Bal, Irene & Arslan, Okan & Budhrani, Kiran & Mao, Zixin & Novak, Kae & Muljana, Pauline. (2020). The Balance of Roles: Graduate Student Perspectives during the COVID-19 Pandemic. TechTrends. 10.1007/s11528-020-00534-z. 

University of California, Berkeley

This article is a series of anecdotes from the viewpoints of six graduate students who talk about their struggles with their education during the outbreak of coronavirus. It provides a personal look at how higher education has been shaped by the pandemic.

- a parent/student with two children also attending school who organized her schedule into helping her kids during the day while doing her work in the afternoon
- an instructional designer who had to get used to the shift into online learning, which included learning how to use tools such as WebEx and Zoom
- an online lecturer who had to shift their curriculum to help their students with flexibility in classes while getting used to working at home
- an IT administrator whose work nearly stalled their doctoral dissertation, forcing them to focus on reflection regarding their research
- another instructional designer who had to help people figure out how to change their classes to work with online learning while neglecting their dissertation
- a teaching assistant who had to focus on helping the students get used to online learning while having to put their doctoral work on pause

It suggests that progress in higher education depends on the new work schedule caused by the pandemic and how each person responds to the transition in their own way.

The Balance of Roles: Graduate Student Perspectives during the COVID-19 Pandemic

For many people trying to get an education online, especially for students in higher education, the idea of time management is important. However, this pandemic has ensured that one's schedule has become turbulent because of all of the new demands: getting used to online education, having to take or teach courses through a new platform, and trying to get one's own graduate education work done when one's employment or other obligations potentially require getting used to doing it all online. What would be the most efficient way to ensure almost all demands in one's schedule are met?

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