Text Guido Camps
The big moment came last Tuesday: after working from home and teaching online for over a year, I’d been allocated the in-person lecture I had asked the timetablers for. I even had butterflies in my stomach when I got up, and the whole car drive to the campus felt strange. I got there 45 minutes too early, a margin I would never have bothered with before Covid.
About 10 minutes before the start of the lecture, the students began to file in and five minutes later, they were all there. The big question of how to make students come to lectures on time now has an answer: all it takes is a global pandemic and a year of being shut up at home.
The strangeness reached its peak when we saw each other in the flesh. For weeks we only met as talking heads with names shown below them. Without these names, people proved to be a lot harder to recognize. And funnily enough, we had been speaking English for weeks, and now it turned out the whole class spoke Dutch.
It was weird, that first lecture after a long, long time, and yet it was one of the very best university experiences I’ve had in ages
But quite how thoroughly we’d been conditioned by online education really became clear when students had to present something. We had got used to slide-sharing, when all the faces disappear from the screen because the presenter has taken it over. Now everyone was watching me expectantly as I tried to fish a pre-Covid USB stick out of the depths of my bag because we (meaning I) hadn’t given any thought to how the slides were to reach the projector.
So it was weird, that first lecture after a long, long time. It didn’t go smoothly and yet it was one of the very best university experiences I’ve had in ages. In the past year I’ve sometimes wondered if online was going to take over the world, including after Covid. But after this one lecture, my doubts are quelled. The future is sure to be partly online, but most teaching will be back in the classroom.
Guido Kamps (37) is a vet and a postdoc at Human Nutrition. He enjoys baking, beekeeping and unusual animals.
