I and my wife both work full-time work from home and are trying to juggle online learning for our two children — one is in primary, and one is in a secondary school.
“We are lost” and frankly. “It’s not like we have another option, so we are doing the best we can under the circumstances.”
I am sure we are not the only parent struggling. We have to make arrangements for Laptops for both of the children, jump off from our work if they need any technical help.
Similarly, many Schools, Colleges, and Institutes have started online classes, live sessions to continue learning. With each new change and adoption, new challenges surface.
Many schools have adopted various tools:
- MS Teams (Office 365)
- Google Meet (GSuite)
- Webex
- GoToMeeting
- UberConference
- Zoom
We have an article about various tools offered free for Schools and Institutes.
The live sessions are now becoming common and have accepted as a new normal. But has new challenges surfaced and we are trying to check what simple solutions the college or Institute can have.
Information Security: One of the challenges which have surfaced is information security. Recently an incident surfaced about a Zoom Session Link of a School student was shared with his elder brother or friend which allowed the person to have access to the class, attending students, information. It is a scary situation for any student, parents, teachers, as well as Institutes.
Solution: Schools/Colleges can opt for some platforms like MS Teams part of O365, which is secure, provide credentials to students as well as teachers. Students with credentials can only participate in class. Teachers can track any unauthorized access and may disallow from joining the session. There are many other secured platforms like Google Meet, Webex. For platforms like Zoom, it’s now important to have password-authenticated sessions, and teachers must keep on changing the password with regular intervals and communicate with parents.
Internet and Network availability: In India, we still do not enjoy much-needed speed for and bandwidth which is needed for live sessions and streaming. Many times students don’t have the required network and are not able to attend the live sessions. They lose chance because of a lack of Infrastructure.
Solution: Schools/Colleges can record the sessions and make them available to students who were not able to attend the sessions
Lack of Interaction: Online sessions lack much-needed interactions. The real joy of online teaching comes from finding interactive ways to work with students, get their feedback, and have online office hours, to guide their growth. With the current bandwidth issue, teachers are more focused on completing the syllabus. It lacks interaction where we have a person to person contact. In current sessions we have chat but Teachers are unable to focus on session and chat as those are many messages from different students where the Teacher tends to miss out on the question and query. Many times teachers have to put all students on mute due to the potential background sound.
Solution: Teachers can record offline videos make them available to students through a restricted distribution platform for students to go through and keep Interaction sessions/ Query sessions for possible Interaction. This would be a blended model (Offline & Online)
The readiness of Teachers on Content: Many teachers have upgraded their IT Skills, PowerPoint skills in recent months to be ready for the live sessions. Still, there is much to do. There are various IT Tools available where we can create Interactive Content which can ensure the engagement of students as well as time to time evaluation of their learnings.
Solution: there are tools like screen recording with PowerPoint and Speech, Creating Interactive video with tools like H5P
Crowded due to simultaneous WFH of Parents and Online Schools: Many parents are facing this challenge. Many are working from home have to balance their work, calls, and online classes of their children. As the online classes are time-bound, many times those are overlapped with the work of parents and it always gets mixed up with each other creating disturbance to each other.
Solution: Adopting a Blended Model of Education (Online and offline) Many have offline activities but those can not be monitored. We should have 40% Offline where course content and videos can be developed offline by teachers and distributed with restricted access to students so that students can access the content from anywhere at any time.
How about combining Offline Learning with Online Learning:
Offline Learning: Offline Video recording by teachers, Reading textbooks, Watching the Class Recording, Participating in Quizzes, Giving feedback and queries to teachers for online sessions
Online Sessions: Focusing on query handling, providing explanations, and having more interaction.