The Observatory: Who Are We Leaving Behind?
The Observatory is a new weekly series that brings together students, alumni, and professionals associated with OSU Battelle Center to write about topics that are relevant to the mission of our center. Our guest writer this week, Divya Batchu, is a fourth-year student studying environmental public health. She is interested in infectious diseases with a focus on using novel geospatial approaches to track disease clusters. Currently she is taking an Office of the Secretary of Defense sponsored course called Rapid Innovation for Public Impact at Ohio State. The course is taught in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, and is maintained by OSU Battelle Center for Science, Engineering, and Public Policy.
This spring, The Ohio State University, and many other educational institutions, made the decision to shut down because of SARS CoV-2. Schools across the country had to rapidly transition from traditional in-person teaching to delivering all course material online. In addition to this transition, on-campus students left their dorms, international students returned back to their home countries, and students experienced financial strain from leaving on-campus jobs. With the development of a vaccine still months away, it’s time to evaluate our new normal in the context of higher education.
Online classes were once a rarity to see among course offerings, but now only a fraction of labs and lectures are in-person. Most students are now well versed in Zoom lectures and online breakout groups. While E-learning might seem like an insufficient substitute for traditional pedagogical instruction, there are many advantages to E-learning. Online instruction during COVID-19 has provided greater autonomy to students over the pace of their education. Students worried that the quality of their education may be compromised by this transition to full virtual delivery method can take comfort in knowing that studies have shown that medical students who learned via online lectures performed similarly to their peers who had traditional pedagogical delivery. In addition to the benefits e-learning provides to students, instructors can also get much of the same flexibility with this now widespread approach. The pandemic has provided a much-needed impetus for innovation
These benefits are only possible if both the student and the instructor have access to a stable broadband connection. The reality is that in the United States over 21 million Americans don’t have access to the internet. There is a stark digital divide in this country at a time when the internet has become a requisite for attending school, doctors’ visits, and even meeting friends. What happens to students who live in areas that have poor internet connection? What happens when a professor tries to teach a class virtually on the same weak broadband connection as their children in virtual class? Students from families earning less than $75,000 are twice as likely to say that they have canceled all their fall education plans compared to students from families earning $100,000 or more. Summer enrollment for black undergraduate students declined by 8% from the previous year. In-person lectures provided an equalizing factor. Every student had the same opportunity to learn as long as they were seated in class. E-learning has added another layer of inequity to education accessibility. E-learning is our new normal for the foreseeable future. Privileged students can take advantage of the new tools that E-learning brings. However, as we progress forward we need to consider who might be left behind in our new normal.
