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One Month In Stories from Harvard undergraduates on how learning has changed since the move to online instruction.

One month ago, Harvard students transitioned to remote learning. Over this time, we have regularly asked the Bok Center’s undergraduate fellows to reflect on their experiences with online courses and with learning in new environments. Last week, we asked students to weigh in on the ways in which learning has changed over the past month. Here, we share reflections from undergraduates who work with the Bok Center’s Learning Lab.

Reflecting On A Fourth Week

Those two days (partially) off the grid definitely forced me to reflect on one of the primary challenges to learning remotely: how heavily it relies on infrastructure that many families and parts of the country & world don’t have or could easily lose.
a massive tree fell in our yard Monday morning and took out an entire telephone pole

This is an interesting week for me to fill out this reflection, because from Monday morning to about an hour ago (Wednesday morning) my family had no WiFi, and no power for most of that time as well, because a massive tree fell in our yard Monday morning and took out an entire telephone pole. Conveniently enough, this happened the day my Junior Paper for History & Literature (the biggest assignment of the year for my concentration) was due—so it led to hours of panicked attempts to finish editing & uploading a thirty page word doc to Canvas via data & spotty service on my phone, which was quickly running out of battery. I got it in a whopping two minutes before the deadline, and this was only possible because I had data and service—however spotty. Those two days (partially) off the grid definitely forced me to reflect on one of the primary challenges to learning remotely: how heavily it relies on infrastructure that many families and parts of the country & world don’t have or could easily lose. My teachers were super understanding for the past two days, but they were only two days—any more time and I would’ve lost income from work and fallen steadily behind in class.

The biggest innovation I’ve tried to incorporate into my life is opening up steady and consistent lines of communication with classmates & friends (& teachers, when needed!) in order to connect on shared difficulties and find solutions. It’s been especially helpful to hear from friends about how they’re dealing with the emotional impacts of this crisis!

-Sophie, '21

Compassion in Crisis

Professors and students can mutually show compassion for one another by understanding that this is an unprecedented situation, and it's incredibly stressful.

I think the most important thing in this new world (though I have always believed this is the cornerstone to collective success, I hope this crisis highlights it) is one thing: compassion. Excellence nationally and globally should look like compassion for everyone and empathy for each person’s lived experience.

In terms of Harvard especially, what standards for excellence exist at the college now may need to be altered if, for example, we were to remain remote for the coming fall semester (I fear even typing this thought into existence, but I tell myself it’s better to be prepared for the worst case scenario and be pleasantly surprised at moving back to campus in August). I would say in this case, excellence should be striving to find innovative ways of keeping students engaged in classes, though that’s far easier said than done. I think releasing students from such rigid and intense expectations will allow them to rise to the occasion in their own capacity. Harvard’s campus is a pressure cooker of success; it pushes students to keep going beyond the breaking point, which is simultaneously thrillingly stimulating and wildly exhausting. I constantly feel as though I’m moving on campus. Learning at home, it’s the exact opposite. I leave my room twice a day. The drastic environmental shift should be taken into account when recalibrating excellence. Now is a time for more self-care than Harvard’s campus usually allows for. I haven’t quite mastered that self-care yet, but I suppose I have plenty of time to work on it in the coming months. I’m just not quite sure yet how the academic rigor of Harvard can be replicated without the atmosphere of Harvard: my motivation to stay up working until 1am drops dramatically when there are no friends in the common room to talk to or Insomnia cookie runs to make.

The easiest way to make students motivated now, I would say, is to encourage them to care about what they're doing. I believe that creating a stronger bond between professors and students, mirroring one that would appear more easily in a live classroom setting, will push students to continue to want to achieve regardless of whether they're sitting in Widener or sitting in bed. And a frame of mind shift, too, will come with this empathy. Professors and students can mutually show compassion for one another by understanding that this is an unprecedented situation, and it's incredibly stressful. Personally, a lot of self-check-ins and yoga are helping me remain grounded right now. We all just need to help each other out, and I think readjusting the standard for empathy will be the first step in this journey.

Behind a screen, you're automatically removed from direct human contact which can be isolating for everyone. Increased communication between Professors and students, and among students having the same learning experience, will help to keep everyone more engaged. The online learning experience is vastly different from what we as college students (and the professors, too, I’d assume) are used to. Right now, we’re experiencing short-term, last-minute, desperate-times learning. None of my classes were extraordinarily impacted because my professors can still show power points and lecture, but I’d imagine that engineering or science classes prove FAR more difficult. Hopefully, though, if professors have the summer months to prepare and reassess, some more long term solutions will appear, if that’s what’s necessary. I stand by my first initial thought, though. Compassion, right now and always, is paramount in this brave new world, so to speak.

