Post-secondary protocol, if you actually stop and think about it, is extremely archaic. This year—2020—I’ve had instructors ask that all notes be taken by hand and electronics be turned off at the door; these instructors also didn’t use D2L. If you want to pick up or talk about assignments, you come to the instructor’s office hours.
You can imagine how a list of rules like that went over.
Call me set in my ways, but there were parts of that structure I actually really liked: it demanded decorum, dedication, and diligence on the part of the student, and I can see how ideologies like that came to be. In its earliest days, post-secondary was strictly elite—think Alexander the Great being tutored by Aristotle. While that might be an extreme example, it paints an interesting picture of what education might have looked like 300 years before Christ.
Even in my parents’ generation, going to school after Grade 12 was a little strange. So, when a commodity is relentlessly rationed for decades and centuries, an air of specialty surrounds it. (It would be negligent to not point out here that what is plentiful is de-valued; we can see traces of this looking at Master’s degrees, which, according to Statistics Canada, rose in popularity by more than 40 percent between 2006 and 2016 for Canadians between 25 and 64 years of age.)
Realities surrounding education have changed relatively quickly, and the COVID-19 crisis is perhaps the best example of that.
I’m personally really pumped for classes to be online in the fall, if for no other reason than it means that I can take another class during time previously allocated to getting to and from campus. This means—if I were to take online classes until my degree is finished—I would graduate a year earlier than planned.
Things naturally change, and there are often both good and bad parts to that change. The changing elements of education won’t be easy. Students won’t be able to rely on instructors as much, and instructors, well, need I even say how much their worlds have changed? I don’t foresee Camosun ever really going 100-percent back to what it was, but that brings up a question: should it? Methods of decorum, dedication, and diligence can change, too. And they will have to.