Stepping into the LearnUs Era

Spring 2021 marked a milestone for us Yonsei students. Not only did we lose a year of our student lives to COVID-19, but we also entered a new age of digital learning: the era of LearnUS. Learning Ubiquitous Square (LearnUS), launched as an innovative alternative to the YonSei Cyber Education Community (YSCEC), intended to address students’ concerns over the technological demands of online learning that the former system could not keep up with. However, given its arguably unexpected and premature debut, our initial months with LearnUS were wrought with unpredictable server crashes that left us scrambling for solutions. In an effort to tackle these early-stage issues, Yonsei announced renovations to the system, and on 6 Sept. 2021, the newly updated LearnUs celebrated its grand opening to the public. Have these renovations made a significant difference to our online learning experience?

Having entered my college life with Yonsei’s former learning platform YSCEC, the abrupt switch to LearnUs came with very little time to adapt to this change. Both students and professors shared the struggle to keep up with the new system and the ensuing chaos: missed announcements, tardy video-lecture uploads, and sporadic server crashes, logging us out of the website. Beginning this fall semester, however, LearnUs did indeed reflect changes in the stability and flow of operations. While the user interface (UI) design itself did not appear to have undergone major changes, there were a few significant additions made to the system.

In an interview with the UIC Scribe, an official from the Innovation Center for Teaching and Learning (ICTL) announced the main feature of the newly updated system is Zoom’s linkage to LearnUs. By integrating Zoom’s meeting data into LearnUs, professors are now able to upload Zoom meeting links directly to the LearnUs system, allowing students to enter meetings by simply clicking the “Join Meeting” button. In addition to eliminating the hassle of remembering meeting IDs and passwords, this new feature automatically registers attendance information through its data-sharing interconnection to LearnUs. As this attendance information is swiftly reflected in the electronic attendance system, both students and professors are saved the effort of manually recording attendance.

The second notable feature of this renovation is the introduction of the LearnUs mobile application. The new LearnUs app comes as a replacement for the CourseMos app that students had access to at the start of the year. While both the apps are similar in functionality, the main distinction is that the LearnUs app is exclusively created by Yonsei for its users, whereas the CourseMos app was shared with other universities. Although the LearnUs app’s UI is more polished and runs smoother, it still offers the same functions: class announcement and assignment alerts, messaging, a curated calendar to view your deadlines. Given the comfort of having all LearnUs notifications delivered straight to our phones, we can rest assured knowing this ease of accessibility is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

While these renovations to LearnUs certainly yielded a more stable learning experience, none of its users were informed about these changes. Valeria Delacruz, an International Studies sophomore, and Sung Jun Han, a senior in Economics, remarked they did not know about the LearnUs app prior to its mention in their interviews with the Scribe. When asked about the CourseMos app, both interviewees and Hamna Shehzad, a Comparative Literature and Culture major reported they had no knowledge of the CourseMos app either. This lack of information was not limited to students as professors also found themselves in the dark about LearnUs’ new features. For some UIC classes, professors continued to upload details of Meeting IDs and record attendance manually as they did not know about the integrated Zoom feature. There have also been cases where professors struggled to understand the new system’s mechanics. Student A, a Comparative Literature and Culture major who preferred to remain anonymous, recounted: “Our professor didn’t know that the Zoom ID integrated into LearnUs expires after the class duration, so with no other meeting link uploaded, we scrambled to inform our professor about this issue and ended up entering class 10 minutes late.”

While students like Han and Delacruz have praised LearnUs’ stability and smooth performance, Shehzad claimed LearnUs did not enhance her online learning experience any more than YSCEC did, raising the question of the need for YSCEC’s overhaul. When probed about the transition from YSCEC, the ICTL informed the upgrade to a cloud-based system — as opposed to YSCEC’s server-based system — helped reduce maintenance costs, allowing Yonsei to operate multiple resources as demanded by the amount of user access and open up its platform to a global market.

With an increasing reliance on online learning platforms, the transition to LearnUs and its renovations have no doubt enhanced our learning experience compared to learning in the pre-Covid era. However, in focusing its attention on delivering LearnUs’ services to the public, Yonsei may have overlooked its main audience — marring students’ attitudes towards the change. The university’s delayed and insufficient notice to its students and professors certainly diminished what could have been a positively anticipated and enjoyable experience. Perhaps the next time the LearnUs undergoes a significant change, we can hope to receive a more proactive notice. In the meantime, all we can do is ride the wave of this change and hope LearnUs continues to aid students’ learning needs.