For those of you who don’t know, Binus University has a ‘batch system’ for their students. So this is how it works: If your classes are offline this week, the following week would be full online classes and vice versa. So almost every class, whether it’s online or offline, is a hybrid meeting with students who take turns being in class every other week. Binus do this to press the numbers on students coming to campus every day because apparently covid is still a thing.  I, the writer, would love to share a little bit of her point of view regarding this system, and whether this is the best way to conduct an academic program. I’m going to state my opinion on the negative effects of this Batch system and also on the positive sides as well. 

To give you a little heads up, the negative side of this system would be about human connection deprivation and social media addiction. Whereas the positive side would be related to time management and flexibility. So, here we go. 

In 2020, we were deprived of human connection in the worst way possible. I’d say people in the Spanish Flu era had it better than us because social media didn’t freaking exist. When we lost social connection with other people, we seek it in the most convenient way possible in the safety of our homes. And hey, guess what? A guy from America named Mark Zuckerberg made an app for that! How convenient is that? Now we can still have social connections through our phones, right? Technically yes, but this invention has been misused on so many levels. We seek dopamine by scrolling for hours. Jumping around Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and back to Instagram. Looking through other people’s activities during quarantine and judging some of them who got out of the house when they should be inside (I’m sure this sounds familiar). We’d say: I’ll just kill some time until everything’s back to normal! I’ll stop scrolling when going to school in person is mandatory, by then I’ll have the motivation to put down my phone. But, what happened then? We never got back to ‘normal’. Even a lot of universities are still doing their classes online, Binus University included. So, then, we keep scrolling and scrolling in the midst of the professor talking in the zoom classroom. We raise our dopamine level way above its baseline and the withdrawal was excruciating as if it came from hell. Our new ‘hobby’ that we develop during quarantine in 2020 never came off until today.

I still do believe that if schools are offline 100%, I would be able to get over my own social media addiction. Because sometimes you have to force someone to get out of their convenient homes and make ‘actual’ social connections than what he/she has at home. And by ‘force’ I didn’t mean physical brute force. What I meant was something that is mandatory, but gives a person a sense of purpose in dressing up and going out of the house. Going to campus is the best way to ‘force’ someone into making social connections. Even if the person was feeling lazy that day, or didn’t want to talk to anyone, that person still has to go to campus so he/she won’t fail his/her classes. That way, his/her need for an ‘actual’ social connection is fulfilled even though he/she doesn’t feel like it at that particular day. This ‘forcing people to make social connections’ could be beneficial for students who are experiencing grief, anxiety, mini trauma, or mild depression. Those are the times when we don’t feel like interacting with other people even though those are the times when we need social(supportive) connections the most. Disclaimer though, in certain circumstances forcing social connections could make certain psychological conditions worst. But, like I said, having that mandatory class could spark a sense of purpose in a person, whether your psychological disease is chronic or not.

With all of that, I could safely conclude that kids these days are deprived of social connections. Even so, there are exceptions. There are some kids who actually talk to people more because of this system. The hybrid batch system that Binus apply makes these kids socialize in the middle of an ongoing class. Yes. This gives them more flexibility to hang out with friends and meet new people, therefore, finding more opportunities for jobs and connections(which is what college is all about). Students could be meeting with their brother’s business partner at a cafe while still being in their Algebra class on their phone on mute! And let’s be real here, you don’t really need what you learn in that algebra class in real life. You just need to understand the bare minimum to pass the grade. So, these online classes could be beneficial for students when they seek connections outside of the campus environment. Online classes give a ton of flexibility, and heck, I even know a guy who works 2 full-time jobs while being active in an organization and still being a student at Binus! When you could manage your time well, and find the motivation to go out of your house and meet people, this system would be super beneficial for you. YET, not all students would be so extroverted, or/and they don’t even have a community in the first place to connect with. Some kids don’t want to go out of the house because they feel like they have no sense of purpose in hanging out at a cafe without an actual reason(Raditya Dika is an example of this type of person). Some kids can’t even hold long conversations if it doesn’t involve a project at school or elaborating on a topic on something substantial for them(and that’s definitely not small talk). Moreover, some people would rather be at home binge-watching Netflix or scrolling social media addictively than go out of the house and do the things they aren’t good with: idle, small talk with a bunch of people. Or, take that last scenario but the reason for not going out is simply because no one is available to have that social connection with. 

If you ask me how I really feel about Binus’s batch system, I’d say it’s a big no. It did more harm than good and I would love for Binus to make 100% mandatory offline classes once the pandemic is over. If this is not done as soon as possible, we would have a generation of depressed, social media addicts kids who will then grow up and make decisions for this country. We don’t want that do we?