Remote learning a failure? More like a work in progress

One of the major effects to have come out of the quarantine is the mass adoption of online remote education by schools around the country. It seems like virtual teaching should be such a simple and obvious thing, we just need to take what we are already doing and move it online.

Except that it isn't, teaching in-person and teaching online are in fact not the same thing.

The Wall Street Journal released an article last year entitled "The Results Are In for Remote Learning: It Didn't Work".

The article talked about a number of different reasons for why opinions of remote learning are so poor, ranging from lack of internet connectivity to a lack of student engagement, but one of the biggest problems that newly remote teachers face is simply that teaching in-person and teaching online do not share a one-to-one correlation.

Take Sears, for example. In 1998, the Sears Christmas catalog went online for the first time. The way they were doing things in their store was working well for them, so they didn't try to reinvent the wheel online. They simply scanned their catalog and made it available online. That approach ultimately failed because the real world and online experiences are not equivalent.

Companies like Amazon saw these areas for improvement and decided to try something new. They focused on making the customer experience online their priority, and through that method, they gained the success that they have today.

In the same way that retailers had to rethink and rebuild, teachers need to rethink their strategies as they attempt to interact with their students in a digital environment.

Learning to Teach Again

It is becoming apparent that our schools' current vision for remote learning is in need of some changes. Luckily, remote learning is not an entirely new topic. Many companies, such as CodeWizardsHQ, have been teaching online for years, with great success. From our own experience with coding for kids, we are able to offer some suggestions for moving forward successfully with remote learning.

1. Reconfiguring Class Sizes -
   Schools often conduct classes with more than 20 students at a time, but when these classes move online it can be difficult for a teacher to do more than simply "broadcast" their lesson. One way to deal with this is to meet with students in smaller groups.

In a virtual classroom, if a class of 24 students can be broken into three groups of 8, their teacher can focus more on just those eight students during the course of the class. They could perhaps even increase the amount of close contact time with those students! And since a lot of learning happens in pre-class readings and activities, the time spent in class with the teacher can be more tightly focused on areas that may need help.

2. Redesigning Curriculum -

In a physical school environment, class time can often end up being devoted to a lecture style of teaching. This doesn’t work nearly as well in an online class. It can be much trickier to hold onto the attention of students when everyone is remote, and the curriculum for a digital classroom needs to reflect this.

The majority of work should actually happen outside of classroom time. In a digital first curriculum, classroom time should be defined by the words “interactive” and “hands-on”. Classroom time is not for introducing new concepts. Instead it is for troubleshooting. Teachers should use this time to dig into the ways that students are using and understanding the information that was introduced to them through pre-class work, and to help them to fix any misunderstandings they might have.

3. Rethinking Professional Development (i.e. Teacher Training) -

Teachers are currently being asked to do a job they weren’t trained for. Many teachers have little to no understanding of the technological side of things. Teachers must receive training to be successful in their new online roles. A simple thing like learning how to mute a student’s microphone when there’s a distracting sound can do wonders for the overall effectiveness of a class, but it may not be an idea that occurs to a teacher if they don’t have experience online.

Professional development time in schools should be focused on getting teachers up to speed as quickly as possible, with a focus on the specific tools that they will be using so they can use the technology to help them focus on the part of school that they do best. The teaching.

4. Rebuilding Online Learning Tools -

While it can be easy to assume that the tools that we already have are enough, the fact of the matter is that we're not there yet. Many of the tools that are needed for a successful online learning experience simply don't exist yet. As great as Zoom is, it's just a small part of the overall picture. It can get the job done, but teaching could definitely be made easier by using the right tool. That's something that we realized early on in our online teaching journey, and is the reason we've spent over 10,000 hours building our own set of tools to help our students learn online.

5. Reaching for Beyond the Classroom Learning (BCL) -

Especially in today's world, students cannot be expected to learn everything that they need to know just inside the classroom. Class time and homework are simultaneously too much and not enough. It is important, then, that students have the support they need to encourage learning outside of the classroom. This could take the form of organized self-learning extension activities, teacher to student communication outside the class, or student to student community building.

Ordinary teachers everywhere are being asked to perform an extraordinary feat, teaching online, and while many feel like it should be simple, it isn't. From the outside, maybe the results look like the failure of remote learning.

In our opinion, remote learning does work, we just have to do it right.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or the management of EconoTimes