landing? FEAR NOT!

This week, dispatches from the world through the screen: Kelsey and I are thrilled to feature the reflections (complete with awesome links to even MORE awesome reflections) of an actual, retail online student, the brilliant Akshi Chadha. Enjoy!

Akshi Chadha, our guest blogger.

Every summer, I decide I’m going to change my life. Summer is the perfect time—I have a long break from university. I am at home surrounded by my family. And, I have no expectations of myself except to, well, get my life together. The plans for summer 2020 were pretty straightforward: return home to India, catch up on months of sleep, start thinking about grad school applications, start working on my thesis, and eat nothing but Indian food.

I can positively tell you: none of these things happened.

The pandemic struck and suddenly I was stranded in London, Ontario, Canada, spiraling—contemplating my own mortality and worrying about my family. Things got to a point where I just wanted to get a flight out (which I never did), abandon everything, and never return, especially not to school. Why should I continue to be some oblivious student—an online one at that—when the world around me is on fire?

Because I’m anything but oblivious as a student.

I know I’m not the only one who’s been asking themselves if their education still matters. The pandemic has brought on a sense of futility by stripping us all of access, support, resources, connections, and space—all the things that facilitate our education. Managing work, family, and school from the confines of our personal space might make one question if being a student is really worth the extra effort that it is going to take. However, I’ve come to realize that even on the bad days, learning is a priority for me as it empowers me like nothing else. It equips me to be able to think about all that plagues the world, and how I’ve been a part of the problem, and how I can start becoming a part of the solution. It equips me to able to think. I am lucky enough to be pursuing something I actually love, learning from people I actually admire. And in a world shrouded in obscurity, such clarity about something is welcomed.

So yes, learning still matters to me. But online learning is daunting territory. For most of us, online learning has an ominous ring to it that makes us instinctively resistant. Yes, I want to be on campus, among my peers and professors. After all, it’s what I’m paying for. But I also want myself and everyone else to be physically safe and right now that notion supersedes everything else.

How I look (and feel) trying to figure out what is going on in my online classes.

With these priorities in mind, I’m trying to view online learning as a way to learn and connect with my peers and professors in a time when our safety depends on distance. Remote learning is inconvenient, however, it can become meaningful and effective if we try to view it as a solution to learning in a pandemic rather than an infliction.

So here I am: trying to keep track of a million Zoom invites, trying to actively engage with whatever is in front of me (a screen? a book? a baking sheet?), and trying to take charge of my learning in a way I didn’t have to before. Simply trying. And with this relatively optimistic outlook, I started an online blog series for my peers in the faculty of Arts and Humanities at Western University, called ‘How to ‘Online Student’’, hoping to extend support and understanding to students like me who have no idea ‘how to’ but ‘want to’ make this work nonetheless.

I am not trying to paint a delusional, merry picture here—online learning is problematic in many ways. But only when we acknowledge the slowness, the frustration, the inaccessibility, the inconsistencies, and the isolation, can we begin to find a way around it. Hence: the blog. The ‘How to ‘Online Student’’ series features suggestions for navigating specific areas of online learning such as motivation, netiquette, Zoom, online resources, and community-building.

While the inspiration for the blog came from a need to combat my own uncertainty and anxiety, I was also moved by various stories on the internet about students trying to learn despite inadequate resources and instructors trying to teach despite inadequate technological training. The series is thus an effort towards solidarity, a hand extended for support, and a commitment towards creating the classroom together in the midst of a pandemic. With each post, I am looking to work out certain questions:

• How can we optimize online learning techniques and environments?
• How can we support (and I mean really support) each other?
• How can we reciprocate the efforts of our professors and create the classroom in conjunction with them?

I don’t have the perfect answers to any of these questions, but I’m hoping the blog is a starting point for something. Anything. My hope with creating the series is that we recognize that ‘pandemic student-ing’ means we have to replace our usual goals with pandemic goals: mindfulness, self-compassion, self-awareness, responsibility, finding value in learning, and maintaining connections in the face of debilitating isolation. If there’s one thing I wish everyone would take away from the blog series, it would be that we should remember to be human—in every good sense of the word—in these perpetually digital times.

And that we should remember to breathe while doing all this superhero stuff!

About our guest author:

I am a fourth-year student pursuing an Honors Specialization in English and Creative Writing at Western University. I write things—some of them have been published or are forthcoming in Watch Your Head, The Roadrunner Review, Symposium, and SNAPS, Salve, and The Forest City Poetry Anthology. As a writer, I’m interested in the immense potential of the written word in helping make the world a little bit better so that is what I’m always striving to work towards. You can find me at www.akshichadha.com!

The Survey Results Are In!

Friends, welcome to September 2020, which I’m sure looks very different to any September you’ve previously encountered. Personally, I’m missing the joy of returning to a campus where the fall colours are beginning to emerge, even as the sun still shines and its heat still warms the grass (while the geese run rampant, pooping all over it!). I’m also missing seeing my students live; I’m teaching a “hybrid” class this term, but it’s not the same, not by a long shot.

Like this. it’s a whole thing. They even have their own Facebook page!

Luckily, as autumn roles in here in central Canada, some things are still shiny and new; this includes the results from our summer readership survey. Thank you to all who participated!

Kelsey and I have pored over the details, and are making tweaks accordingly. From now on, you can look forward to two monthly posts, one of which will be a “practical tips and ideas” post, and the second of which will be a longer, narrative think piece. (You’ve told us both of these kinds of posts are most appreciated by readers.) Occasionally, we may include interviews or other post formats, but we’ll try to stick broadly to this model so that you know what to expect in your inbox.

We also want to introduce as many, and as many diverse, new voices as possible: this means platforming people of different backgrounds, ages, career paths, abilities, and so on. Because we know that contributing to a site such as this one is a commitment of time and energy, and because we know lots of folks are very overworked right now (especially folks who tick “diversity” slots at work…), we are aiming to make guest contributions as not-onerous, and as fun, as possible.

To that end, we are planning to curate “hot topic conversations” – perfect for the COVID moment, but massively useful for all the other teaching times, too. The plan: to convene roundtables on Zoom, record the discussion (with everyone’s permission, of course), and then share both the transcript and an audio-described video of the roundtable in this space. This format will allow us to gather and learn from a range of voices, but the time commitment will be manageable and the physical labour minimal. What’s more, we will gather “hot topics” (the themes of the panels) and potential panelists (to talk about those themes) separately, so that nobody feels they need to make themselves vulnerable around an issue they’d rather not discuss in public.

This is of course, like all our experiments over the past fourteen months, a work in progress, and to actualize it we need your help!

SO…

If you’d like to participate in a Zoom roundtable over a “hot teaching topic”, if you’d like to suggest a “hot teaching topic” for a roundtable, or if you’d like to contribute to the AC in another way, please let us know by heading to this link and filling out this VERY VERY VERY short form. (It’s really short.)

 

As well, if you indicated on our summer survey that you’d like to contribute to the AC in some way, we’d be very grateful if you’d click the link and complete the form too, so we know who you are!

Many thanks for your support of the AC, friends. We’re looking forward to growing in a healthy way and supporting you in turn through this very strange new school year.

With gratitude!

Kim + Kelsey