BRING BACK FACE TO FACE EDUCATION FOR CREATIVE BUSINESS STUDENT AT HOGESCHOOL UTRECHT

Are you also sick of sitting behind a computer all day following classes on your own, all while building up a huge student debt to pay for it. Then we want you to help us fix this by signing this petition! (please sign in with your student email so we can see that you are a HU student!!) There are so many reasons why online classes are not working and still our school the Hoge school Utrecht and the creative business program are still implementing this. Now you might think, what can we change about it? But the real question is why are we still excepting the fact that are quality of education is being hurt without a good reason. We joined this program voluntarily to get a good education and paying a lot of money for it, this has to stop now! 

DISCLAIMER!!! The strikes like they are now with public transport would be a special occasion where it would be acceptable to have online class because people are not able to travel to campus. 

Student debt

It's no surprise to anyone that when going to hbo it costs a lot of money. And you would think now that corona is not relevant any more that you would get your money’s worth when it comes to education. Sadly right now we are not getting the optimal quality education that we deserve. For some reason we are still getting most of our classes fully online or partly online, this makes the quality of education go down. Even when a teacher tries their best, online classes will never be of the same quality as face to face classes. You would think that when you pay full tuition that you will also get normal full capacity education, especially when there is no good reason to keep classes online and most of the campus classrooms are being left empty.  

Quality of education

What does good quality education mean? It means a teacher that is able to naturally engage students in discussions and share knowledge about a subject in a way that gets through to the students. Right now that is not what is provided by the creative business program and teachers, because we are having online classes. The creative business course is a lot of group work and practical learning, this is impossible to do well when having online classes. We get sent into a breakout room to do exercises and group work which makes it really hard to get proper guidance and interact with each other. Group work becomes awkward and feels like you do it alone, and classes feel like someone reading slides to you that you could just as easily read yourself. This is not the quality that we as student deserve the creative business program should according to the program itself should be built around practical and real world scenarios, how does getting online classes coincide with that. 

Concentration and mental health

We think that everybody knows the feeling of zoning out when having online classes. Even when you really are trying your best to focus and keep engaged during these classes, it often still happens that you find yourself doing something else or not listening any more. But what do we expect, you are basically looking at a computer that is talking to you, this is in no way engaging or stimulating. For a lot of people that are already having concentration problems when in normal classes, it's just impossible to focus on an online class. In face to face classes when you get distracted, there is movement and people that can help you refocus. Online classes just feel like you put on a Netflix series that you forget to pay attention to after 10 minutes. Even when the teachers try, this will not change the fact that it’s very static to teach in this way.  On top of that we all experienced it or read about it, during corona there were a lot of people that suffer mental health issues because of the whole pandemic. Now that we are out of that, the mental health problems for a lot of people have not magically disappeared. One of the things that help a lot is interacting with people, even when it's sometimes hard. By implementing this many online classes, the school is again isolating their students what will make the mental health problems worse. This is very serious because self-isolation or better said forced self-isolation is such an easy way to fall further down the rabbit hole of anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues.    

Social contact

Everyone that had a student life before this pandemic knows that social contact and making friends is a vital part of this time in your life. During the pandemic we all felt what it's like to feel isolated and alone, it was almost impossible to make friends through the online classes. The rate of depressed and lonely young adults was at an all-time high. Now that we are out of this pandemic, we were all exciting to get our social lives back and make new friends. Yet with having a lot of online classes you don’t even know who most of the people in your class are if you never had face to face class together.  

International students

In the creative business study, at least half of the students are not from the Netherlands. Which means they moved to a new country without friends and family to get a good education and pay a lot of money for it as well. By providing mostly online classes you take away their chance to make friends and get to know people, this results in a lot of student feeling lonely here because their support system is not here. Besides that, these students and the Dutch students all assumed that they would get a face to face education as soon as COVID-19 allowed it again. Yet now that COVID-19 fully allows us to be in class face to face and do all the things you would do before COVID-19 started, we are not getting that face to face education like we expected and deserve to get.

floortje verbrugge    Contact the author of the petition