Pros and cons of distance learning - Мақала

Pros and cons of distance learning

The Internet became an important participant in the educational process in the early 2000s, and today a rare teacher or student does not use technology in teaching at all. We communicate with colleagues, students and their parents in messengers, use an electronic magazine, and search for additional materials on the Internet.

According to the eLearning Industry, the e-learning solutions market grew by 900% between 2001 and 2017 alone. The opportunity to study remotely attracts many, and in the coming years, the share of children who receive education remotely will only grow, because there are more and more tools for organizing such studies every day.

This approach has advantages and disadvantages, and every teacher should know them to avoid unpleasant surprises. In this article, we looked at the pros and cons of distance learning in school.

Advantages of distance education

Now the advantages of distance learning in school for thousands of teachers are not at all obvious. It seems that distance learning is a continuous inconvenience, a threat to discipline and academic performance. But this is not the case: remote education has a lot of advantages. Here are some of them.

The opportunity to work with each student individually. Distance learning technology helps you find your own approach to each student. It happens that a timid child is shy to work actively in the classroom, where the eyes of twenty classmates are fixed on him. But on the remote site, such a quiet person feels freer, asks the teacher questions in the chat, and successfully completes tasks. And the teacher can choose for such students additional tasks that correspond to their inclinations to maintain interest in learning. Distance learning is a great chance to get to know your students better.

Automation of routine processes.Simply put, technology can take over the most boring part of a teacher's job. For example, checking homework and compiling statistics on the class. On average, using interactive workbooks with automatic verification will save at least 1-2 hours a day, if not more. This system works very simply: the teacher goes to the site, selects the subject, class and topic, finds a suitable task and sends the link to the students, and then just looks at the same site, how they did. This is how an interactive workbook for grades 5-11 from Skysmart and JSC "Publishing House" works „Education“»A chance to learn new technologies. The high demand for teachers with remote work experience is a reality. The ability to use interactive learning platforms, Google Docs, electronic workbooks and video conferencing services increases your value in the labor market and gives you the opportunity to find a part-time job in an online school (and there are many such schools, they are growing and need new personnel). But even more valuable are the skills of organizing your time, working with students remotely, and the ability to control and motivate them at a distance. If you can handle it now, you can try your hand at online tutoring by next school year.

The game tasks. Distance learning involves a very active use of digital technologies. This includes gamified tasks: online games, quizzes, and interactive brainteasers. Let's not forget that for any child, play is the most natural way to learn about the world. And high school students like such tasks more than dry tasks from the textbook. Games not only make learning fun — they help you evaluate progress and bring an element of healthy competition to your studies. Educational games are not included in the official program, but we recommend that you dilute the usual tasks with them. A child who learns with pleasure will achieve greater success than someone who is bored in class.

A more measured pace of work. The main thing that distance education gives you is time. Now that most of the communication with students takes place in messengers, you have more time to think about your answers to their questions. After all, you do not have to answer immediately, at the risk of making a mistake — you can check the reference literature and give a more thoughtful and detailed answer. This makes the relationship between the teacher and the students more professional, but at the same time more relaxed.The ability to work in a comfortable environment. A teacher who works remotely can live anywhere — in the city or in the country, in Chelyabinsk or in Thailand. Of course, today movement is limited, but it will not always be so. But the freedom of movement of teachers who give lessons online will definitely remain. Already, many teachers have appreciated the advantage of remote work — you can get up later, there is no need to rush to get ready and go across the city to work. Moving away from the school atmosphere with its noise and bustle has a beneficial effect on the state of mind of many teachers and helps them to concentrate on important aspects of their work.

Relevance of knowledge. Our usual printed textbooks do not always keep up with the passage of time. They often become obsolete even before they reach stores and libraries. Outdated geographical maps, mathematical puzzles about packaging potatoes on a vegetable base, illustrations in an English textbook with images of floppy disks and computers from the childhood of parents — all this is from some other world, but not from the world of modern children. The remote learning process allows the teacher to find relevant materials that meet the interests of the child of the 21st century. For example, you can learn English not only from textbooks, but also from current memes, songs, and the latest episodes of TV series. And puzzles about the number of subscribers in social networks are much closer to modern schoolchildren than counting potatoes.

Availability of training materials. Now many online libraries have opened their virtual doors and allowed the use of their textbooks and manuals for free. But in fact, on the Web and so you can find freely available a huge number of e-books that will be useful for preparing lessons. This makes life easier for both the teacher, who is not limited to the benefits available in the school library, and the parents of students, who cannot buy dozens of expensive additional benefits.Disadvantages of distance education

The disadvantages of distance learning in school are not as numerous as it may seem. However, they are there, and the school teacher should know what difficulties and limitations he may face.

The need to understand digital technologies. No one argues, switching to a new style of work is disturbing and tedious. Especially if there are no uniform instructions, and you need to understand everything quickly. If you don't know where to start, start with webinars on distance education. With a little effort, you can become practically an expert in all digital educational tools in a week — in fact, there is nothing complicated about them.

Lack of personal communication. For a teacher who is used to keeping all the students in sight during the lesson, the "home" lesson can be a difficult test. After all, with distance learning, it is difficult to control all children. Video conferences, a shared chat where the teacher can communicate with children, work on group projects in Google Docs, and other tools for real-time interaction will help solve this problem.

The need to work with students ' motivation. The job of a modern teacher is not to read a textbook aloud. Its task is to motivate and inspire students, to maintain their interest in the subject, to encourage curiosity and initiative. There is no computer system that can take over these functions. And now, more than ever before, the teacher needs to show all these talents. Perhaps teachers will have to pay much more attention to those children who have problems with motivation and organization: such students may decide that it is no longer necessary to study at all. Therefore, teachers will have to invent new forms of control of such students.

There is no boundary between working and free time. This problem is familiar to anyone who works remotely. Working from home, a person can hardly tell exactly when his working day ends. Therefore, people often recycle. On the other hand, it can be difficult for family members of a remote teacher to realize that they are not just "sitting at home all day." Your family will probably interrupt you. That is why it is so important to set aside a corner for work and to agree with family members: as long as you sit in this corner, you are like in a school classroom, even if it is virtual. During these hours, no one should distract you and address you. And to maintain a healthy balance of work and rest, set an alarm clock that will remind you that every hour you should get up from the table and do a warm-up, and after 19: 00 in general, you should turn off the computer and have a good rest.

Many teachers have already managed to evaluate all the pros and cons of remote learning. And, if you look closely, the advantages of this system are still more. Every year, more and more children will be educated online, and the usual offline practices will take on an increasingly digital form.

But now it is very difficult for teachers. It's hard to plan, keep your cool, and develop effective online learning strategies when everything is on fire and collapsing. Don't panic: no one is asking you to make perfect decisions right now.