You're listening to Roundtable.
I'm Niu Hongling, joined by Steve and Yixuan.
Coming up soon.
Your phone has 128 gigabytes of storage, and 20 of them are taken up by apps you only use to buy hot water or check your grades.
Is your university's smart campus actually making you smarter or, on the contrary, a little bit frustrated?
And could the secret of better blood sugar and a faster metabolism be as simple as moving your desk three feet closer to the window?
Today we're looking at why window seat is one of the most important assets you can have at the office.
But now welcome to the modern university experience, where you need more apps to survive a Tuesday than a NASA astronaut needs to get to Mars.
We've got an app for the gym, an app for the library, an app for the canteen and apparently, an app that makes you watch a commercial for sneakers before you can turn on the shower.
It's called digital fatigue, and it's only subject every student is currently majoring in.
Today, we're asking why is my school's all-in-one app actually 10 separate headaches?
You have to watch a sneaker app before you can turn on the shower.
That's annoying.
To be fair, I was being a little dramatic.
It's not the situation in all the universities in China or around the world anywhere.
But it's kind of like I collect all the problems that every student compared about and put them in one day.
And that would be frustrating.
You know what?
The first impression when hearing all of these apps that is coming up through these universities is that wow.
It's been upgrading because back then, that's another perspective.
Back then we used that kind of all-in-one card system.
Oh, that's true.
I used them.
We have that card.
You go through the gate of the school, the library, the canteen, everything.
But the thing is that you sometimes forget that card, right?
But you never forget your cell phone.
Exactly.
And now that's my perspective.
It is actually in some way getting more convenient.
They're trying to be more convenient.
Yeah, trying to be more convenient, but not everybody's loving it.
Topics like campus app slimming and regulating learning app chaos, these types of...
Headlines have gone viral on social media.
The Weibo topic views were around or are around 100 million for campus app issues alone.
There was a survey of nearly 2,900 university students.
It was done by China Youth Daily and it really kind of underscores the contradiction at the heart of the issue.
Campus apps, they're really widely used, and in a lot of cases, they are unavoidable.
I mean, there's nothing you can do.
You have to have them.
But the issue is the satisfaction.
Students are not happy with their design or their functionality, and the happiness meter, if you will, for these apps remains very, very low.
Well, I think campus is kind of like little, tiny little society or a tiny little unit that is separate from the outside world, because in campus you can have your very own system when you're dealing with everyday life.
So if we want an app or if we want to use app in these different um aspects, Definitely they can come in quite handy.
And in, for example, academic scenarios or daily life scenarios, there are different apps.
Yeah.
So imagine this, though.
So you're a student and you're right.
It is like its own little society inside the real society inside the campus.
Yes.
So you've got your app for your class check in.
Okay, 88% of students use that.
Then you've got your homework app.
You've got your online courses app.
That's 78% of students.
You've got your course selection app.
Then you've got your grade checking app.
Then, after your classes, you go back to your dorm.
And then you've got to open up an app to do your laundry.
Oh, and then you have an app to top up your campus card.
And then you have your campus run check-ins and you have your water collection app and you've got your bathing app.
Now, before the show, I had to ask what's a bathing app?
Um, this is.
And what's the laundry app?
I asked about that as well.
So you go to do your laundry and you scan i think it's probably a qr code on the laundry machine, on the washing machine, within the app that you have on your phone and that allows you to pay to do your laundry.
And it's the same for like showering, i guess.
Right, you'll go and you scan the qr code and that'll well, first you have to watch the sneaker advertisement and then you can get in the shower.
Yeah.
And the reason that we're having these apps and having students paying for these fees is because most Chinese universities are highly subsidized, which means that if you shower in university, the amount of money you spend on water would be lower than university you spend on in other places, and as well as food and everything.
And in order to make sure that um, the resources is not wasted, we have these kind lunch, these kind of no matter if it's a all-in-one card or an all-in-one app or different types of apps, just to regulate things a little bit, Many universities they're trying to develop these all-in-one app.
One example is Communication University of China.
They offer a range of functions, including campus car top-up, as you said, canteen food ordering, email logging, visitor registration and like many things else, in just one app.
They're trying to give students that one app can solve all of the problems.
And some of the apps are collaborating with The surrounding economy, actually, the school.
One netizen is telling that she's from Lanzhou University.
The school's app acts a one-stop service hall as well.
She booked a discounted hotel near her exam venue via their app.
Exclusive partnership with hotel chains.
And that is actually solving her pre-exam anxiety.
Ah.
Right.
So some of the features they're developing is actually helping students.
But the thing is that if you are developing separate apps for separate features or functions, that is just unbearable.
Yeah, because think about all the other apps students would have on their phones for outside of school life.
Probably a lot.
So if you have a ton of them for school life, too, it just makes it kind of a pain.
And this is what students are complaining about.
I mean, it's not that students don't recognize the convenience of the app.
64.
