Recent reports suggest that children prefer a blend of both virtual and real life classrooms gives them more motivation to learn. Could our post covid teaching landscape be the platform the education sector in the UK needs to evolve into the digital plains?
The best way to determine how your children respond to their learning experience both in school and at home, is to let them see for themselves. Many children are visual and audio visual learners, so allowing them the chance to explore the different digital teaching methods that works for them can encourage them to engage with education on a better level. Each digital device we add to the arsenal is a tool we can use in teaching. As a result, modern teaching software and technology now allows us to have wholly Online Teaching Jobs.
Whoever would have thought that a teacher could work from home one day…?
Blended Learning Becomes Normal in Higher Education
The coronavirus brought every educational establishment in the UK to a standstill. The idea to go online and teach back then opened the doors for this method to stay relevant even years later. As soon as education authorities realised that it was possible for students to learn course materials at home, it became an accepted part of teaching. Blended learning, a combination of online and offline lessons, has emerged slowly as the restrictions ended.
Budgets and Digital Learning
Where you might think that school budgets won’t extend to virtual learning, this is not the case. It is cheaper to outfit all students in the UK with a laptop and limited internet access then hire online teachers than it is to maintain whole school buildings and all the admin staff they contain. Using virtual learning or even blended learning allows the school board to save on overheads for each lesson we don’t hold in real time.
Lowering Learning Overheads
Now, with budgets being what they are in schools all over Britain, it is becoming increasingly likely that classroom sessions will evolve into virtual classes, instead. Schools could be smaller buildings, resources could go towards filling the digital skills gap among teachers or updating software and tech that helps the students learn. Technology libraries could grow to become as important as a book library. Checking out high tech coding computers could become as normal as checking out a copy of Moby Dick.
Put all this together and there is a significant chance that online teaching and virtual classrooms will cost the schoolboard far less once the system is implemented.
Student Retention
One thing nobody could have suspected would happen is that students who are offered blended learning are less likely to leave courses, school, and classes early. They were more likely to complete their learning than those who might have been forced to take part against their will a decade ago are now less likely to skip class because they can take part from home. Blended learning, ultimately, is about meeting the students on their level and offering them comfortable alternatives to what has long been an uncomfortable experience. Let them change the school system. It needs the revamp.
Are you for or against blended learning?
The only real foreseeable problems with providing UK students with a fully blended learning experience is that it requires more cooperation from parents. If children must be home on a Friday because they have virtual class instead, then parents must change their working schedules to facilitate this. Could this be the shift we need towards the four day working week? Only time will tell.
