Online Schools and Online Learning during the COVID-19 pandemic
As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads across countries around the world, many schools are forced to close. Some of these schools had to quickly come up with a way to providing education to students staying at home while some closes completely.
As an A-Level student who has also been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, I will be sharing my experiences with online learning, the problems that we faced, and what we think the schools/teachers can do to make our online-learning experience better.
Lessons
Revision? Not really…
When the schools in Thailand were told to close international examinations weren’t cancelled yet, so the schools had to try their best to continue to provide the students with education they need for their examinations. Additionally, as we get closer and closer to the examinations, teachers tends to give more revision time where students can work on exercises and questions from any topics, and ask questions if there are any. This works well in person (and with some students); however, it is much less effective online. Most students would switch off, get distracted or procrastinate. All without the teacher really knowing. Not only does this not help with learning, it also makes the students more bored as they’re both not getting anything done and not really having free time either.
So what can be done? Not a lot… online quizzes are useful, and brainstorming sessions can be fun too, but most teachers will have trouble keeping students engaged with these for a whole class, let alone for multiple lessons.
Examinations cancelled, but what’s next?
Things got a little easier when the examination boards announced the cancellations of examinations. This allows for a more flexible lesson plan, which is much needed with the situation which is evolving quickly on its own. Now, what can be done? We now have a little bit more time, but the students are still stuck at home with a million sources of distraction.
It’s the passion project.
One interesting solution came from one of my teachers. Why not make the lesson be about the thing that’s distracting them? If you can’t fight them, join them right?
The setup was that the students are told to go research any topic that they’re interested in (has to be somewhat related to the syllabus though) then come back and present to the class about it. This works surprisingly well! Students (me included) spent a large amount of time, even after classes, researching the topic and creating the presentations. Some even continued researching after the presentation! I guess it’s a win-win for both students and teachers, the students gets the learn new things, and the teachers have an evidence of work being done.
Don’t give us too many options.
Options are great and we like it though I’ve noticed that some teachers starts to give too many options during online-learning. Not only does it make it harder for the teachers themselves to manage these options, students may also have a hard time working with these options.
Some students gets confused on which task to do and some tries to juggle between all the tasks and ends up doing less than they could have. Some students may find it hard to find a friend to ask for advice/take to as the whole class is spread across a large number of tasks leaving only a small group of people working on the same task. This is made even worse by the already limited communications between students.
If options are to be given, those tasks should be linked/integrated, so students work on different tasks can still talk and ask questions to their peers.
Tune down the lesson plan a little bit
Some teachers tend to plan more for their lesson than they intend to teach, then adapts the lesson along as the class move along, looking at the pace that the students are working at. This works well in person, but it is quite a bit more difficult to tell if you’re setting too much work when you’re not there seeing their work live.
Furthermore, some students find it harder to work at home due to them not being used to the workspace or getting distracted. So for the first few weeks, reduce the amount of work set a little bit to not put too much stress on students while they’re getting settled into online learning.
It’s also quite easy for students to mistake classwork for homework and vice-versa. This is because we are doing both the homework and classwork in the same place (both at home) which can lead you to think too much homework has been set even when the total amount of work is the same.
Society
One of the main thing about a school is the community, the ability to have a little chat with friends during classes and asking questions. Online-learning has greatly limited how we function as a society, but I believe things can still be done.
Literally everyone can hear you
A majority of teachers may notice that students talk much less during online lessons. Though it’s not because we don’t want to, it’s only because we don’t want everyone to hear. In a video conference, everyone can hear what you’re saying, and we don’t want that in most cases. Speaking while knowing that everyone can clearly hear you is a lot more difficult than turning to the side and talking to somebody next to you. We are also aware that not everyone wants to hear our specific question/conversation. I will be talking about a possible solution to this in another section below.
Video On?
Human conversations rely a lot on visual cues, we look at the other person’s body language all the time when we talk. This gives us an idea on if the other person is interested in the conversation or not which then tells us if we should continue talking or we should slowly end the conversation. It also gives us an indication on whether someone is available to talk as we can see what they’re doing.
