Covid 19 has resulted in schools and educational centres all over the world moving on to online learning. Students have swapped the traditional pen-paper setup for laptops, ipads and other devices. In place of face-to-face learning, most teaching now happens over a zoom call. In theory, the transition to online learning should have been seamless with today’s technology.
But after months of seeing their children hunched over their iPad during school hours or after-school tutoring classes, parents are starting to question whether their children are really making progress. In Victoria, growing concerns over the fast-approaching VCE has prompted the government to allow face-to-face teaching to resume for Year 12 students. Why hasn’t online learning delivered as promised?
First and foremost, big class sizes, an average of 20 to 25, is the real obstacle. It is difficult for one teacher to supervise and provide guidance to so many students especially online. In a physical classroom teachers can put them in groups based on their abilities and assigned the work pitched at their respective levels. She can then split her time between the groups. However, it is difficult to do such break-out groups with young students online and get them to work together. Students at such a young age just do not have the maturity to do so.
Secondly, for Mathematics teaching to be a success, it is no secret that at the foundation level numeracy and problem solving has to be taught separately. A child could be at different levels for both and their progress monitored so that the work assigned will be just right to maximise learning. For example, a child that has not mastered fractions, should not be assigned problem solving involving fractions. Failing to adhere to this principle repeatedly will only cause undue stress and anxiety to a child which will eventually lead the child to fear and hate the subject. This is a scenario that has to be avoided at all costs as by then we are deemed to have ‘lost’ the child and to gain the child’s cooperation again will be an uphill task.
Most importantly, there is no real-time teaching in schools. This means teachers are not able to see what students are doing real-time and as a result they are not able to provide guidance when necessary. As a result, a child could be making the same mistakes repeatedly. Imagine, a child given a 10 page worksheet on fractions and repeating the same mistakes for all 10 pages as teachers can only see the work when submitted. Hence, all the efforts of the child will be in vain. Unfortunately, this scenario happens repeatedly and as a consequence the child forms the perception that his efforts for Mathematics is just not paying off and begins to stop applying himself in the subject.
How do we then make online learning work? I think the whole school structure including the curriculum needs to be redesigned to be online-first. Online learning presents unique challenges especially with regards to interactivity. Simply taking an existing face-to-face curriculum and dumping it into zoom is definitely not the way to go. Educators need to experiment with the various tools and platforms available and design a curriculum and a delivery model to suit. Here at MathsHub we have been investing in various technologies to make online learning as interactive as possible. We’ve received amazing feedback from our students due to our online-first approach. Online learning definitely poses some challenges, but the onus is on educators to adapt to the changing landscape to ensure good outcomes for students.