Imagine you are in a college classroom. Whispers travel around the students and computers click as the professor struggles to play a video up on the board. After ten minutes of technological difficulties, a fuzzy, poor quality video from 2009 plays ahead of you. For the next hour you copy a lecture onto your computer, learning about statistics taken in 2012. You are confused when hearing this information, knowing it is outdated. You paid a lot of money for this class, and after the pandemic, you were excited to attend in person and get a proper education. But the quality is shockingly low, and the technology used by the college is confusing and problematic. You can’t seem to submit work, find notes, or reach out to your professor when needed. 

This is just one example of some things I have experienced within the first couple weeks of college. I am a senior in high school who attends half days and then attends classes at Centenary University. Going from a technologically advanced high school to a classroom from the stone age was a shock, but I wasn’t the only one who struggled with the change.

Once the pandemic struck, schools worldwide had to shut down and find a way to reach the students from home, “but the approach most colleges [were] employing [was] simple ‘remote learning’ via live Zoom classes, a method little evolved from video conferencing from the late-1990s,” quoted Harvard Business Education. Despite being forced into the evolutionary world of technology, some colleges resisted the change, and many were unequipped to change, creating disruptions and difficulty in the learning process. It took me weeks to find the online portal for the school that is labeled “password reset” and contains tons of different websites with no ways to use them or login in to them. My teachers struggled to post work, the students struggled to find the work. Overall it was a mess.

Teaching in colleges consists mainly of lectures and old fashioned slide shows. Over the past few decades American Public Media researchers have noticed that, “it’s impossible for students to take in and process all the information presented during a typical lecture,” and without the use of technology and evolved teachings such as visual representations, group projects and online programs, lectures are the main strategy used in college classrooms. 

By limiting the future generations with the old methods of teaching, students  are less likely to evolve and reach their full potential. College is the higher education that is supposed to pave the path for a successful future. As mentioned in The Conversation Newsletter, the pandemic set up 50% of colleges to shut down, due to their lack of preparation, claiming that, “unless universities move quickly to transform themselves into educational institutions for a technology-assisted future, they risk becoming obsolete.” As the generation of the future, born in the boom of technology, our future looks bleak and old fashioned. The time to create change and improvement is now.