Students from a metalworking class pose during an in-person class meeting. Photo provided by Erin Albreht
By Annika Taylor
Western’s announcement last March to go online meant being able to sleep in, not making the daily trek to campus and a longer spring break. Whatever novelty there may have been has disappeared in the year since.
Classes of students are now commencing and graduating without the sought after “college experience.” For many, in-person classes have become a distant memory.
The news that remote classes will continue as the norm through summer quarter may pose the question: “What are in-person classes actually like these days?”
What In-Person Classes Look Like
In order to have an on-campus presence faculty, staff and students participate in pooled COVID-19 surveillance tests every two weeks and fill out a daily symptoms survey.
While on campus, wearing masks and six feet of distance must be maintained at all times unless a student is alone in a room. The windows of rooms are kept open for air circulation and if the room has fans, they are always on. Western lists campus guidelines and provides health and safety updates regarding COVID-19 on the university website.
The majority of the classes offered in-person are experiential, so even basic precautions have resulted in some unconventional student-student and student-teacher interactions.
For example, in a studio art class maintaining six feet of distance may mean a professor gesturing at a painting from six feet away describing how to improve technique.
Are In-Person Classes Better?
Erin Albreht, a fourth-year printmaking major, has two in-person classes this quarter, both of which are studio art classes. These two classes equate to about four hours of in-person instruction each week. In her experience, in-person classes during the pandemic are both better and worse than they were pre-pandemic.
Western reduced class sizes as part of their pandemic precaution procedure resulting in a more communal, hands-on experience for students.
The bad news is that other precautions, like starting in-person instruction two weeks later than usual, have proven challenging. Winter quarter is already the shortest quarter of the academic year and the two-week delay resulted in instruction feeling crammed.
Although ClassFinder may list a class as “in-person,” a lot of instruction still happens online. For art classes, this often means watching a video demonstration of a technique and then coming into class and jumping right in.
Limitations on studio time have been frustrating for students.
Art students used to have access to the art building nearly all hours of the day. These days the building closes periodically for cleaning and is closed entirely on weekends. This is a drawback for students who used weekends and evenings as an opportunity to work ahead.
Tabitha Smed, a fourth-year art and education student, is currently taking one in-person studio art class.
For Smed, the decision to stay online or be in-person comes down to the type of class. If there were in-person alternatives to her currently remote classes she would still choose to stay remote.
“Some classes don’t benefit from being in person,” Smed said.
To her it makes sense for studio classes to be offered in person, but not her art history or education classes.
She believes that professors are doing their best but that it’s harder to get in contact with them and harder to get motivated.
In terms of one-on-one instruction, Smed said that her in-person classes would have had small class sizes anyways, but that it has resulted in less distraction.
Last quarter junior Kris Keilor was in an electronics lab class that met four times throughout the quarter. The class was meant to meet five times but the last meeting was canceled following the spike in COVID-19 cases following Thanksgiving.
The purpose of the class was to build smoke detectors but because of the final class being canceled, the smoke detectors remained unbuilt unless students opted to build them on their own time.
Keilor credits his professor Dr. John Lund for pushing the university to allow students the equipment to build their detector at home.
Keilor believes attending the lab in-person was worth it.
“Getting hands on help was key to success in labs and to see and practice the concept. It’s not intuitive. You get to see the mathematical limits,” said Keilor.
No matter what professors do Keilor believes remote learning can’t replace the discussion and impromptu study sessions that are allowed in-person.
“Education remote is not high quality,” Keilor said.
The only reason Keilor is taking classes during the pandemic is to not drop out of his cohort and senior class project.
What about the “College Experience?”
Since going online Keilor learned to value socializing more. Small interactions matter to him, like a classmate poking his head out of a doorway to say “hi.”
For Albreht, in-person classes are very important when it comes to socializing.
As someone who lives alone, in-person classes are her only face-to-face interaction. In her experience it’s very difficult to make friends in an online format and she feels like she never gets to know anyone in her remote classes.
While in-person classes today do not compare to what they were before spring of last year. Western’s main campus remains nearly empty. Coffee shops, markets and communal spaces, like the library and the VU, are shut down. Although current in-person classes result in more interaction, it’s not the same.
“It used to be you would pass hundreds of students on your way to class, now you only see students when you actually get in the room. This isn’t what college is,” Albreht said.
“You can’t lean over and talk to the person next to you, because there’s no one there. You can’t hang out afterwards either,” said Smed.
Smed feels more appreciative of being in a classroom after the shift to remote classes. She feels bad for first years who don’t get to experience what Western was like before the pandemic.
Getting connected with classmates outside of class is more difficult than it once was, but not impossible.
Smed feels like Zoom doesn’t do a good job of replicating a classroom setting and she finds herself relying on Discord groups to get in touch with classmates.
Moving Forward
Both the dangers of staying remote and transitioning back to in-person concern Smed.
“We need to stay remote, but the education isn’t the same,” Smed said.
Albreht thinks that taking in-person classes is a really cool opportunity and that Western is adapting well to COVID-19. She feels bad for those who don’t attend classes in-person, but also wants them to know that their education is still valid. She believes that putting your best in now, even if you are learning remotely, will make it easier when it is eventually time to come back.
“The worst of it is done and students should be hopeful,” Albreht said.
Keilor thinks that the education of remote learners is still valid as long as students put in the time and effort. He is challenging himself this quarter to stay present in his classes and with his classmates. He believes in the cumulative cascading effect.
“If no one is talking I want to engage more. Any one person who engages more makes it easier for the next. You have to lead by example,” said Keilor.
Keilor has taken this quarter to focus on personal growth. He thinks that if you struggled with time management it’s more obvious now then it was before.
According to Keilor, we have to become our own task masters learning to manage ourselves outside the supervision of professors and parents.
As difficult as remote learning is, just getting back to in-person classes doesn’t seem to be the answer. Many of the problems we all face from lack of interaction, to feeling less engaged in classes still affect those who are learning in-person. Instead we can focus on doing the best with what we have knowing that at some point we’ll all be back in the classroom. Hopefully it will resemble some of what we remember.