Blog Eleven - Online Learning
Online learning, the bane of existence for many students and teachers alike during the COVID-19 Pandemic, introduced many students to a style of learning they had never seen before. Online learning refers to any instruction that is done through some electronic medium. Some token online learning platforms were video-meeting software like Zoom and Google Meet. Some other methods used included pre-recorded video lectures and quizzes. From asynchronous learning to synchronous, the rise of online learning brought with it many new opportunities and popularized new learning styles. However, the difficulty of adjusting to a new system, as well as the increased distance between students and their classrooms, come with a wide range of problems.
It is also undoubtedly more flexible than in person, as students can learn from anywhere, and if the course is asynchronous, at any time as well. This allows learning to be less of a task for students, as there is more of a motivation to start since it’s much easier to do. It is certainly less meticulous to start a Zoom call or a self-paced quiz than to get up and go into a classroom. In fact, this ease of attending and paying attention in class may be correlated with higher test scores, as the “Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning” found that students learning online “modestly better, on average, than those learning the same material through traditional face-to-face instruction.”
Yet, there are a lot of skills that simply cannot be developed in an online classroom. While teamwork and collaboration can be practiced through breakout rooms and group activities, these skills are absolutely enhanced during face-to-face interaction. Working on a project simultaneously teaches children how to compromise with others and, more importantly, how to work together. Students can learn how to interpret and use body language effectively, which they cannot do well through an online meeting.
Online learning can also restrict the variety of courses that students can take. Many disciplines, such as robotics, require a more hands-on teaching approach.
It can indeed be said that one thing about online learning could be both a pro and a con. Online learning forced society to fast-forward to a more digital world. While the transition was already happening gradually and naturally, online learning had people confront the fact that the world was becoming more computerized, and nothing could stop this transition. Humans are more connected with each other than ever before, all due to technology and computers.
Due to learning shifting to a more asynchronous style, millions of laptops and devices were handed out to learners across the globe, and consequentially, millions of students were being taught the valuable skills of knowing how to navigate a computer, something which will become essential for students in today’s digitalized, modernized world. Yet, the emergency nature of the COVID-19 lockdowns meant that schools had to spend a lot of money very quickly for these laptops and devise a plan to organize all this. As the CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, Kevin Krueger, said in an interview reported in the article “During COVID-19, Schools Have Made a Mad Dash to 1-to-1 Computing. What Happens Next?” by Education Week, “What most school districts did was they dropped everything, and they bought things whether they had the budget for it or not.” Since these computers were a requirement for students, districts had no other option. They had to get the funds for online education one way or another, which led to many projects and other programs being dropped quickly to make up for the funds, halting development in many areas yet supercharging the transition to giving each student an individual device.
Another standard learning style that picked up during COVID-19 was hybrid learning, where it was half online and half in-person. It is an attempt at getting the best of both worlds. Often, it was structured so that students would come to school for a few days and be online for a few days. Hybrid learning also provides quite a lot of flexibility, allowing teachers to schedule activities that would be better done in person on the in-person days and adjust lesson plans accordingly.
There is certainly a wide variety of impacts that were brought on by online learning. While the change was sudden, it didn’t change the fact that districts were inevitably going to have a one-to-one student-to-device ratio, so it simply picked up the pace. Yet, this fast pace also made it so that the transition was not as meticulously planned out as needed and that other projects were forced to be halted, which could have devastating impacts.
The convenience and effectiveness of online learning, balanced with its lack of engagement and inability to develop specific skills, definitely makes the decision of whether to pursue it now that students have started to return in person a tough yet necessary one for many school districts.
