Considering some students are still adjusting to the academic changes of COVID-19, it’s imperative for professors to offer asynchronous video meetings for their students.
The new normal of online learning has been a slow adjustment for many students and professors alike. Watching a Zoom lecture can be essential in keeping a student involved in the class throughout the semester, while many students are still balancing their personal lives with this new experience.
It should be noted that while students are working to keep up with their learning remotely, online classes have proved to cause issues and more difficulty than in-class learning for many students.
In a survey conducted by Generation Lab, 77% of students claimed that distance learning is worse or much worse than in-person classes.
In person learning offered an environment that placed each student equally in the same room to learn, but remote learning has only emphasized the inequities which exist for some students.
In a study conducted by Georgia State University, 69.9% of students preferred the asynchronous teaching style. Reasons brought up were unreliable internet service at home, the convenience of re-watching and personal scheduling issues.
Another issue students could be facing is taking care of children who are also at home due to the pandemic.
According to data collected by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, more than one in five undergraduate students are parents.
With student parents having to balance being a student and also a teacher for their children, the small amount of flexibility asynchronous video meetings offer can go a long way for students balancing multiple changes in their lives.
With so many responsibilities in and outside the classroom, the mental toll, video meeting fatigue and lack of concentration that can stem from required synchronous Zoom lectures burden students’ learning experiences.
In a survey conducted by Texas A&M University, 89% of the student participants experienced difficulty with concentration since classes have shifted online.
Asynchronous video meetings can help with times when students need to take a break from school, so they can return to to work with a more ready mindset.
The lack of a physical location to learn has also shown that some individuals need to be in a certain environment to get into a certain mindset.
According to the same Texas A&M survey, out of the 89% of students experiencing concentration difficulty, 46% of them claimed that their home was not a suitable environment to focus on schoolwork.
While the options to have a proper academic space to learn are currently very limited for students, having access to asynchronous video meetings can help with at least providing students the option of learning at a time that best works for them.
Providing asynchronous video meetings to students is imperative to the online learning experience. Although learning remotely isn’t perfect, the best solution would be offering students all the opportunities to continue learning online, while not requiring them to attend at a specific time.
