In new research from OnePoll and educational gaming company Osmo, 77 percent of parents agreed that teachers should be paid more for all they do, news agency South West News Service (SWNS) reports. Four in five even said they have a newfound respect for educators after guiding their own child’s distance learning during quarantine.
when we talk about online education is using digital technologies to transform the learning experience,” said Vijay Govindarajan, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business. “That is not what is happening right now. What is happening now is we had eight days to put everything we do in class onto Zoom.”
Conceiving, planning, designing and developing a genuine online course or program can consume as much as a year of faculty training and collaboration with instructional designers, and often requires student orientation and support and a complex technological infrastructure.
if there’s a silver lining in this situation for residential colleges and universities, it’s that students no longer take for granted the everyday realities of campus life: low-tech face-to-face classes, cultural diversions, libraries, athletics, extracurricular activities, in-person office hours and social interaction with their classmates.
Online higher education “is a thin diet for the typical 18-year-old,” said Richard Garrett, chief research officer at Eduventures. “But today’s 18-year-olds are tomorrow’s 28-year-olds with families and jobs, who then realize that online can be useful.”
Along with their students, faculty were “thrown into the deep end of the pool for digital learning and asked to swim,” Moe said. “Some will sink, some will crawl to the edge of the pool and climb out and they’ll never go back in the pool ever again. But many will figure out what to do and how to kick and how to stay afloat.”
Firstly, we need to resolve the so-called digital divide
Secondly, this will mean that teachers must reconsider all their methodologies and prepare them for this new, blended learning environment.
Thirdly, institutions, both educational and normative, must understand that, in this new context, some ways of teaching no longer make sense.
Online teaching will not consist of turning a handle while students learn on their own. On the contrary: it will require teachers to engage more than ever, who will spend many hours in forums moderating conversations and opening new threads.
The latest available data show that three in four high school students had logged in to the district’s online portal on an average day the following week, a district spokesperson told Chalkbeat.
New York City schools began its attendance tracking effort last week. Teachers are counting “daily meaningful interactions,” which can include participation in an online discussion, a completed assignment, any response to a teacher’s email, or even communication with a family member that indicates a student is engaged.
Mayor Bill de Blasio indicated the initial picture would be worrisome. Teachers are “reaching a lot of kids,” he said, but “there’s clearly an issue with attendance.”
The district isn’t using this “for the purposes of any kind of punitive measures,” Denver Public Schools superintendent Susana Cordova said. It’s “really to make sure we’re engaged with our students.
“Merely logging in does not tell us anything more than the student turned on their computer,” Los Angeles superintendent Austin Beutner said in a speech last week. “The absence of a log-in, when a student is reading a book or working on a writing assignment, can leave a misleading digital footprint.”
Online learning is planned, deliberate and thoughtful in the sense that online courses often take months or even years to develop, not days or weeks.
Online learning is far more than online courses and programs. It always has been. While inside the institution it has been difficult to imagine learning as anything other than courses and programs, outside the institution, over the last three or four decades, online learning has been something very different.
the wider internet to introduce educators to things like learning communities, blogs, social software, MOOCs, personal learning environments, and most recently, decentralized technology.
Online learning should be fast, fun, crazy, unplanned, and inspirational. It should be provided by people who are more like DJs than television producers. It should move and swim, be ad hoc and on the fly. I wish educators could get out of their classroom mindsets and actually go out and look at how the rest of the world is doing online learning. Watch a dance craze spread through TikTok, follow through-hikers on YouTube, organize a community in a Facebook group, discuss economic policy in Slack. All of that is online learning – and (resolutely) not the carefully planned courses that are over-engineered, over-produced, over-priced and over-wrought.
I quite agree with what Jim Groom said, that this is not “the time for wild experimentation.” I also recognize that a lot of what is happening today is an emergency response to an unprecedented situation. As Clint Lalonde says, “What is happening right now at many institutions as they are scrambling is grasping at life preservers trying to stay afloat