The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/virtual-classes/)
While the University has fully returned to in-person instruction for this fall semester, the Cornell School of Continuing Education will continue to offer courses completely online for the approaching winter semester.
With the amount of daily cases comparable to last winter and rising, it’s clear the pandemic has no plans to loosen its chokehold on America anytime soon. I, along with many of my peers, expected Cornell to provide similar accommodations for the students that were bound to become sick this semester.
Cornell’s 2021 summer session is taking place entirely online, paying heed to pandemic uncertainties for the second year in a row.
A nationwide Canvas outage interrupted students’ Thursday morning routines.
Freshman year me, waking up for an 8:40 a.m. physics class in single digit temperatures, would be envious of my online semester. The thought of sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with classmates in hard seats, shoveling through backpack pockets for a pencil, while sniffles and coughs ripple across the room, seems like punishment compared to class from my bedroom.
With online classes, missing a lecture is not a problem if they’re all recorded. You don’t have to guess someone’s name. No need to speak up if you can just type. Running between classes becomes opening a new tab.
Instead of walking to classes and seeing friends around Cornell’s campus, students are finishing the remainder of the fall semester at home through a screen, after break –– a challenge for most students.
With over two-thirds of classes online, teaching assistants have faced major adjustments.
Even during a normal college semester, Cornell students struggle to take care of their mental health, caught between endless projects, exams and papers.
After announcing a hybrid semester in July, about 80 percent of Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations classes are being offered fully online.
Chen spoke to the lessons that students could take away from the program, including valuable soft skills such as interpersonal and communication skills, strong teamwork and leadership skills as well as hard skills including “business acumen from their mentors” and “how to implement industry practices in creating secure and robust software and designing impactful, user-friendly products.”