-Laura, '21

Random Walks: Reflecting on a Month of Remote Learning

We can take life one day at a time, with little plan for how our final path will look in the future.
I spend so much of my time taking meals or walking places

I am utterly bewildered by the fact that, as I write this, it’s been a month to the a day since I packed up my life on campus and crammed it into my family’s Honda Pilot. Today also marks a month since all sit-down restaurants were closed in Massachusetts. Those are just two of so many things that have changed around the country and world. In my own life, doing schoolwork from home has been very difficult in some respects and fun in some others. I’ve definitely had so much of a better understanding of what my days are like at school when I’m not there. For instance, I spend so much of my time taking meals or walking places (which I think contributes to my ‘hurry up and go’ attitude, which has now segued into ‘hurry up and wait.’) Now, I think I fill that transitional time with either surfing the web or checking my email or catching up with friends.

My own innovations to keep a sense of normalcy have primarily been social -- my blockmates and I are found solace in working on a collaborative project together to keep us creative, busy, and thoughtful. But, it's not all work and no play: we also have game nights once a week to unwind, and they're some of the highlights of my quarantined time. Also, simply opening up my Zoom room to work in the presence of friends has been a wonderful tool and restored the feeling of working in Widener or Kirkland basement with companions and curbed a bit of the loneliness one inevitably feels so far flung from everyone. Also, my nightly constitutional walk has really been critical to keeping my blood pumping and spirits high.

Nonetheless, I’ve also found how difficult it is to partition ‘work’ and ‘home’ when, how you say, working at home -- this is especially tough in the microcosm of my computer, where a switch of a tab can take me from working diligently to goofing off. I’ve also been amused (and, at times, beset) by some first world problems that have really taken hold when technology is your portal to the outside world (a broken spacebar really sent me into a tizzy a few days back).

One class that has rebounded so well in the face of this adversity is Physical Sciences 70: Introduction to Digital Fabrication. The professors are willing to purchase and ship students tools they need, and the use of Slack has created more of a conversation between students and faculty that unites us over common code problems and dreaming up medical solutions with 3D printed materials. On campus, the work was much more individual, but I feel like our class community is so much stronger and more collaborative in spirit now.

Now, thinking about how we define excellence moving forward, I have a few thoughts about how Harvard could set a good example:

Prioritizing Integrity: This is so incredibly important now more than before, when temptations and the ease of misconduct are perhaps raised. I think continuing to do and pursue honest academic work will be the cornerstone of remote learning.

Leading with Flexibility: I think that by trying to accommodate every student’s situation, from providing financial assistance to adapting syllabi to continuing to provide counseling services, bringing as many of the campus’ benefits to students no matter where they are is going to be creating an environment where excellence is at all possible.

Change-Driven Learning: How can we tailor our studies to best understand the current state of the world around us and impact our own local communities, especially when we have so many resources at our disposal even from afar?

Lastly, on the note of the title, while I have been randomly walking around my neighborhood quite a bit, it feels to me like our collective experience and lifestyle is defined by so much uncertainty and stochasticity. We can take life one day at a time, with little plan for how our final path will look in the future. Nonetheless, move forward we must, doing the best we can to take a step in the right direction. I have a lot of hope that we'll look back on our trajectory and know that, when the state of the world called for it, we made the right moves.

-Sophie, '21

New Month, Same Day

To help move forward with the transition, I’ve tried to convince my family for a one-hour window around 12/1pm of “quiet time” so that I can use the dining table to do my work.

Since the move to remote learning, many factors have been both expectedly and unexpectedly challenging. Finding motivation (especially as a senior) to stay on top of classes/work whilst at home has been almost impossible for me. The time difference makes it very difficult to keep up, and my family don’t see me as being a full-time student anymore - and fairly so. That means it has been very difficult to plan out a week for both academic (and LLUF) work, as I can get pulled at any time to help out with certain jobs at home (including helping care for vulnerable members of my family). As each of my four classes have taken to remote teaching, they have each come up with complex alternative plans (to the students' benefit). However, staying on top of these four separate new plans (which aren’t reflected in Canvas) - each with new specific weekly deadlines - has been a challenge.

