Thanks to 2019-nCov, all students over China have to take courses online at their homes. And, I am one of them. Though the first month of experience, I don’t think taking courses online is a good idea, and I hope my life can become normal as soon as possible.

How do we take courses online?

For elementary school students and some junior high school students, the more common way for them is watching courses on TV – that’s reasonable because they are under 9-year compulsory education so they are almost studying at the same pace and following the same syllabus. The tv station created individual channels for them, and with the existing TV playback system, the experience shouldn’t be bad. The only disadvantage may be the lack of interactivity.

For other junior high school students, as well as the senior high school students, they usually study ahead of the syllabus to preserve time for reviewing so that they can achieve higher grades, so the studying progress may vary from schools and even classes. The only way for them to take courses is taking live lessons from their own teachers. There are several service providers such as the recent famous DingTalk. Once everyone along with the teachers joined a same class group, all of the studying is conducting in the group. This way of studying is almost same as studying in school, the only difference is that the communication is online rather than face to face.

For us, the college students, unfortunately, we should also take courses online. Because of our more flexible system, the form to study is more flexible, too. Besides the live lessons, some teachers choose to recommand a good MOOC lesson for us, and the other may choose both of them – yes, we will learn a lesson twice in such a situaion.

Privacy problems in live lessons

There may exist a demand that students cast their voice to everyone in some scenes, so it’s normal to design a button to switch your microphone on and you can talk to others. But, in the most situation the feather is not used correctly as excepted, instead it was always opened mistakenly without the acknowledge. Moreover, some famous platform isn’t designed for live lessons, and the microphone is default on. What’s more, due to some stupid UI design (yes, QQ Group, I mean you), it’s not easy to distinguish whether your own microphone is opened, and the host isn’t able to disable other’s microphone, too. In addition to microphone, the camera is the same.

The live lessons is taken in home – a private and secert place, so it’s always embarrassing to leak your private life to others.

And according to a report published by a reliable computer security company (Huorong), not only the camara and the microphone may be exposed but also your computer desktop and so on.

Bad learning experience

1. The server is always unstable

Both the live lessons and the MOOC lessons (actually pre-recorded lessons on contrary of live lessons), they are playing in form of video which consumes huge network resources. In the school day, almost all the platforms are crashed. Obviously, no one can foresee that how terrible the network traffic would be conducted from all students over China. Although they urgently increased the scale of the server after that, it is still normal to find the service unavailable today.

2. It’s tough for teachers

Because the accident happened suddenly, the equipment for teachers to hold a live lesson may be poor. So, the voice of the teacher may come with a bunch of noise. The voice of the teacher may be intermittent or extreme low that you may even not able to hear clearly at all. What’s more, live broadcast consumes a lot of computer resources, their computer may freeze frequently, which seriously affectes teaching efficiency.

Besides the hardware limitions, setting up the software is also tough for teachers without pre-training. Many teachers expressed doubts in front of a brand new computer they had just bought, why their students couldn’t hear their voice.

3. It’s tough for students, too

Not only for teachers, there are equipment limitions for students, too. For example, in our programming lesson, the teacher need students to write some programs as practices. That’s reasonable, you can learn nothing from programming lessons without a computer. But some students can’t afford a computer, or it may be a big burden for them. It makes them being at a loss. But in school, at least we have computer rooms for them to learn computer programming.

Second, these Apps are really problematic. On my lastest elective, half the students couldn’t enter the live lessons, and I was one of them. We use QQ Group for the lesson, and the reason why we couldn’t enter the live room was that there are two modules available in QQ Group to broadcast a lesson, one is QQLive, another is QQ Voice. At the first of time we tried QQLive, but the teacher couldn’t open his microphone, so we moved to QQ Voice. In QQ Voice we could hear him, but QQ Voice opened everyone’s microphone by default that we had to disable it manaully, but the UI is designed so hard to distinguish whether the microphone is open or disabled, so we could hear so many voices from unsuspecting students, which was totally unable to hear the teacher clearly. And no one can disable other’s microphone except himself.

OK, we moved back to QQLive again, here, the problem came: once QQLive started, everyone using Android QQ couldn’t enter both QQLive and QQ Voice any longer. When you entered QQLive, it said “QQ Voice is running, you can’t start QQLive”; and when you entered QQVoice, it said “QQLive is running, you can’t start QQ Voice”. Obviously, that’s a bug. My classmates reported that on other platforms these two are not mutually exclusive. But on my PC, I can’t start QQLive, and I don’t know why.

On another lesson using Tencent Lesson, the teacher set a checkpoint to avoid students not focusing on the lesson. It shows a button at a randomly time, students need to click that button in a short time to prove themselves still in the class. But, a lot of students reports the button didn’t appear. Then, the students who failed to check in were nevrous proving themselves not missing class. And the teacher spent several minutes handling it.

Frankly speaking, I am fimiliar with the computers, once got problem, I know what happened and how to deal with. For my classmates, thay may not be interested in computers, it could be a big challenge for them.

4. Too much platfroms

In college studying, teaching class and administrative class are different, the teaching between teachers are standing alone. So, the form of teaching are different, too. Some one just upload some coursewares and let us self-study, some one will broadcast a live lesson, some one will recommand a MOOC lesson and self-study…

So many forms make so many platform. In this month, I have used serveral platforms, just for online courses.

MOOC:

Chaoxing MOOC
icourse163

Live Lesson:

QQLive
QQ Voice
Tencent Lesson
Zoom
Tencent Meeting

Hand in school works:

E-Mail
An internal platform which crashes everyday
A QQ Applet developed by 3rd-party company

English:

FiF spoken tarining
U Campus
WE learn
An wechat official account “VocabGo”

I was shocked after I list them, that’s really too many…

(Unfortunately, I haven’t tried the famous DingTalk...just kidding, I don’t want at all

5. Compared with paper books, PDFs are like a piece of shit

Before this accdient, once reading news that the students in America use iPad or Chromebook in their class, there’s a little envy…But, I don’t want it any more now.

Most of us don’t bring books to home during the vacation, so teachers sent us PDFs of our books. The PDF reading experience can’t be worse. Too slow to scroll pages, reading only one page at a same time, unclear and even tilted texts in a scan version, keeping looking up and down between the screen and your paper…

I also tried reading them in my Pad and Kindle, the former one helped a little but the text become smaller, the latter one was totally unusable.

Health problems

Mental health

Physical health

Is it really a good way to study?

Some problems above can be easily fixed, or some problems aren’t caused by the online courses itself, for example we can buy paper books to avoid terrible PDF reading experience. For online course itself, is it really a good way to study?

I don’t think so.

When studying online, your attention will be unavoidable affected by other things, such as a message in your phone or an interesting advertisement poping up in your desktop. Although we may do same thing in a real classroom, but at least it has a risk that punished by your teacher. Instead, you will do these things at no cost at your home.

For communication between students, it is not as easy as one in the classroom. When you are in classroom, you felt doubt about something and ask your deskmate is so naturally; but when you are on online courses, starting a private session with any one to ask about something is strange and embarrassed, unless that one has been your friend before.

Taking courses online is a bad idea