Studying and online teaching during Covid-19

After finishing high school in 2019 in Romania I decided that it is time for a change. For this, I left my country in order to pursue a bachelor’s degree program in the Netherlands. In my blog, I will share with you the experience I had during my first and second years of study during the pandemic. How physical courses and exams transformed into online teaching.

First semester

In late August when I arrived in the Netherlands, there were no signs or even news that Covid existed. For this matter my first semester of university has passed like anyone would expect. It was full of socializing and meeting new people. We had classes every day, so it gave me the chance of making new friends from all over Europe. Usually, they were living either in the same city as myself or in Germany, in the neighboring city. Based on the fact that the city in which I am studying is directly at the border between the Netherlands and Germany it was very normal for some students to choose to live in Germany.

Towards the end of the first semester, some news started appearing about this new virus that was spreading quickly. Once the second semester started, our university adopted some basic hygiene guidelines such as advising people that feel sick to stay home, frequently washing their hands, etc.

Second Semester

After about two weeks, more and more cases were registered in the Netherlands. One Thursday morning I received an email from the university where I was told that physical courses will be suspended for an undetermined period. This action took all of us by surprise since there were no early signs that this would happen. Nonetheless, after this first email, we received an additional explanation that the teaching will be moved in the next weeks on a virtual platform called MS Teams. The full shift took our institution about 3 weeks, in which we had no classes. The problem was that more and more businesses were starting to shut down because of the high number of cases.

My classmates, friends, and I started being demoralized in those 3 weeks. We thought that the student life will be in one way, or another also suspended for an undetermined period. For the first week, the “student life” was pretty boring since we took seriously all the measures imposed by the Dutch government. In the second week, we started meeting each other in order to have some social contact. This made us realize that the situation is not that bad from more points of view. First, all of us were living in student accommodations meaning that social contact was not hard to come by. Second, we already spent a semester together and so we were already practically friends.

Once the teaching started, I am not going to lie, it wasn’t that good. I cannot really say if it was because we were just not used to having lectures from our rooms or just the teacher’s method of teaching wasn’t yet adapted for the online environment, but one thing was sure, no one was paying attention, nor remembering anything after the lecture.

Furthermore, the number of classes was way lower than before. In the first semester, we had university every day from 8:30 until 16:30. When moving everything online we only had one course per day, usually from 12:00 until 13:30. Of course, this was bad when looking at the quality of studying but good when looking at it from the students’ point of view, meaning a lot of free time to spend with other students and just time to bike around and explore the surroundings given that it was already late spring and the weather was just wonderful.

While teaching slowly started becoming better, another topic arose, will the exams be online or offline? At first, we were informed that the exams will be held online and so a lot of students went home. 2 weeks before the first exam, our course coordinator told us that our program will be the only one that will have exams on the campus. He said that it is too “complicated” to make online exams for our subjects. After the exam period passed, all of us went home. We didn’t know when the university will start or if it will still be held online or on campus.

Third and fourth semesters

Fast forward one month, the university tells us that teaching will be held online with the possibility to open the university at beginning of winter. Even though the courses were held online I chose to come back to the Netherlands and attend them from there. During the 3^rd and 4^th semesters teaching really just got better and better and also grew on me.  I mean in the end we would’ve been getting the same level of teaching while also being comfortable in the house and having the chance to multitask while you are listening to it.

When looking at the current online teaching method, I have to say that I am pleasantly surprised. I would’ve never thought that online teaching can be compared to offline. At the moment, I don’t see a need for physical courses but only when it comes to group work.

To sum everything up, my experience with studying during Covid-19 was not that bad after all. I got to have quite some free time in the beginning and ended with being able to follow quality teaching right from my room, without the hassle of waking up very early to get to university and also having to possibility to rewatch that course as many times as I wish.