Photo Illustration by Jordan Soto
It’s 2025, why aren’t more online classes offered at a commuter school? This must change for the benefit of not only students, but faculty as well.
With growing enrollment at San José State more online classes need to be offered.
There has been an 8% increase in enrollment within the last year on campus, resulting in more than 40,000 students being on campus, according to SJSU’s Institutional Research and Strategic Analytics.
Parking at the university is already awful as it is, but with the growing enrollment, it’s only going to get worse with time.
There have to be alternative ways to prevent commuters from their grades from being affected by attendance.
Online classes are still offered, but not to the extent that they used to be, especially with many classes returning to in-person sessions as time goes on.
It makes sense why classes are trying to return to in-person sessions because online classes weren’t popular or usually offered before the COVID-19 pandemic, but they’ve become convenient after many experiences during the pandemic.
Some departments at SJSU are favoring and scheduling more in-person sessions over online classes.
The School of Journalism and Mass Communications is an example of this.
Only 10 of the 64 courses offered for the 2025 Fall semester are online, according to the course catalog.
I work full-time and I’m required to work a minimum of 32 hours a week.
A year ago I took two courses online to go with three in-person classes and it helped with my schedule so much.
I only had to commute to SJSU two times a week from Gilroy which is about a 32-mile drive and it saved me so much money on gas.
This semester I can’t say the same, I have to come to campus Monday through Thursday and the gas prices are starting to add up with me having to fill my car up every week.
With a 5% increase in tuition for the fall semester more students need to work more to prevent taking out loans or going into student debt after graduation.
Some jobs aren’t so lenient for students, which makes it difficult to pick out classes to match their schedule, especially for full-time workers.
According to Lumina Foundation, 64% of college students are employed and 40% of those students work full-time.
There has to be alternative ways to prevent commuters from being frustrated and their grades from being affected because of attendance.
The easy answer is to increase the number of online classes for students.
These classes are beneficial not only for the student, but the instructor. Instead of a repeated lecture, they can record the lecture once and post it to each class.
However students know what they’re signing up for when they select an online class, which makes late work inexcusable.
It could also cause students to forget about classes since there’s no required meeting times.
In some cases, all the assignments are posted at the beginning of the semester instead of weekly.
I can admit that I’m guilty of doing this, but fortunately I’ve learned my lesson.
This is the downside of online classes, not to mention the lack of social interaction between students which is a key part of college.
You need to make connections in college especially when you want to network for job opportunities after graduation.
But you can still meet others in online classes. I’ve had classmates create Discord servers to help communicate and help each other with assignments/projects.
It just seems like online classes are more convenient for all parties involved, and the pros outweigh the cons.
I’m not saying all classes should be solely online, because some students prefer in-person learning.
I can admit there are classes that I prefer to take in-person as well, but online classes should be offered more.
It just makes sense and it can provide both students and instructors more time to take care of a lot of responsibilities on an already busy day.