In all the movies I’ve seen about college, classes have always seemed so magical. I imagined myself sitting in a lecture hall surrounded by classmates and listening to my professor teach as I took notes.
However, when I was picking my classes for my first semester, I was discouraged when I found out I was going to be taking an online class and a hybrid class. While the majority of my classes were in person, I was a little shocked that half of my classes had an online component.
Once the semester kicked off and I was actually doing work in my online classes, I realized it may not have been as bad as I had anticipated. But still, online classes are no replacement for the in-person experience.
I had one fully asynchronous class, which was wildlife issues. The structure of the class involved lectures, annotated notes, discussion posts and quizzes due every Tuesday.
While I enjoyed watching the lectures at my own pace and was grateful for the ability to pause and take notes, nothing compared to the feeling of watching a lecture live in person and listening to the professor explain the content live.
In my in-person Theatre Appreciation class, my professor was lively and animated and made all the lectures truly memorable. They were also interactive: Sometimes he asked us questions or demonstrated an acting concept we were learning and ask us to mirror what he did.
One of my roommates, who took the online section of the class, didn’t get this same experience. She would tell me he was lively in his recorded lectures, but I would often have to describe the funny comments that he would make in-person.
Additionally, the online section seemed to have a lot more work than the in-person class. While I would usually have to read a play by the end of the week, she would have to watch the lectures, take quizzes, and write discussion posts due each Friday.
My hybrid class, Intro to Statistics, had more in-person components than my fully online class. We would have to attend labs each week, and we could attend the lectures live if we chose to do so. If not, there would be Zoom recordings posted on Canvas, or an interactive video we could watch.
At the beginning of the semester, I started by joining the live lectures through Zoom. However, this didn’t really work for me as I would get easily distracted, and the concepts would not really stick with me when I went to complete the homework.
I started attending the live lectures and continued throughout the semester. By going to the lectures, I made a new friend, and we sat next to each other and chat after class was over.
That’s another component missing from online classes: in-person connection. Coupled with the fact so many people can be in your online class at once, I never got to know anyone from there. We responded to everyone’s discussion posts, but we never had any real conversations.
In my in-person classes, even if I didn’t have a conversation with everyone, I was still familiar with their faces, and that was comforting to me. In stats, our professor would joke around with the class and we would all laugh in response, creating a sense of connectivity.
While online classes offer the ability to go at your own pace and can seem more convenient, UF should prioritize offering as many in-person classes as possible. Through live lectures and connection, my in-person classes gave me the experience I had only ever seen in the movies.
Isabella is an 18 year old UF political science freshman.
Isabella Cabrera is an 18-year-old UF political science freshman.