Going back to the survey results, 64 said that they know that the apps are convenient for them.
But only 6% said that there are no issues with any of the apps.
94% said they are annoying or they have annoyances.
They said there were too many apps necessary for surviving on campus.
Those are kind of the broader complaints.
More specifically, they complained about advertisements.
67% said they don't like the number of ads.
That means if you open up your app before you can actually see or use the app, you'll have to watch an advertisement first.
Others said that they were fragmented or there are too many in general.
Half, about over half, said that they were unstable.
Some had limited functions on their complaint list, about 40%.
And then others complained, this would be annoying too, almost 27% said duplicate functions.
So you have to have different apps, but they kind of do the same things.
So, once students are using all these apps, there must be a percentage of these apps that would allow them to communicate with teachers.
So the teachers must be using the apps as well.
How are they?
Are they happy about the apps?
Not everyone is satisfied with their apps.
Surveyed university faculty report that campus apps designed for teachers currently suffer also from issues like functional instability, delayed maintenance and slow updates.
Because when we mentioned that they need to like log on some online courses right, and they need to add some homework apps that they need to get.
So teachers are another end of these apps.
They need to get all of the homework and then maybe grade them or something.
So it is also very important to have the interface really easy to use or make it stable, and that is actually require like constant maintenance for these apps.
Yeah, I made fun of these apps from the beginning till now, but I believe the initial aspiration of designing different apps or designing functions on apps is to make school life more convenient for both students and teachers.
Yeah, yeah.
And now I think it's not necessarily the case for every university to have the budget to develop these apps for themselves.
And that is why they would cooperate with other companies out there the kind of app designing entities out there to design maybe one app for their schools or multiple apps.
And when you're not paying for the app you're using watching 30 seconds of sneaker ads constantly, Kind of like the go-to toys.
Yeah, I mean, that's just the way of the world now.
When we turn on our television in our living rooms, we have to watch an advertisement before the cable kicks in.
It's just kind of a... thing now.
And yeah, on Western social media apps, there are advertisements.
You have to pay more if you don't want to watch the advertisements.
And that's why I want to ask this for our dear listeners out there, for those of you who are listening and who happen to be a student, who are uh, or a parent of a student you maybe you can send us an email or leave a comment in the comment area.
Let us know whether or not you would willing to, or how much you would willing to, pay for your university to design that app that you would find very useful and very convenient, that your university can integrate all the functions in that one app and make your life a bit easier.
I was curious to know if this was happening in the West and I didn't realize this.
But even K-12 schools have a lot of applications and there's a real difference in the expected satisfaction and the actual satisfaction.
So there were, this is from govtech.com from last year.
So more than 100 teachers, 125 parents and 50K through 12 administrators responded to a survey about school app use at the end of 2024 through 2025.
54 of administrators said that their schools use between 10 and 15 officially sanctioned educational apps.
That's crazy.
Quite a lot, actually, for K through 12.
Most administrators held a positive view of the status quo.
80 of them believed that teachers and students and parents were satisfied with this system of using so many apps.
Then they asked the parents, are you satisfied?
Please rate your answer out of I think it was 100 and their satisfaction level was 100, five oh or below.
Um, they were really.
They found it quite annoying.
I mean yeah, you can track your child's academic progress and stuff through all of these different apps, but they found them to be both quote confusing and time consuming.
Yes, and that is part of the reason that in 2019, the Ministry of Education, along with other authorities, issued a notice on mobile applications used in the education sector.
And it aims to curb industry issues such as data privacy violations.
We didn't mention that that issue can also be a huge problem, especially if one app is overly successful and started to be adopted by all schools around the country.
Then in that case, the data privacy violation would be even more serious and need to be supervised even stricter.
And besides that, there's also excessive advertising and the compulsory use of low quality platforms in schools, and the guidelines mandate a formal registration system for app providers and emphasize the importance of securing personal information, especially for minors.
So we see the authorities are already doing things in this regard and regulating the the market, because definitely universities or other schools for even younger students would have to cooperate with app providers with the market.
And I think we know where the goal or where the destination should be.
It's that the path, there are too many paths and we need to find out a better one.
Yeah.
I mean, it's awesome that these apps exist.
I think it's all for the convenience of the students.
But if we can just kind of streamline the process a little bit.
And you're listening to Roundtable coming up next.
Let's find out how come window seats in the office are more valuable than you think.
Stay tuned.
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How about fiery debate?
Want to hear about current events in China from different perspectives?
Then tune in to Roundtable. where East meets West, and understanding is the goal.
This is Roundtable with me, Steve Haverly, and Yu Shen.
If you've ever felt like a houseplant that's been left in a dark hallway for too long, you might not be alone.
Most of us spend our workdays under lights that have the biological impact of a dim candle, wondering why we're tired, hungry and slightly cranky by noon.
Today we're talking about the natural light diet.