Some school made it mandatory for you to have your video on during a video conferencing class, but some don’t. It’s bad enough not being able to see their whole body language during conversation, it’s even worse when you literally can’t even see their facial expression. I think (when it is appropriate) schools should encourage students to have their camera on. Having cameras on also means that students are more likely to work and less likely to procrastinate.
Break times
A lot of conversations start when you’re just walking past each other or just seeing the other person doing something. This is something we’re completely lacking with our current online learning solutions. Once the class is done, everyone logs off and go do whatever they want. It is true that most people still talks to their friends through direct messages or private calls, however, this is limited to mostly their close friends rather than the whole school.
The Platform
As schools switch from physical learning to online learning, they’re faced with a decision. Which platform to use? There’s a large number of options out there for video conference and online workspaces. However, full-day online classroom experience hasn’t really been on anyone developer’s/company’s list. Not a big deal… right? We can just go ahead and use the video conferencing tools like Zoom and Google Hangouts and just call it a day. Not really… Video conferencing tools are designed for a different environment in mind, so some of the learning features are missing from these tools. Plus, a conference is meant to last hours, not the whole day, and they have a much smaller focus on community.
So many of them!
Some schools leave it to the teachers to decide which platform to use. An argument going for this is that teachers can choose the platform that is most suitable to what they’ll be teaching, but this makes it harder for students who have to switch between a large variety of apps for each of their classes. It’s normal to people to work slower when we’re not used to the physical environment we are working in, and that also applies with these the online environments. All these apps have different user interfaces and behaviour making it difficult for us to get used to all of them.
Zoom into the breakout rooms
Many schools chose to use Zoom as their video conferencing platform, and that’s great. It’s just that a lot of people don’t really use it to its full potential. As mentioned above, we don’t want everyone to hear our conversation, and breakout rooms are great for solving (or partially) solving that.
The host of the meeting can assign participants to a breakout room and the participants can join or leave the breakout rooms whenever they want. One approach of using this feature came from another teacher, who assigned us to breakout rooms based on the tables we were on when we were in class. Though not perfect as we still can’t talk to a person from another table (Zoom doesn’t allow the participants to choose the breakout rooms yet), it definitely works! We talk and ask questions much more frequently between the people on our virtual table.
Breakout rooms aren’t really the answer to the problems though. Entering and leaving breakout rooms takes quite some time and you can’t switch between breakout rooms yet. The host also cannot talk to every breakout rooms at the same time making it very difficult for teachers to monitor and talk to the whole class once the students are assigned to breakout rooms.
Breakout rooms are disabled by default, you will need to go to your online Zoom settings to enable it
Working together?
Most video conferencing tools do not come with classroom-optimised features, so most teachers have to choose two different platforms, one for the video conferencing, and one for submitting work and setting tasks. This isn’t that big of a deal, but if these apps have better integration it will be much easier for both students and teachers.
Emails just won’t do it
Most schools rely on emails for communications outside of classes, while emails are a great way of communicating, they’re more optimised for more important things. Students should have a way of communicating in a less formal manner both with fellow students and with teachers. This can be difficult for some schools where Child Protection is a concern, as most texting application does not allow admin monitoring. From my knowledge, Google Hangouts and Google Hangouts Chat is a good place to start.
Maybe we’re not looking in the right place
Most schools looked at video conferencing tools when they had to choose the platform for online learning. But maybe we should be looking at online workplace tools like Microsoft Teams and Slack. Not only do they allow you to create and keep chat threads, they also allow you to create voice/audio channels that students can switch between quickly and whenever they want. Teachers can set up a couple of voice channels for each classroom and students can choose to go onto each channel to talk and ask questions between students. Students can also create a thread to ask questions, which can be saved and be referred to if the question were to come up again from another student.
These online workspace tools can also be adapted for break times, a server can be made available to all students in the school (or for each phase) with multiple voice channels available so students can join and talk to each other during their free periods/break times.
Microsoft Teams also have great integration with the Microsoft Office 365 apps allowing files to be handed in right inside Teams. Neat!
