This is a sort of "second part" of what I wrote previously here
Due to the pandemic we are living nowadays, the need for a broad and wide education is mandatory. Nonetheless, is not a discouraging issue; society has already made such advances in e-learning matters, like the access provided by different schools and colleges to platforms like Coursera and Edx, creation of pages like Khan Academy or Crash Course, tutoring services like The Princeton Review. The focus must be placed on the empowerment and improvement of this kind of initiatives, as well as in the creation of similar and upgraded ones. Particularly, I have used the tutoring services mentioned above and consulted some videos in Khan Academy’s YouTube profile. I found them to be a great complement to my classes, and more recently, my online classes.
I have a friend that told me about an extra official free course, from an ecologist organization in his country, which was managed entirely through social media and WhatsApp, and the lectures were given via YouTube livestreams. When he told me about that, I just went speechless, because such a simple idea have the potential to reach thousands and even millions of people. That kept me thinking how the experience that I already had with online resources and this novel initiative could be merged in a synergetic way.
Google Classroom provides a complete costless platform that can mimic the interaction and feedback that students and teachers could obtain on a face-to-face scenario. The main issue that has to be highlighted is the learning community that society is used to, because that is a key factor that influences the effectiveness, like Giddens et al (2020) concluded on their work related with the development of a virtual community platform for doctoral studies. Combining prerecorded lessons, reading materials, forum activities, pre-graded quizzes, reiterative communication by WhatsApp, Telegram and e-mail, and virtual live sessions through Meet or even YouTube and Twitch lives, on a similar and enhanced way that resembles Coursera could be helpful to pursue a disruptive e-learning model. It has been studied that online feedback provided via tools as Google Docs could improve writing skills (Neumann & Hopcha, 2019), so, why not improve the whole skills and cognitive set of the students with these and new tools that can be appearing trough time?
Society still needs to grow its educational tissue, but that does not mean it is on a wrong way, since 1840s Postal Services started to provide correspondence education, then in 1953 University of Houston offered televised classes and in 1989 the University of Phoenix was the first institution to provide an online college program. Remote learning is not something new in the society, but still needs bigger and stronger contributions to stablish as the rule and not as an exception, and humanity is facing towards and closer to that direction.
REFERENCES
The History of Online Schooling. (2020, August). https://www.onlineschools.org/visual-academy/the-history-of-online-schooling/
This post was published first on Uptrennd:
https://www.uptrennd.com/post-detail/perspectives-on-education-2-virtual-spaces~NzAyODI1
