The Online Overachiever

By the time the professor is done asking their question, this person has already had the “raise hand” button selected for 45 seconds. With an insatiable desire to prove their worth to a classroom full of students who probably aren’t even on their Collaborate Ultra tab, the online overachiever will stop at nothing to make sure they absolutely ace the participation part of the class. If you want to answer a question before this person, good luck because you are going to need godlike reflexes to raise your hand or type and answer before them.

“Technical Difficulties”

When the professor asks a question to this person, the response is usually 30 seconds of absolutely deafening silence with a dash of awkward tension before they hit you with the “sorry my mic isn’t working today” in the chat. This would be forgivable if it wasn’t for the fact that they had used this exact excuse for the last 17 class periods. The quintessential cop-out of the Collaborate Ultra age, “my mic isn’t working today” is no better than “my dog ate my homework.”

The Noise Machine

Unlike Technical Difficulties, this person actually turns on their mic, but you’ll wish they hadn’t. When they turn on their mic to answer a question, unleashed upon your ears are the sounds of the world’s largest vacuum cleaner, at least seven TVs at maximum volume in other rooms, pots and pans crashing from the top shelf and a tornado siren just for good measure. Instead of an actual answer, all you get is an earache and a confused professor, who is probably just going to ask them to repeat themself for some reason.

The Amnesiac

The Amnesiac comes in two forms.

The first one is the person who forgets to lower their hand. Eventually, the professor will ask them what their question is. In a moment of panic, The Amnesiac will then ashamedly lower their hand, pretend that nothing ever happened and then wish that they never learned how to use a computer. At least if you forgot to lower your hand in real life, you would be getting a nice arm workout, but with online classes all you get is shame.

The second, and more chaotic one, is the person who forgets to turn off their mic. As the professor tries to go on with their lecture, they are promptly interrupted by The Amnesiac having a lively discussion with their roommate, completely unaware that 20 other students are involuntarily also participating. There is seldom an experience more awkward than being forced to listen to a conversation between two unknowing parties while the professor’s futile pleas for them to turn off the mic echo in the background.

The Zookeeper

We get it, you have a pet. There’s nothing wrong with a cat just cluelessly meandering in the background, but it all gets out of hand when the pets take hold of the attention. It only takes one student drawing attention to their pet to create a domino effect that derails everything. After one cat makes a cameo, every other student with a pet takes that as their cue to retrieve their animals and turn the class into a full-blown show-and-tell.

The Early Bird

It doesn’t seem to matter what time you enter the class; you will always be second to the Early Bird. Nobody is quite sure just how early they got there, but you get the sense that it could feasibly have been a few hours. This is the kind of person that also probably lines up at 6:45 a.m. outside of Blackhawk for breakfast, finishes all of their homework within a day of it being assigned and starts studying for finals in October.