The university campus life experience may be irrevocably changed with students who have been stuck at home for more than two years still embracing hybrid and online learning.
Academics say the shift to online and hybrid learning has drastically increased their workload and reduced educational quality.
The University of Sydney undergraduate students Skylir Chang and Heike Arendt.Credit: Rhett Wyman
Campuses are slowly coming back to life, but some experts fear the transformative university experience for young people could be lost forever.
Most NSW universities have been reluctant to reveal the current split of online and in-person courses, however almost all say students are asking for continued flexibility.
Australian National University higher education expert Andrew Norton said there was resistance from students to going back to a full on-campus experience after becoming accustomed to online learning through the pandemic.
“I guess one of the problems is you’ve had a couple of cohorts who didn’t have a lot of experience on campus because they were home for all or most of the past years,” he said.
“So the social glue bringing you to campus, your friends, wasn’t there anyway. At some level, they don’t know what they’re missing out on.”
He said while online learning was cheaper to deliver for new institutions, infrastructure costs for legacy universities meant they had an incentive to return students to campus en masse.
But the number of international students stuck overseas, especially in China, also meant universities had no choice but to maintain large-scale online options, Norton said.
Sydney University senior linguistics lecturer, and National Tertiary Education Union branch president, Dr Nick Riemer said most academics found online teaching requirements more intense and tiring than in-person.
“There’s also all the extra administration and technical work that goes with setting up online enrolments, monitoring them, reacting in cases of technology failure,” he said.
“In a way it sort of duplicates the work that academics have to do.”
He said there was a widespread recognition that, in most cases, online delivery of classes was substandard and not a substitute for in-person experience.
“I don’t think there’s any question that the pandemic has shifted things permanently,” Riemer said.
University of Sydney law students Lucy Sive and Ella Krygier.Credit: Rhett Wyman
University of Sydney design student Skylir Chang, who is on exchange from New Zealand, said her subjects offered both on-campus classes and online options for students who are unable to attend in person.
It was useful for her when she recently had COVID-19 and was able to keep up with her studies online.
She is enjoying having an on-campus experience and making new friends after studying almost exclusively online at the University of Auckland through the pandemic.
“Instead of having two options it was just all online, so you didn’t really get that social side of things,” Chang said.
Postgraduate law student Ella Krygier said the campus was beginning to come back to life, but it was nowhere near as busy as before the pandemic.
“It’s not what it was when I was doing my undergraduate arts degree. Now people have flexible options for doing classes online that they’re used to, so many people don’t come in as much.
“I would say there is a little less of a community now.”
She said she was glad most law subjects were still being delivered in person, but enjoyed the switch to online exams since the pandemic hit.
“I much prefer classes being in person, I cannot take in content as well online I find it impossible,” Krygier said.
University of Sydney said that 90 per cent of lectures and most tutorials and seminars were now offered in person, with 40,000 people on campus each week.
It was up on 80 per cent of units offered on campus in semester 1 last year, before lockdown hit and most classes were forced online.
“We will continue to learn from our experiences during the pandemic and the online delivery we were forced to adopt, but there will always be a place for face-to-face teaching. The community that develops around a campus makes for a richer student experience,” a university spokeswoman said.
University of NSW, University of Technology and University of Western Sydney did not provide a breakdown of courses offered online versus in person.
However, they all indicated that students reported a preference for hybrid or flexible models of teaching.
UNSW student representative council president Nayonika Bhattacharya said there needed to be a balance between returning to in-person classes with student accessibility concerns.
“Students want in-person opportunities but in a way they’re not forced to come in and the choice has not been taken away from them,” she said.
“I think COVID highlighted a lot of the flaws that existed in the system. So we should keep the changes that are quite useful but also acknowledge that in-person engagement is a powerful tool for people to learn.”
University of Sydney student representative council president Lauren Lancaster said online and hybrid course delivery did not have the same educational outcomes as in-person classes.
“Online learning was never supposed to be the dominant stream of tertiary education delivery,” she said.
“Now that we’re seeing people come back on campus there’s also a lot more engagement about what it means to be a student, what it means to be part of the university community in a wider sense and that’s a really positive thing that builds connection between all of us.“
Norton believes the lasting impact of the COVID-19 changes to university life and education won’t be fully understood until years to come.
“The impact of the people you meet on campus in and outside the classroom is hard to quantify and extremely important throughout the rest of your career and building networks,” he said.
“I think this is an experience that will probably not end well.”
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