Colleges poorly prepared for online lectures

A student listens to an online lecture at her home in Seoul, Monday, as schools belatedly opened spring semester due to COVID-19. / Yonhap

By Bahk Eun-ji

Universities, which delayed their new school year for two weeks due to fear of the coronavirus spreading, began the spring semester with online lectures on Monday as replacements of their classroom lectures. However, many students were unable to access classes due to technical problems.

Colleges across the country that postponed their spring semester have opened, but most schools are only providing online lectures for the first two weeks, until March 27, so that students do not have to be in classrooms.

However, some schools' online servers were down as a large number of professors and students tried to log in at the same time.

Servers at a number of universities, including Seoul National University, Korea University and Chung-Ang University, were down on Monday morning. Many users also went through difficulties to join the classes as many were not accustomed to the online lecture system.

Students have been complaining that the schools did not fully prepare to provide online classes during the two week delay period.

“I managed to attend the online lecture but some of my friends are concerned about possibly being marked absent as they couldn't even log into the school online lecture system due to the server problem. The student quota of the lecture I took is 43, but only 16 students including me were able to access the lecture,” said Kim Hye-rim, a senior student of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS).

Another senior student at Korea University, wanting to only be identified only by his surname, Lee, said his class was supposed to open at 3 p.m., but the school server had been down since the morning.

“So I asked my professor through an e-mail if the class was cancelled or not, but he hasn't responded yet,” Lee said.

University officials said they are in the process of fixing their systems.

“The student council asked us to fix the server since Monday morning. We have been working on increasing the internet speed in order to offer the online lectures without difficulties,” said a HUFS official.