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Now that the Fall semester is over, we wanted to take stock of online learning imposed by COVID-19. Yay, we survived, students persevered to finish CHEM314 strong! But what did we learn broadly? Random thoughts are personal and non-transferable 1/10 @l_wang_cen
#1: It is clear that online learning during COVID would not have existed without technology. It is easy to find complaints, but let's not minimize what we did: whole courses from home, incl. live sessions! We covered everything in CHEM314, labs included. Simply amazing. 2/10
#2: Beyond tech, online learning is great for flexibility. Many students had insane schedules and really unusual circumstances this Fall. >50% of our exams were taken in the evening. Flexibility was a must and it cannot happen without an online component. 3/10
#3: Flexibility is a double-edged sword. It creates the burden of time management. A fixed in-person schedule tells you when the lecture ends. How does the student know when they have been working on the course enough for the day? 4/10
Students use recorded videos to "rewind" contents and listen multiple times. This is great, but it opens the door to inefficiency. How many rewinds are enough? You only listen to it once in a live lecture. How many concepts do you really need to rewind? It's hard to know! 5/10
#4: What if you did not choose to do this course online? The approach to a course is not the same if you take it because you want to rather than because you must. How many pre-meds love OrgChem? Same applies to learning online if your choice would be in person. 6/10
#5: Online learning makes the instructor fly blind. We had many students go entirely asynchronous. This means absolutely no contact outside assessments. We heavily rely on "body language" to know if students are grasping the concepts in class. This was gone. 7/10
A student struggling and one thriving look the same! How many students are disconnected entirely? Does our teaching suck? We went from 80+% attendance in person to below 15% in our live sessions. Yet our drop-out rates and grade distributions were the same as usual! 
8/10
8/10
#6: Related, many students had no idea there were 70+ students in the class, all despite having done a round of video-introductions in the beginning, plus periodic group assignments to create connections. The sense of community is challenging to preserve. 9/10
There are many other thoughts, some specific to the course (labs on video????). But it is clear online learning is for a specific student profile. It can make knowledge more broadly accessible. But learning is dynamic and online learning breaks important feedback loops. 10/10
CODA: what the students managed to pull off is
