Due to the global pandemic that broke out at the beginning of this year, a large number of universities around the world have adjusted their offline teaching methods to remote or a combination of offline and remote teaching methods. While online teaching ensures that courses are delivered on schedule, the rapid change in teaching modes has made a lot of professors and students feel a little uncomfortable. Nevertheless, this change brings not only challenges but also opportunities for students.

Remote teaching ensures that students' learning is carried out as planned. At the same time, online teaching ensures that students take courses in a safer environment and have a more flexible schedule. To illustrate, compared with offline learning, students do not need to rush to their classrooms before classes, nor do they need to spend time in crowded spaces. Accordingly, students do not only save commuting costs but also save time by not needing to commute. Moreover, some online courses offer recording and playback systems to help students understand content more comprehensively. Students can adjust the playback speed according to their needs, helping them to avoid missing something important and improve their acquisition of knowledge. This provides self-disciplined students with a more efficient learning mode, and this was also the main purpose of online courses when they were first introduced. Students are free to determine their most effective and suitable learning mode. Overall, online learning has allowed students to further improve their learning efficiency.
On the other hand, such a rapid change in teaching has also raised some potential problems for professors and students. Among the problems posed by online courses, the most worrying issue is students’ learning efficiency. First of all, for students with relatively irregular schedules, a highly independent learning environment may become the biggest barrier to maintaining learning efficiency. For some students, paperless learning and a relaxed indoor environment may result in procrastination. For instance, notifications or messages on mobile phones, or delectable foods in the refrigerator are potential distractions that some students find difficult to ignore. For students easily sidetracked, online teaching is less effective than offline teaching. Furthermore, poor hardware equipment may hinder students' learning efficiency. In the process of rapidly changing from paper-based learning to paperless learning, not all students can easily obtain sufficient hardware or software support. Compared with offline teaching, remote classes require equipment such as computers. The lack of hardware support not only affects the learning efficiency of students but may also add economic burdens to some students’ families. In this case, the school's support for students becomes crucial. Beyond that, some students have said that rapid changes have made them feel more pressured. Compared with traditional offline learning, the first step to online learning is not acquiring subject knowledge itself but the need to fully master various skills related to online courses. Some students have expressed concern about network instability and many other unpredictable events that may occur during online lessons or when submitting homework remotely. Therefore, to some extent, offline teaching helps students avoid some unnecessary problems, allowing students to focus more on the content of their courses. Moreover, while studying online, prolonged sitting and looking at a screen has an impact on the health of students, which may cause a student’s eyesight to deteriorate or beget other health problems. In sum, online teaching will, overall, further improve the learning efficiency of students, but it may also pose some new challenges for students.

In the meantime, the rapid shift from offline to online has also brought some new challenges for some professors. To illustrate, for professors, what has changed in the form of online teaching is not the knowledge that the professors want to convey, but the way of
imparting that knowledge. It is not easy for some professors to suddenly change the way they have taught for decades. Consequently, some professors also need support and must learn new skills to teach remotely. Compared with offline teaching where professors can concentrate their attention on a subject itself, for professors new to online teaching, the efficiency of their teaching methods may be affected. Also, professors need to consider content difficulty, ensuring that online courses and offline courses are relatively consistent in this respect, as well as the frequency of quizzes to ensure the fairness of grades. To summarize, compared with traditional offline teaching, online courses also create new problems for professors.
The transformation from traditional courses to remote courses caused by the pandemic has presented new challenges and opportunities for both professors and students. The difficulties and challenges arise from the unsuitability of remote courses for those accustomed to traditional methods. As the saying goes, everything is difficult at the beginning. As long as professors and students understand the situation and establish the most suitable teaching and learning models, these challenges can be overcome. In fact, online courses are an opportunity for students to further improve their efficiency, which was also the main reason for the development of online courses. For students who are good at time management, the process of adapting to online classes is also an excellent way to cultivate their self-learning ability. While students are looking forward to the resumption of offline courses as soon as possible, they can also look at the conversion of offline courses to online from another perspective. To a certain extent, this transformation has given students who have self-control and are proficient at self-learning the perfect opportunity to develop their learning abilities and meet a better self.

HuYu
Business Major