Changes That Must Be Made to Online Learning

Online learning has grown in popularity extremely over the last few years. Before around 2020, the most online learning you would see would be online college classes. Online school almost never came up in high school or below. But once the COVID-19 outbreak happened many schools had no choice but to transfer to online school, even if they had no idea how to handle having classes online. This often led to students not learning properly and teachers being unable to properly adapt their classes to the online environment. These problems made online learning much less effective than in-person school. But online school doesn’t have to be a worse alternative to in-person school. If teachers properly adapt their classes to the online environment and students can adapt to online classes, then online school can be an effective tool for education.

              Teachers haven’t learned how to teach in an online environment. And this often leads to problems, since teachers try to apply things that they’ve done in in-person classes to online classes, which doesn’t often work. Since online school and in-person school are such different environments, techniques that might be very useful in in-person school ends up being worth much less in online school. For example, many different methods of keeping students’ attention just don’t work in online school, especially when many students just don’t have cameras on. When I had online classes in high school, we even ended up having PE online, which ended up being a lot of blank cameras with the teacher telling people to do exercise for 45 minutes. I found that with constant access to the internet and what is essentially almost no supervision, I often didn’t end up paying the most attention to class. This was especially true for classes that were just lectures. However, for certain classes that had lots of interaction, such as theatre classes, the experience wasn’t actually too different from in-person school, just much harder.

              This shows that not only do teachers need to adapt their classes to online school, but students to adapt to online school as well. Many students don’t know how to treat online classes since they’ve never experienced them. And high school students aren’t the most responsible people. This leads to problems in the online school environment since no one is stopping the students from not paying attention in class. As a paper from the Journal of Education and e-Learning Research puts it, “most high school students may not yet be responsible enough to partake in this type of e-learning”. Despite this, a New York Times article finds that for students with strong math skills, “online algebra students did substantially better than their counterparts in standard classrooms.” This shows that students are capable of doing well in online classes, as long as they can engage with the topic.

This shows the possible positive benefits of online school, as long as the problems are fixed. As long as teachers learn the proper techniques to teach online classes, and students can engage with the topic, online school can be an excellent supplement to in-person school.