First-Year College Students: Perspectives on Technology and Wellness in Education

This paper explores the impact of technology and wellness in the context of students entering post-secondary education. It aims to provide insights into the use of technology and how it affects students’ wellness. The transition from high school into post-secondary education has often been a complex phase in students’ lives, and such complexity may be especially significant for virtual high school graduates, in other words, students who finished their high school education mostly virtually due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students starting post-secondary education are usually between 17–19 years old, an age period at which these students are more developmentally vulnerable to the effects of rapid physiological, financial, and social changes. Despite some positive aspects of technology usage in education, challenges remain. Students navigate potential academic losses due to ineffective virtual schooling experiences during school lockdowns. This may aggravate students’ adaptation to higher-education culture and norms and academic expectations, especially formal writing standards often required in university papers. Other challenges may include the over-reliance on technology for academic, social, and personal tasks, accentuating students’ difficulties with wellness and requiring a rethinking of learning practices to eloquently respond to students’ needs in the context of the legacy of the coronavirus pandemic. This paper seeks to contribute to the conversation on how post-secondary institutions respond to the need to balance technology and wellness in the context of education. Ultimately, this paper explores perspectives on potential higher institutions’ responses to the impact of technology on students’ mental health and learning as well as implementing wellness practices while integrating technology into education.