To help move forward with the transition, I’ve tried to convince my family for a one-hour window around 12/1pm of “quiet time” so that I can use the dining table to do my work. I’ve not been overly successful with persuading them for every weekday yet, but it was really helpful when I had a remote exam to do - rather than trying to work on it from my bed. Another thing I found helpful was to set my Canvas time to my own time zone, so my assignments are now due in British time (e.g. 5pm rather than 12pm) - this makes it much easier to manage and stay on top of deadlines, rather than having to remember the difference in my head every time and accidentally submit something late.

For me, I think the concern is less what excellence will look like in the future of remote learning and more the challenge of adequately evaluating such excellence. These challenges already existed on a campus such as Harvard, whose students come from a variety of diverse backgrounds. However, these challenges feel as though they are amplified in a remote system, where some students have infinitely better access to resources and time than others. Fairness in evaluation is going to be difficult, and I believe colleges should work on systems which allow professors to get a better sense of what “home-life” means for different students, rather than the responsibility to do so being placed on the students themselves. It's understandable why students may feel awkward reaching out to professors in order to explain their difficult circumstances before a class has even begun, and so having a system in place to gather this information could greatly benefit such students.

-Connor, '20

Self-drive in Dynamic Times

Although it is easier to veer off schedule at home, just having that sense of structure has been great for my mental wellbeing.
my collection of zoom backgrounds is growing

The primary way in which education has changed for me has to do with how much of the learning now has to do with my self-drive. To make sure I complete my readings and listen to my class audio lectures, I have been scheduling that time into my calendar and doing my best to follow said schedule. However, given that my home is so dynamic, it may be difficult to be disciplined with schoolwork. Unlike when we were on campus, it longer feels like school is the priority, so I have been trying to remind myself that we only have a handful of weeks left and that I want to finish my 4 years strong. I have also been trying to set an example for my 11-year-old brother, who is also doing online school. I want to sure he does all his schoolwork before playing any video games or doing some other activity, but I would hypocritical if I am also not dedicating sufficient time to school.

One really useful strategy that I have been using to cope with the challenges of being home is maintaining a full schedule in my calendar. I intentionally block out my day for classes/schoolwork, job-related work, exercise, personal time, etc. This has been really helpful as I feel that my days have a purpose, it reminds me of the structure I had at school and gives me goals for what I must complete before the end of the day. Although it is easier to veer off schedule at home, just having that sense of structure has been great for my mental wellbeing.

In terms of academics, only one of my classes has live Zoom lectures. It’s enjoyable to attend because the professor is engaging and takes up the entire class time. This means that the class does not feel a waste of time. Rather, I am learning new material and enjoy the professor’s willingness to make class pleasant, with steps as simple as using fun Zoom backgrounds. As I think about what excellence looks like now, I think about the importance of both professors and students to have the space to be open with one another. Sympathy goes a long way right now. It is important to understand that everyone’s learning environment is now different and that the mental energy that students can offer to school may fluctuate week-to-week depending on personal life. As such, I think now it is important to show that teaching is a relationship: course teaching staff can demonstrate how they care about their students (ex. more flexible deadlines) and students must advocate for themselves to take advantage of said opportunities if needed.

-EVP, '20

Remote Learning and Every Day Life

I think having resources like YouTube videos or other similar helpful online resources is really important, while also decreasing the normal workload to be sure that the main concepts are getting through without overwhelming the students.
It's difficult to find a work/life balance, although keeping a daily agenda has helped.

Compared to a month ago, every day life today looks very different. In terms of learning, half of my classes have become live zoom sessions and half have become online lecture recordings. I've found that it's helpful to keep attending and watching my classes according to their initial schedule so the workload doesn't build up too much throughout the week. I feel as though I work more efficiently with the recorded classes because I can watch them on a higher speed and go back or pause to review concepts. An especially useful tool that some of my classes have been using is YouTube. My math class, for example, gives us the option of attending a live zoom session or watching a few short YouTube videos explaining the main concepts and then walking through practice problems. These videos are usually only 1-5 minutes long and there are usually 1-5 videos posted for each day of class. After watching these, you're prepared to go straight into the pset.

