How did moving online impact your communities within the university?
(eg: with colleagues, students, cohorts, research teams)
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I cater to Senior School Children (9-12 th Grade). While preparing for our School’s Foundation Day, I realised it was so difficult to catch hold of them. The most prominent excuse was Network issue/Wifi conectivity problem. Working in physical space, is so friendly. You can connect not only with the vibe of the child but also the space which motivates you to work harder together as a unit.
With colleagues, collective discussion wrt a child’s social and emotional needs, maintenance of records together , sharing anxiety of declaration of board results and it’s preparation , sharing of lunch boxes and staff parties are missed. Merely a con call and a meeting on MS Teams can’t replace it!
Moving online had an impact on a lot of societies in my college,as events had to be cancelled suddenly. These were events that had taken months to prepare,and though everyone understood the need to cancel them,we were still sad to see our hard work go to waste. Due to all the activities moving online,we had to quickly adapt to working without physically meeting each other. Many of our meetings would happen after classes,and most of us would be very tired. The uncertainty also impacted the deadlines we had set for ourselves,which resulted in loads of stress.
Thankfully, by the time the pandemic arrived in Delhi, our batch of MPhil students had already completed its course work. We were anyways poised to go our own ways – into the narrow domains of our individual research topics. We would still meet eachother for common reading sessions, and at talks held at the Department. When these moved online, we were deprived of our meeting each other. While the academic content was received online, and this even in an enhanced manner, we no longer had the opportunity to derive emotional support from friends. The light talk and tea that surrounded our reading sessions and talks could not be moved online. The pandemic caused many of us to return to our homes. We stayed in touch on WhatsApp, telephone and e-mail. We even studied together. We shared resorces. Despite all of this, we missed being able to be with each other. Meeting online or on telephone is great, but it still has a funny feeling to it!
Haven’t seen/met colleagues in months.
Networking has been adversely affected.
Was able to safely remain aloof of workplace politics.
there are no communities as such in the university, and that is what I feel was the biggest task that took a toll. I planned on establishing a society in the university and present the plan to the Dean and Director, i have been unable to do that until now and our masters Sem 1 has been without any competition or any activity which is very sad.
the other community impact was, we have no social group as such with our seniors. we havent even seen them. that is very darb
we have no social community either to celebrate any of the festivals. we have has the blandest university experience
there has been no sports day, annual day etc we didnt even have any orientation. so whatever community we could form in terms of student union has also not seen any light.
The university experience is incomplete without the social interactions that come with it – both with professors and one’s classmates. As such, the online mode becomes slightly contentious as it does not stand to facilitate these interactions in the way that on-campus learning would. Most of these interactions happened by way of casual bump-ins or seeing people on the hallways which allowed for spontaneous action-reaction conversations. However, in the online mode this spontaneity is lost almost entirely. As a first year post-graduate student, I have not had the opportunity to engage in any community building due to the entire experience being online. This could lead one to say that online media and platforms could be a great supplement to in-person interactions but their ability to be a substitute for the same remains debatable.
The shift to an online mode with the onset of COVID had a huge impact on my communities in college. Be it with friends, classmates or professors, the frequency and nature of interaction changed. Online, I tended to talk only with a narrow circle of friends. Holding casual conversations over text or video calls seemed tedious and hence my interaction with other classmates became need-based. Losing out on such possible connections and friendships is something I attribute to the pandemic. My relationship with teachers was also affected by the online mode. I found it easier to interact with professors who I was acquainted with earlier or who had taught me previously. Forming a relationship from scratch (especially in classes where no one would have their camera on) presented a challenge. While the online mode restricted interaction with a larger campus community, my conversations with friends became more frequent and detailed. Continuous checking in on one another, updating each other about work or assignments and sharing funny anecdotes from our homes became the norm. Over a year into the pandemic, I am now much more comfortable in online interactions, even in group settings which can become awkward! Graduation ceremonies—though a huge reminder of the experiences we were losing out on—did give me a sense of belongingness and ideas about how now to experience communities.
Since I only had a semester’s worth of experience physically in college, I found myself restricting my interactions to the three or four students and teachers I had mingled with initially. Therefore my community remained quite narrow in the first couple of months. Reaching out to others felt nerve-wracking and unworthy of extra effort. The few instances where I did interact with new people began and ended purely on work-basis.
However as the months went by and societies began restructuring themselves to fit the online format and conducting online events, I was able to feel some semblance of togetherness, though still limited.
