For Jennifer Kasiama, a student at Toronto’s Ontario College of Art and Design, 2020 was an incredibly frustrating year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like so many others, her course become all-virtual when the pandemic took hold. “I spent so much time on my laptop, I definitely got Zoom fatigue,” says Ms Kasiama, 20.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“My attention wasn’t as focused as I’ve been with in-person classrooms, and my grades definitely suffered in the first semester.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After struggling in the autumn she began to monitor her screen habits, while also managing her time more successfully. In the second term her grades inched up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The lurch into virtual learning has been jarring for both students and educators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The transition was so unbelievable, I practically got whiplash from it,” says Steven Miller, a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University in New Jersey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was used to teaching his journalism students about reacting to a crisis, but also found himself struggling to manage the sudden shift to virtual courses as the pandemic forced Rutgers and colleges across the world to lock down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
First, he noticed a gap in communication between educators and students. “In teaching you want to see your students faces to find out if they understand what is being presented to them, and when we went to online learning, students weren’t obligated to turn on their cameras,” Prof Miller says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then, he had to quickly adapt to new software his school asked teachers to use for synchronous (real-time) and asynchronous (pre-recorded videos students can access anytime) learning. He recorded lectures using Canvas, which helps deliver online video to students, similar to Zoom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So what does the future hold? It seems likely that for many colleges there will be a hybrid format of online and in-classroom learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tech firm Top Hat is hoping to cash-in on that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Toronto-based firm offers a digital courseware platform that lets anyone running a course film lectures, grade assignments, add live chat and discussion boards, and launch custom quizzes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The popularity of its system surged during the pandemic. Top Hat recorded a 66% growth in revenue growth in the year to March 2021 – half of its current users have joined since the pandemic began.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“What drove this uptick in demand is how educators needed to maintain that engagement with their students – it’s something we even saw pre-pandemic, for those in distance-learning programmes,” says Nick Stein, chief marketing officer at Top Hat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s not enough to just move everything to a virtual space, though. Post-secondary students didn’t feel as motivated by their courses when online classrooms became the norm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A study found half of US students said they were very satisfied with their courses before they went fully online, but that figure fell to 19% when their courses shifted online.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For Jennifer Kasiama, a student at Toronto’s Ontario College of Art and Design, 2020 was an incredibly frustrating year. Like so many others, her course become all-virtual when the pandemic took hold. “I spent so much time on my laptop, I definitely got Zoom fatigue,” says Ms Kasiama, 20. “My attention wasn’t as focused as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n