Returning to the university lawns in the shade of the corona.
This coming Sunday it will happen - about 350,000 students will return to campuses, cafeterias and the grass after a year and a half in zoom.
Some will acquire an education there, some will find love and some will develop a lifelong academic career.
Since the outbreak of the corona in Israel, learning at the academy has been online, the institutions are opening their doors - except that it will be for students and faculty with only a green mark.
Thus, for example, admission to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem will be done only according to an up-to-date green label and the guidelines of the Ministry of Health - or corona tests.
The institution stated that there will be no hybrid learning (i.e., online classes) and all classes will be held on campus.
At Tel Aviv University, we stated that the studies will take place in a frontal manner, and that distance learning will be accessible for those students who do not have a green mark and have not passed corona tests.
The lessons of the corona
The University of Haifa announced that there is no entrance to the campus for students or faculty who do not have a green card.
All classes will also be online - in a variety of ways, for those who do not have a green label.
The Open University states that those who do not have a green mark will be required to present a test.
At Bar-Ilan University, the goal is for most undergraduate students to study physically on campus according to the rules of the green mark: the studies will take place in a hybrid manner (including online courses), with the courses, except for practical experience workshops, accessible to those who cannot attend for various reasons.
Ariel University in Samaria also stated that it will act according to the green label, and that all frontal lessons will be recorded and will be available to students.
At Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, we noted that those who do not have a green daughter can enter by presenting the result of a valid negative test.
The classrooms will be filled again, Photo: Gideon Markovich
One of the things that students found to be advantageous during the Corona time is the recorded lessons, and the various student associations make an effort to preserve this - so that all the lessons are recorded and uploaded to the university website.
The Hebrew University stated that most of the lessons will appear as recordings on the website, but for some reason it depends only on the lecturer's approval.
The University of Haifa also states that not all lessons will be uploaded to the study website, and that in some of the lessons this will be done according to the decision of the lecturer in the course.
At Ben-Gurion University, too, the lecturers are not obliged to record lessons, as is the case at Tel Aviv University, where it was stated that the lessons will be made accessible by live broadcast or recording in accordance with the lecturer's decision.
Lior Hazan, Photo: Yehoshua Yosef
According to Lior Hazan (29), an MBA student with a master's degree in management and chairman of the Student Association at Tel Aviv University: "Recordings are a very important tool for us as students.
For quite a few years now, the association has been working with the university on building a database of recordings for courses, a work that, of course, has been greatly accelerated thanks to the Corona.
Recordings are not a substitute for classroom lessons, but an additional aid to them.
They help to repeat the material and understand it better, and of course make it easier to complete the material for students who are not in classes due to illness, reserve and the like. "
The 2007/08 school year, with 350,000 students, records an increase of about four percent in the number of students compared to the 2007/08 school year.
Quite a few challenges
The MLAG (Council for Higher Education) states that women make up about 60 percent of all students in the academy. The Israeli academy will have quite a few challenges this year, the first of which is to prepare students for the Israeli and global employment market and future professions. Emphasis on research, a very important topic - but many students feel that there is a huge gap between studies and the demands of the employment market.
The second challenge is to improve the quality of teaching - but here there are not too high expectations from the system.
Universities cannot fire tenured lecturers, so even when they underestimate students and get a flood of negative ratings - universities do not work.
In addition, many students have been harmed in the past year and a half, both financially and mentally and socially, as the corona has raised the level of anxiety in many.
Therefore, the institutions must constitute a stable framework and take them into account.
Amber Saban,
For a significant proportion of undergraduate students this will be the first time they come to study from campus, after the previous school year was studied entirely in Zoom - including the exams.
"It's a great excitement, a bit like the first day of first grade," says Inbar Saban, a second-year economics and management student at Tel Aviv-Yafo Academic College.
"I haven't really studied on campus yet, I got there just to be tested so you can't call it real studies like I used to. I feel like I'm just starting my studies for the first time."
According to her, she only knows most of the students from the zoom and the pictures on the phone: "I do not know most of the classmates at all. I am already waiting to get to know everyone."
