Scroll back three years to the first time schools closed because of the pandemic and, try as hard as we could, it was very difficult to achieve the same standard of education online compared to that in the classroom. Scroll back further to the infancy of online education and you’d probably be horrified at what you’d see – a good metaphor would be the chasm between 1980s mobile phones and today’s.
Online education has come a long way in the interim but how far wasn’t apparent to me until I observed a lesson delivered online and a subsequent one in the same subject, delivered in person as one of the students was in the location of the teacher.
In person, the teacher pointed out the question to the student in the textbook; with some difficulty as the question was couched in a lot of information on the page. On screen, the question could be isolated, enlarged and annotated without any fuss enabling the student to clearly see elements of the problem – furthermore, the teacher could cut, copy and paste elements of the question to show how the calculation should be formulated – a lot more clearly than writing it in a book or on a board.
You could say this is little different to teachers having the same material on an interactive white board in a class but the personalisation of the presentation of the material – it’s on a screen close to the student rather than on a screen in a classroom where the view of the board is unlikely to be close enough, face on and without obstruction, means that the learning experience is enhanced for the student.
A lot of the benefits of online learning which are helping to close the gap have come about through advancements in the technology e.g. the ability now to collaborate on an in-app whiteboard has really helped. In-app discussion forums also help build a recording of a debate or discussion that can be referred to or assessed later. Uploading student work to the learning management systems is now streamlined through a QR code and teacher marking of the work is aided by advancements in AI.
This all takes me back to the bricks and mortar school where, if an expensive resource was requested by a teacher, I’d ask what the benefit was compared to the cost. The tools for teaching effectively online aren’t cheap but the benefits are scalable. More to the point, they can be used to make online education VERY effective and this is where an online school’s commitment to staff professional development is important.
The bottom line is that the standard of online education can vary enormously – akin to the standard of teaching across physical schools, and again, like in a physical school, it can and should be excellent but it depends on the school’s commitment to that excellence. In what is still a relatively small education market, the responsibility of all online schools is to ensure the highest standards of teaching and learning so that the sector can be seen as high quality and take its place as a viable alternative to the classroom.