Forget the kale smoothie sciences that sitting in the sun might actually help you burn more fat and stop that 2 pm chocolate rate.
Is that true?
Is that that important?
And we know like sitting by the window is kind of more fun than sitting in the close corner.
That is dark or only light.
Only be able to enjoy the light from a dim light in the roof.
But is it that drastic?
Yeah.
And to put it simple, think of natural light as the charging cable for your body's internal battery.
It may sound as if humans are like solar panels.
We kind of are.
But yeah, in fact that's essentially true, because most living organisms on Earth need sunlight, right?
Whether they are just animals, plants, or even just microorganisms.
Just as a phone struggle to run complex apps on a low battery, our bodies struggle to regulate sugar and maintain focus when we are unplugged from the sun's natural cycle for a long time.
So recently, a study published in the top metabolic science journal, Cell Metabolism, put Office sliding to the test, and researchers recruited people with type 2 diabetes and split them into two groups.
And for four and a half days, both groups followed the exact same routine same food, same activity levels, same sleep schedule.
And the only difference is the light given to them.
Yeah.
So one of those groups.
They worked in an office with natural daylight streaming through the windows, as you can imagine changing in brightness and color as the day goes on.
You know, just as a normal day goes.
That was one group.
Now, the other group, they sat under standard artificial office lighting, which is what?
A pretty steady mix of fluorescent or LED lights, unchanged lighting. from morning to night.
I know which group I'd like to be in.
Anyway, what happened next was surprising even to the people who were conducting the study.
So in less than a week, their metabolic data started to diverge pretty significantly.
So blood sugar became more stable for those under the natural sunlight.
Apparently, research shows that people working in natural light they have a lot more stability for their blood sugar levels.
And the participants.
They stayed in the healthy range for a much longer period of time 509 of the day compared with the 433 of the people who were seated under artificial light.
That's roughly two extra hours per day of better blood sugar control.
Wow, that is drastic.
I'm curious because I do also think that sometimes my office desk is not bright enough.
That is why I bought my own light and I installed it on the screen of my computer.
Is that better?
Making it brighter?
Your desk looks like someone lives there.
There's blankets and pillows and cupboards for snacks, but that's not what you're asking about.
I'm trying to make it brighter with an artificial light.
Is that helping?
You're asking if office lights are good enough.
Well, the short answer is not really.
Natural light is the strongest signal for your body's master clock.
So this is the region in your brain that gets fired up, that acts like your internal timekeeper when it when your body is exposed to the sun, and it tells your body when to wake up, when to eat, when to burn energy, when and when to sleep.
And the natural lights that people will attach or sorry, the fake lights that people will attach to their computer monitors or things like that, doesn't do anything for you.
Yeah, and also bright daylight helped the body clearly distinguish day from night and keeping your internal mini clocks across your organs aligned.
That is kind of a body clock that you're having and that's based on your whole environment of the natural daylight and your kind of a very, very bright but artificial light on your computer.
I think they're even making your environment at the same status for a really long time.
That make you even misunderstand the surrounding environment.
And maybe that's also another reason that make you work.
I think it also has something to do with the fact that when our bodies respond to different lights in the nature maybe it's a bright day, it's a cloudy day, it's maybe around the time that, because of the changing of sunlight, you need to take a little rest.
And if you want, take a little break.
And that would help us avoid the kind of 2 pm crash.
Yeah, the 2 pm crash.
This is old data.
It's from about 10 years ago and we don't know, I guess, if modern office professionals are more accustomed to office lights nowadays, but a poll of 2000 office workers from 2016 found that nearly half of those employees believed that their work suffered from a lack of sunlight, with productivity levels dropping sharply after 2 pm.
In contrast, exposure to sunlight kept people motivated for longer throughout the afternoon.
I don't know if that's a fair correlation though, because you know, after lunch you tend to get a little bit sleepy.
But speaking of food, by the way, they did a study with mice and light exposure.
And in mice, light exposure essentially turned down the mice's brain hunger switch.
So the mice ate less and gained weight more slowly.
So if you are seated internally in your office with fake lights everywhere, you might notice that you snack more and you've been gaining extra pounds than your window-seated co-workers.
Wow, now we know natural light are very, very important.
But it's not like we can tear down the building and build a new one with glass ceilings.
Or we can't just move to other places.
So, when we already know that it's important, but we can't really have a kind of office designed for sunlight, what can we do?
Remember one topic that we had discussed, 15-minute park time.
So maybe you can just take that 15 minute, go outside after lunch and then enjoy that natural sunlight for just 15 minutes.
And that could just help you really a lot.
Or just quit and find a new job.
Or the employer.
Get a position that is next to window.
Yeah, exactly.
Question number one at the interview.
Where was my desk going to be?
You're putting a lot of weight on a desk, on a window seat.
But I think employers can also take into consideration this factor and maybe start a strategy of switching seats a little bit.
Yeah, that's fair.
Yeah, make it a bit more fair and enjoyable.