Remote learning definitely has drawbacks, though. It's difficult to find a work/life balance, although keeping a daily agenda has helped. On the bright side, I've been exercising every day because it's a nice break from work. I've also found that it's much harder to focus because my family shares a rather small workspace where our wifi is best, so it's very rarely silent. This has caused me to take a lot longer on tasks than usual. Because of this, some classes lightening the usual workload was vital. For example, math went from 3 to 2 written psets (and classes) a week. I'm not quite sure why, but I've also found that despite the increased office hours, I have less motivation to reach out for help. This means I've been working harder to figure things out on my own, but this also has made me spend long hours, much longer than necessary, on work. That's why I think having resources like YouTube videos or other similar helpful online resources is really important, while also decreasing the normal workload to be sure that the main concepts are getting through without overwhelming the students.

Having 24 hour, open book exams have also worked well. This has given me plenty of time to make sure I'm submitting my best work, while also making sure I truly grasp the material.

When I do have live zoom classes, I enjoy going into breakout rooms because it can be somewhat awkward to talk when the whole class is together in a room. You don't know who else wants to talk, so you don't want to interrupt anyone. It's nice when professors switch up the breakout rooms, though, so you can talk to different people.

Moving forward, I think excellence in this new world will come down to making the most of the free resources we do have available to us, learning for the sake of learning now that it's emergency sat/unsat, and doing what we can to come together as a community and help each other through these difficult times.

-Julie, '23

Finding Time and Space, Remotely

I was able to stay much more productive at Harvard than here in general, which I think has something to do with the fact that I had different spaces at school that inspired me to be productive,
It’s focusing our time and energy on those things that are most fulfilling for us, while also normalizing the fact that sometimes we will not be able to be as productive as usual...even productivity itself may come in different forms.

This month, the most important thing I’ve learned is that if you are trying to simply superimpose your Harvard schedule to wherever you are now, it will not work out. I started off trying to work at the same times, eat at the same times, and take the same breaks, but I didn’t take into account the fact that my routine and responsibilities at home are simply not the same. On top of that, I was able to stay much more productive at Harvard than here in general, which I think has something to do with the fact that I had different spaces at school that inspired me to be productive, whereas at home there’s nowhere to go really — especially in a small apartment like mine — which can definitely burn you out sometimes.

I think over-working and putting an excess of pressure on myself has been my biggest challenge. After a month of experience, I’m now giving myself much more time to do the work I need to do, and also allowing myself to be a little bit more relaxed with my classes as well when it gets to be too much. (I reached out and got an extension for a paper this week and it was the best decision ever.) Also, prescribed free time is great! When I'm reading a book or spending time with my family, that is all I try to worry about doing. Otherwise, I find I'm constantly stressing about not doing enough school work in all the "free time" we are told we have now.

Still, the classes I enjoyed most on campus remain engaging and some make up the better parts of my week. Namely, my creative writing class taught by Professor Susan Faludi. Even though we’re not physically in person, the class still feels very much like a small little family of sorts. Susan always asks us about our weeks, woes, and wins. We also maintain a weekly blog where everyone in the class is open to write about absolutely anything that's on their mind, which has definitely helped us all stay connected to each other in this new age of remote learning. The actual act of writing necessary for that class has also been really comforting. We’re writing long form journalism about women in Boston, and I really love my topic (a local, all-female punk band). Writing about something I experienced back in Cambridge also just connects me to Harvard and my friends in a way. When my other classes are assigning rigid, academic papers, it’s really refreshing to get to write more personally and creatively.

We’re writing long form journalism about women in Boston, and I really love my topic (a local, all-female punk band).

Moving forward, I think “excellence” definitely looks like self-care. It’s taking a step back to re-evaluate the work we’re doing and the pressure we may or may not be putting on ourselves amid the pandemic. It’s focusing our time and energy on those things that are most fulfilling for us, while also normalizing the fact that sometimes we will not be able to be as productive as usual, and that’s not the worst thing. Furthermore, it's crucial for members of institutions such as Harvard, both students and faculty, to keep in mind that even productivity itself may come in different forms. It may be helping out around the house, working on side projects or hobbies, or perhaps even volunteering for pandemic relief efforts. Productivity could also mean allowing yourself to take a step back from all the natural stresses of being a student, taking the time to take care of yourself and unwind, even if just so that when it is time to sit down and do school work, you're in a much better mindset to do so.

-Sofi, '23

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Credits:

Created with an image by Boston Public Library - "Arnold Arboretum, 1921 https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/8s45qw06m Please visit Digital Commonwealth to view more images: https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org. "

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