21st century education

This year for many has been very difficult. Living locked up and not being able to live life like before the pandemic is stressful, sad and nostalgic in some sense too.

It is in this situation where online classes took an important part of our lives. Before, it was impossible for me to think of having a whole year of classes through a screen without sitting at my desk looking at a white board while the teacher spoke. But due to Covid-19, online classes became a reality very quickly and suddenly.

My experiences with online classes have been different throughout the year. First, I found this new system novel but it also produced uncertainty, especially thinking about colleagues who did not have an internet connection, a computer to connect to each class or an optimal space to study. These things are still happening for almost a year of online classes. Another negative aspect has been the large number of hours that I spend in front of the computer, there are days that I spend from 10 in the morning until 7 in the afternoon in front of the screen in class and doing work, which made me now have to wear glasses . On the other hand, the constant stress of the country situation plus meeting academic requirements have generated a mental overload and that stress levels will increase.

But within all the bad things about this new type of class there are some aspects that I rescue. Now the communication with the teachers and the management of the institute is much faster, in addition the teachers and officials have understood the difficult situations that can occur due to the context and for this reason they have been more flexible in many aspects, improving the academic environment. In addition, the online classes have made me able to better organize my time and organize myself with my studies.

I think there is still a long way to go for this modality to be carried out in an optimal way, but it will serve so that in future cases where online classes have to be used as a resource, it is possible to know how to do them in the best way. I believe that Chile was not prepared to face an online education, since many people do not have the resources, access or technical capacity to attend online classes without any difficulty. This is evident in internet networks that are not enough with the amount of traffic that there is currently, causing the connection to be slow and unstable.

I hope that all the failures can be improved in the future so that in case another pandemic forces us to quarantine we can all have a good online education.