By Johanna Weeks
The new year rolls around, it is finally 2020. Soon, March is upon us and then boom, coronavirus. A year filled with losses and lockdowns began. Slowly, everything moved online. How did this impact college students? Screen fatigued, unmotivated, and bored college students. The effectiveness of the internet was sadly, minimal.
College student’s education was negatively impacted due to increased screen time. Switching to virtual learning was a monumental challenge. This crucial event affected millions of students and it is important to recognize and openly discuss their struggles.
COVID-19 is a pandemic that no one expected to be so hard hitting. It affected the country in terms of politics, religion and education. As humans, we look for alternatives. In times of lockdown we turn to the internet. Specifically, education classes moved online and students stayed at home or inside. According to an editorial posted on the New York Times by reporter Marie Fazio about first-year college students: “The pandemic has made it harder to meet people. Classes and clubs have moved online. Students often eat alone. But they’re making the most of it.” The internet has given students the opportunity to continue their education, but overall the distanced in-person classes and the online classes are highly impersonal.
“It stunted how involved I feel in my school’s community,” said first year University at Buffalo student Cameron Slutzky.
Screen time is a large problem, it impacts physical and mental aspects of students. According to research and statistics from the American Academy of Pediatrics, teenagers and adults should limit their screen time to two hours a day and children under 2 should have no screen time at all. This was assessed in 2019, before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Studies have shown that University of Stanford students spend four-fifths of their day in front of a screen in 2020, that’s 12.4 hours on average each day. This issue is evident in the trend on blue glasses which are supposed to decrease headaches and help people sleep better. This product has increased its sales by 60% since 2020. Marketers claim that it blocks blue light. This light is known to suppress the production of melatonin that makes people feel tired. In addition, according to research done by Harvard University, screen time can interfere with not only sleep but also creativity.
Harvard Medical Center quoted Michael Rich in a screen time study, “Boredom is the space in which creativity and imagination happen.” Rich is the director of the Center on Media and Child Health at Boston Children’s Hospital, associate professor of pediatrics at HMS, and associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. When not in class or doing assignments, college students resort to video games, shows and other internet activities.
“This past year, my sleep schedule has been a mess and I’m bored all the time because there’s nothing else to do,” said freshman SUNY Plattsburgh student Nicole Shocker.
Meeting other students and making connections with professors has been a struggle. Online pre-COVID activities are not as effective. Many students, especially freshmen, experienced high rates of loneliness, depression, and anxiety. Statistics and research completed by Boston University and University of Berkeley support this. The solution is to wait. Wait for it to be safe, more vaccines to be distributed, and eventually students will experience some normalcy. SUNY Plattsburgh has already announced that the next fall semester will be a full on campus experience with most classes and clubs in-person.
“It’s a little disappointing to see students lose that interaction with each other,” said Michelle Toth, SUNY Plattsburgh librarian. “I appreciate technology is there, but I think most of us are ready to go back to a balanced diet of in-person and online learning.”
Toth suggested that shorter online sessions with an asynchronous style learning would be more effective.
“My personal experience with the library course that I teach and reaching out to students is that Zoom works well one-on-one, like office hours with a professor. I found that for a class period it’s good for a short 10- or 15- minute introduction to something, but Moodle [the campus’ learning platform] is more useful for getting people engaged with course materials.” In addition, students can always reach out through email, if they don’t feel comfortable setting up a meeting.
COVID-19 is an unexpected global pandemic that impacted millions of people. The effects were detrimental. The lockdown caused internet usage to skyrocket. Consequently, distanced and impersonal interactions over Zoom meetings and in classrooms made it difficult to create connections. Thus, students were also faced with an increase in depression, anxiety, and loneliness and a different learning platform. College students did not receive the worse side of it, but were presented with a challenge: a change in the expected.
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