Moving online definitely hamper the freedom of speech as far as my students community is concerned.As during pandemic I got an opportunity to teach B.Ed distance students (future teachers)but I can feel easily that although students want to share their ideas regarding any topic which I used to deliver but unfortunately due to this online they used to think twice whether to share or not as there was feeling was insecurity because there were already lots of memes shared on social media which directly impact the psychological aspect of a learner.
Students were not aware how to use different learning apps that was another things which leads students to anxiety.
There was a techno stress among all particularly among students and teachers while interacting online.
Since I started my masters degree online, I found it really hard to interact much with my peers. Although people tried to facilitate virtual interaction using virtual study groups, it isn’t possibble to re-create the kind of physical interaction you have with your peers by sitting next to them in class using virtual platforms. Due to the way most of my online classes were structured, there was almost no motivation for me to actively reach out to my professors for anything other than logistics.
I faced a lot of difficulties with most team based projects and assignments. Different time zones and being unable to meet in-person made collaboration frustrating. This ended up adversely affecting the quality of the final deliverable.
There is a positive ane negative side to this. The pandemic cut me off from the casual engagement that comes with going to the university. It took me a while to realise how much I missed the passing hellos in the hallway, the joking comments of the chaiwala, the value of dealing face to face with administrative staff. However, on the positive side, it allowed me to strengthen communities and networks that I had not earlier imagined. During the pandemic I started a couple of reading groups which have become quite a regular fixture, and because everyone was stuck at home, it meant that people from across continents could get together, read together, and share ideas. In this latter respect, it has been a blessing. My community has simultaneously narrowed its scope and broadened its reach.
Community within university barely exist in online mode of learning. I am not involved in any of the co-curricular activities groups . I barely know my classmates because out of 50 I have met only 10-12 of them since last year. I might not be able to recognize my classmates after completion of course if it remains on online mode.
There is no student union to raise concerns that I am aware of and university has become just a space to login and log out from computers. The interaction , and communication is completely missing.
I was a part of the queer collective at my university. We had a lot of events planned ahead and due to this pandemic and the online shift we could hardly organise those events. For queer and trans* students, these collectives at times can be a source of great resilience and collective solidarity towards one another where we can be vulnerable but still find ways of being resilient.
This collective helped me to accept and learn things better and now, while I am writing this here, I am thinking about how that experience would have been for the students who would have come to the university also because it has a queer collective. The interaction was affected a lot during this time even with these new members of the collective.
As someone who values meeting in real life more than talking on call or text, it was difficult for me to maintain connections and frequently check up on my friends. I feel that I missed out on a lot of interactions with my classmates as my circle was limited to a few friends.
I was a member of the Books and Documentaries Review Club of my department. For me, it was a safe space where ideas and thoughts could freely float around. We used to try and meet once a week in college but during the pandemic, it became extremely difficult to even manage that.
A sense of community with this change of platform was almost non-existent in the beginning months of Covid-19. The first wave was a time that allowed me to strengthen the networks of friends and colleagues. However, as one was confronted with the halt in offline classes during the pandemic over the months, there was a wish to use the ‘remaining’ time in knowing and networking. This wish brought with it, my own sense of inadequacy and losing out on connecting with faculties and others beyond the limited connectivity over emails as of now.
– All were not tech savvy, so was time consuming and frustating for them.
-Factor of happiness reduced that came previously with informal meets at college.
– Some of my students were having single smartphone and so clash of timmings among classes of siblings.
How did moving online impact your communities within the university?
(eg: with colleagues, students, cohorts, research teams)
I felt alienated from my peers, and it felt hard to imagine that we were all going through the same classes, the same courses, the same process, until exam season. I found it hard to engage with my professors and also embark on the kind of research I wanted to do, since I had no access to libraries, but also because of other responsibilities around the household, no time to read.
The extra-curricular activity that I participated most in, in college, was debating. And during the pandemic, the activity and society shifted online. That being said, the nature of debating changed completely. Debating is a really competitive activity and it is usual for rooms to get heated and exchanges to get aggressive. All of that became even more common and normalised when you couldn’t see the people you were directing your words at. When you’re yelling at a screen, it is hard to imagine the people behind those boxes who are listening to you, and being affected by the things you say.
The activity (in its online form) took a massive mental toll on a lot of the members of my society, with some of them dropping out completely. Since debating used to be one of my most dynamic avenues for learning, I felt this loss on a multitude of levels.