Students taking blended classes, where some students are physically in the classroom while others attend virtually, have experienced unique difficulties due to the format of the class.

In Riley Church’s Plan II Tutorial Course, the professor uses an external microphone and records himself over Zoom, and the students in the classroom are not logged into Zoom. Church, a Plan II and radio-television-film freshman, takes the class in person and said students taking this type of class virtually have faced problems such as audio issues.

“It’s always hard to hear what (students in the classroom) are saying,” Church said. “It has caused a lot of people to actually come in person instead, even if they were originally taking it virtually.”

Shaan Davis, a management information systems senior, said he has experienced issues hearing the professor speak in his Strategic Information Technology Management class because the professor is in the classroom and using an external microphone. 

“The volume would just turn up really loud sometimes and would be fuzzy at other times,” Davis said. 

On Monday, after meeting completely virtually for the past couple of classes, Davis’ class returned to its original blended format. 

Davis said according to his professor, the audio technology in the classroom was upgraded in the hopes of fixing the audio issues that students taking the class virtually were experiencing.

“I noticed it was a lot smoother,” Davis said. “We could hear (the professor) clearly.”

Nutrition freshman Snow Nguyen said whenever she takes her Law, Literature and Contemporary Legal Debates class from home, she experiences the same issues that Church’s classmates experienced. 

Nguyen said another issue is that students who are taking the class virtually are not able to participate in class discussions as much as their in-person counterparts. She said she gets less out of the class when she attends virtually than when she attends in person.

“A big part of (this) class is in-class discussion,” Nguyen said. “Over Zoom, you can’t really participate in any discussions that are happening in the class because you can’t hear what the (in-person) students are saying.”

In an attempt to mitigate the issue, Nguyen said her TA started reading out students' comments from the Zoom chat last week so students at home could take part in the discussion.

“It helps get our voice in the classroom, but we still can’t hear what the students are saying in response to us,” Nguyen said.