Life Experiences Color Online Classmates’ Identities
By Lydia Lum
The words “race blind” literally took on a new meaning when I enrolled in an online class. Gone were the labels I had used so often, like reaching for a TV remote control. Black and White. Asian. Multiracial. So it wasn’t surprising that race crossed my mind during a 10-week Internet course for first-time authors. Because I never met my classmates in person, I wondered what their ethnicities were. But did the color of their skin matter? These were among the many thoughts that emerged from my online class experience.
Sure, putting race and ethnicity aside, there are drawbacks to not physically being “in class.” The teacher’s e-mailed critiques were sometimes confusing. What she and I would have cleared up in a single verbal exchange if we had met in person, instead required several e-mails. Equally time-consuming was couching my comments when critiquing others’ writings. I practically became addicted to the punctuation marks that form the Internet smiley face. Good grief! Wasn’t taking a class online supposed to save time? For the time saved in commuting to a brick-and-mortar class, I may have spent the same amount of time drafting and editing e-mail.
My writing class was my first back-to-school experience since earning my bachelor’s degree in the 1980s. The online journey began when I hopped onto Google and typed in words like “writing” and “class” and “fiction.” I had actually been considering a brick-and-mortar class when I found an online alternative. I decided I had nothing to lose. I signed up and paid my tuition.
The class format called for the teacher, a published author who had taught fiction writing to “live” university classes, to e-mail lessons and assignments every Thursday. No chat rooms, no online meetings. As students, we read lessons and submitted work at our convenience. No grades. No demerits for skipping assignments. In fact, the teacher encouraged the six of us to skip assignments, rather than get bogged down. Surprisingly, foul weather affected us even in cyberspace. In late November, one East Coast student e-mailed from her workplace. A bad storm had knocked out the power at her home and thousands of others for several days, and she couldn’t post any more chapters until it was restored. Furthermore, our class still had the subculture of an “in-person” class. Much like gossiping after class, several of us swapped e-mails and privately vented our irritation after we had reviewed unnecessarily condescending critiques from others.
I quickly grasped the hoopla surrounding online classes. Like books on audiotape, online classes give us another way to shoehorn learning into our hectic lives.
