Opinion | The hybrid format isn’t working

Mady Dever, Opinions Editor

Since spring break, Chapman has been test driving the new hybrid class system. And like a test drive, sometimes it’s just not the right fit. 

Don’t get me wrong, I was once firmly on Team Hybrid. The logic is all there; it’s like being in class, but not. The simulation is slightly more realistic because you see a classroom behind your professor, not their living room or the green screened background imagery they chose that day. You can see the university classroom. 

It’s so close that it makes students attending class online feel like they can just reach out and touch it. Because of this, I thought the hybrid classes would improve the quality of learning — at least I could convince myself I was being taught from a classroom. 

But after experiencing it for myself for a few weeks now, I cannot stress enough how wrong I was. 

For starters, I cannot see many classmates who have decided to go back to class because the camera set up in the classroom doesn’t show them. It feels like the bouncer let them into the club and I’m still standing on the sidewalk, cold and in uncomfortable heels, watching the party from a window. 

It’s like I’m on the outside looking in on a class I’m not truly part of anymore. The worst part is when someone cracks a joke in class that I can’t hear because they are so far away from the professor's microphone, everyone on Zoom is stuck sitting there, staring at their little miserable screens in confusion. 

The WiFi is another problem. Maybe it’s specific to one classroom, but during a music class of mine, my professor freezes for a few seconds at a time at a time once every couple of minutes. 

When my professors were teaching from home, they had solid setups — WiFi connection, an external microphone, good lighting. Now I’m filtering through a blurry screen, dodgy connection, muffled speech due to a mask, invisible classmates and I’m squinting at a distant whiteboard in order to try and learn something in the final month of my undergraduate career. 

It was working so much better before. You know what they say about the grass always being greener on the other side? It’s not true. I’m regretting complaining about the online-only format. 

Sure, I don’t like online classes just as much as every other student on campus. It’s draining, difficult to focus, straining on the eyes and painful to the back from sitting in a chair all day long. But performing a balancing act of accommodating both online and in-person students isn’t making matters much better.

As far as I know, it could be a total party for the students who’ve returned. Speaking as someone who has not gone back to an in-person lecture during this hybrid era, it’s difficult to say how it is sitting in a real classroom. I’m going to guess that it’s nice to be back in some way, but it still probably isn’t nearly the same. Sometimes, there’s only one other student in person, sitting alone awkwardly with the professor. I can’t imagine it being a super comfortable experience. 

In one of my classes, all students have decided to stay remote. But my professor who lives in Los Angeles has to drive to Orange every week. That’s two hours in traffic. I spent all my days at Chapman as a commuter student making that Los Angeles to Orange drive several times a week;  it can be brutal. All that just to teach to a classroom with no one in it seems depressing. 

Let’s face it; there really is no perfect solution to this. I’m glad Chapman is trying to move forward in some capacity to return some sort of normalcy to students. But at this point, we’ve proved our resilience and flexibility learning. Just like the rest of this past year online, we’re going to have to make it work.