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What if Everything Stays Online Forever?

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This is the prompt for the essay
What if everything stays online forever?
This won't happen. Right? The vaccine will come. And until the vaccine comes, we will learn how to be safely physically present.
And not everything is totally online now. A combination of lowering classroom density, masking and hybrid courses has allowed most schools to bring back at least some students.
We can eat at restaurants if the tables are outside and spread six feet apart. Online grocery shopping has become exponentially more popular, but that activity was starting from a low base. Most of us still get our groceries by driving to the supermarket.
For many folks, working online was never an option. Some jobs can't be done remotely. Food for large numbers can't be prepared or served from home. Cleaning is a hands-on job. So is every form of construction and maintenance. My wife goes to work at the hospital every morning, as telemedicine only works with some patients at some times.
But what if everything that can be done online stays online?
If you have been working remotely for the past six months, what's to say that you shouldn't work remotely for the next six years? At some point will employers (including universities) decide that the savings of having a remote workforce outweigh the benefits of having most everyone in one place?
We used to have most of our meetings face-to-face. Nowadays, almost every meeting is through Zoom or Teams or some other web-meeting video platform. Even when it is safe to return to face-to-face meetings, will we want to? Online meetings are more efficient (no traveling or settling in), more egalitarian (nobody is in the front of the room or head of the table), and faster (as nobody wants to linger). Traveling for work was one of those things many who worked used to do.
What about online learning? Here is what I think. As soon as possible, face-to-face learning will return. Everyone -- students and professors -- misses the classroom. Residential learning for those students living on campus, however, will be forever different. Post-pandemic, what we will see in higher education is a new integration of residential and online learning. Face-to-face classes will come back, but online will not go away. The new residential class will have digital components. The line between face-to-face and online will blur.
COVID-19 will greatly accelerate the blended learning shift that was already underway before the pandemic hit. Lectures will be recorded ahead of time, with in-class time used for discussion. Office hours will be more numerous and will move mostly online.
When it comes to how we work and how we learn, I don't think we will return to the pre-pandemic status quo.
There may be no going back to the way we were.

--Joshua Kim Director of Online Programs and Strategy at Dartmouth Center (an academic medical center), 9/15/2020

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May 15, 2021
What if Everything Stays Online Forever?
The COVID-19 Pandemic has led to an unprecedented shift in everyone's lives. From being highly dependent on face-to-face and physical interaction with one another, society has become 'digitized' for the most part as most activities were shifted towards the use of digital media, computers, and the internet. Despite these changes, a significant number of people believe that once the pandemic ends, society will then revert back to a "state of normalcy" similar to what we used to before the onset of the pandemic. Nonetheless, similar to what Joshua Kim, the Director of Online Programs and Strategy at Dartmouth Center, said in his article, I also believe that "Post-pandemic, what we will see in higher education is a new integration of residential and online learning" and living. I firmly believe that this hybrid configuration between a physical and digital lifestyle would become the new 'normal' due to the benefits that we learned about it during this period.
A Digital Hybrid Lifestyle
One of the reasons I believe that a mixture of online and offline living would govern our daily lives is its relative convenience. For the most part, the displacement of the workforce from crowded cities to Work-from-Home (WFH) models has reduced the need for everyone to travel, spend, and dress every day. Additionally, this new dynamic is also a "more egalitarian and faster" process than what we were doing before the pandemic, as stated by Kim. This goes the same whether for workers or students since both of these sectors of the population have relied today on virtual meetings, emails, and even social media to facilitate their interaction.
Balancing Offline and Online Modes of Learning
However, I also believe that rather than being fully online, this aspect would be 'balanced' with the advantages that physical and face-to-face settings bring.
On the one hand, it must be noted that not all forms of work and education can be done through online education. For example, medical courses require the students' physical presence to bridge the gap between theory and practice and maxim...
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