Ryerson University students are pushing for online learning options

Feb 1 2022, 9:00 pm

Ryerson University students are adding their voices to a growing cacophony of calls to keep college and university lessons online.

Beginning on January 31, classes at the university have begun to return to in-person learning. In-person classes will be fully operational by the end of February.

While the school has a vaccine mandate and mandatory masking, students are unhappy with the in-person learning plan. A Change.org petition to keep classes at the university online has amassed more than 11,000 signatures.

“Students do not have a say as to whether they’d like to continue online or not,” the petition says.

Similar to other universities, colleges, and Ontario public schools, classrooms are treated as an exemption to the rule of how COVID-19 spreads. While physical distancing is mandatory in most areas of the campus, in the classroom, students are expected to sit closely with their neighbours. An airborne virus’s dream scenario.

The university’s student union is working on an email zap to demand that university administration keep classes hybrid, giving students the option of in-person or online learning.

One student wrote an open letter to the university, stating that Ontario’s current reopening plans are for elective activities like going to a restaurant or a gym, and those are at half capacity.

Students don’t have a choice, they never got the choice — us students were never consulted before the decision of reopening the university,” the letter by Jwalit Bharwani, a mechanical engineering student, reads.

Bharwani said that students are not being given an option that and classes will be at full capacity. The province doesn’t plan to allow indoor spaces to operate at full capacity until March 14, at the earliest.

Am I to understand that Ryerson has a better understanding of this situation than the province? The same university that has said time and again they will only make decisions based on the province’s reopening plan,” Bharwani wrote.

Bharwani continues to say that his entire family came down with COVID-19 in December of 2020, right before exams. He wrote that of the six professors he emailed about becoming sick, only one responded.

COVID affected my marks, my mental health, my physical health and my overall experience of university,” he wrote in the open letter.

Not to mention that the reopening plans come at short notice. Some students say they have moved out of the city to avoid Toronto’s high rent and the need to be on campus. Finding a rental within a few weeks for just a few months is nearly impossible.

One student who moved back to their home country commented on the petition, saying that moving online now is causing extra and unnecessary stress for students.

“Now that I am being told (with such short notice, and much ambiguity) that we will be returning back to in-person, this creates the stress of having to find a place to rent in Toronto, and completely move back into an apartment all over again,” the comment said.

Faculty have also joined the calls to at least reduce class sizes when in-person lessons resume. Tenured professors from the School of Occupational and Public Health signed an open letter to the university about steps that must be taken before the school reopens.

The school has not yet indicated plans to reverse the in-person learning decision.

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