The world was hardly ready for the despair, destruction, and troubles of a global pandemic and we were sadly reminded of just by how much in 2020. More than a year later, we are still recovering and trying to get back to our regular lives. It will take years to recover from it in the economical sense as well as to fully go back to how things were. Many things were exposed as unnecessary though and the lockdown was a blessing in disguise on many fronts.
While it is certainly not a good way to find out how many things we were doing insufficiently and how much we could improve, things are now different and many argue that going back completely is impossible. People are used to spending more time at home and they have newfound affection and respect for certain pleasures in life. One of the biggest things people learned was how much we do not have to leave our home to work, and more importantly, study and learn.
Education During the Pandemic
Thanks to the modern technologies we have had for a long time, people never stopped learning and educating themselves during the chaos of 2020. We experience a true rise in the use of online platforms for education as entire countries’ governments’ education systems moved to the web. Online classrooms became the go-to way for children to attend the classes and most are now wondering if they have to go back to school full time.
Coronavirus spread faster than wildfire causing countless deaths, random lockdowns, unemployment, and numerous other disasters, but if we had to take out one positive it would be online education. While we were shaken to our core by how much our lives were altered, we dealt with it and came out on top. With all these sudden changes, education had to go through a transformation of great prominence. Since the institutions became unsafe for the students to physically be in like before for the purposes of learning and studying, education had to be shifted to the virtual world. Just like everything has its pros and cons, so did this change as it became a challenge for both the teachers and the students to adapt to a newer medium of learning, but it also proved to be very beneficial for them. Educational institutions are now considering shifting to online education in the future as well, and we do not have to wait for a pandemic to introduce this major social change.
New and Improved Way of Learning
So what challenges did we have to face with the rise of online education? The first and foremost is simple, and it came in the form of limited physical interaction between the people you know. Because of the lack of one-on-one interaction, maintaining a classroom environment has been almost impossible. There are innumerable distractions around the students while at home, which causes a lack of motivation and control over the environment. This further causes a lack of focus which defeats the purpose of holding an online class in the first place. Children like their gadgets and games, and most of them are on the same devices they had to use to resume their education. During the first few weeks it was very hard indeed, for the teachers and students but the parents as well.
Other than this, the teachers are not trained to teach an online class and many of them proved incompetent and confused with technology at times. Older teachers close to retiring struggled a lot because they had never before used modern tech in such ways. Another big challenge is the unreliability of electronic devices used for taking online lectures, as well as frequent internet issues. Still, regardless of all these challenges, they can be 100% solved or controlled one way or the other.
A Permanent Switch?
With that being said and all of the problems faced, why are we considering switching permanently to online learning? As we mentioned earlier, we could overcome the challenges in the way of online education as they are not that difficult to deal with and beat. With more resources and training, we definitely can and will. As technology is taking over the world swiftly, it might be a better option since online learning also has its more vital points. For starters, it can be done from anywhere in the world as you do not have to go to an institution physically. More importantly, it is much less expensive considering the cost of transport, lunches, having to live near the campus, textbooks, etc. Moreover, It is much more efficient, easier to schedule, and less time-consuming.
Conclusion and Takeaways
With the rise of online education, more websites and applications are being launched to aid learning, while the ones that already exist frequently release updates and patches to introduce new education-oriented content and features. With online examinations, quizzes, checking, and arranging, it seems that everything can be done online, and it will only keep improving with time. It saves up effort and time, proving to be a win-win situation for both the teachers and the students alike, perhaps even the parents who will no longer have to worry about sending their kids away for long.
A great example of an online tutoring website is UpSkillsTutor. It is a Nigeria-based platform that allows you to choose a professionally trained tutor to help your respective subjects. It is convenient and secure and gives you innumerable options to choose from anywhere in the world, no matter what you want to learn.
As time goes by, with more efficient applications to assist us and new and improved gadgets with novelty features, education will eventually shift online to an even greater extent, perhaps even completely. A balance between physical and online interaction has to be maintained to have a better educational deliverance though, which will be made easy with applications to support it in the future. We must not forget to interact with each other in real life, but the current education system is ripe for a giant makeover.
