Remote Learning Isn’t Going Anywhere – Let’s Make It The Best It Can Be

The coronavirus pandemic brought a huge shift in how the world functioned. It changed how people went about living their lives daily. The impact it has had on people’s personal and professional lives will last for years to come. Maybe, it will be with them forever. However, not everything is gloomy. The coronavirus pandemic has a silver lining too. What exactly are we talking about? The shift towards ‘being remote.’

The Rise of the Remote Lifestyle

The pandemic led to the significant rise of the ‘remote’ lifestyle as offices were closed due to social distancing measures enforced to limit the spread of the coronavirus.

Businesses across the globe soon realized that employees could be as productive from their homes as they are in the office. Similarly, meetings that required ‘in-person’ interaction could be handled over a Zoom call or Google meet. Similarly, many other business operations and tasks could be carried out with the same efficiency, collaboration, and result, with remote working.

Many companies went a step further and opted to make remote work a part of their operations for the foreseeable future. Companies like Airbnb, Atlassian, Coinbase, and Dropbox are just a few examples that offer remote working opportunities to their employees.

Remote Learning – A New Way of Learning For Students

Another section that benefited greatly from this remote culture is the education sector – students in particular. As schools and colleges were closed abruptly, educational institutions had no option but to conduct classes and examinations online.

And remote learning is here to stay for a long time, even if schools are being reopened slowly as the coronavirus fades away. A significant reason for this is the substantial benefits remote learning provides students.

In an article published in the New York Times, Veronique Mintz, an eighth grader, spoke about how she was learning more with distance learning than she did in school. The piece discussed why students like her prefer remote learning – there isn’t any classroom distraction that comes along with it.

She doesn’t miss the other kids who talk out of turn, disrespect teachers or hit one another. This sentiment of ‘remote learning being free of classroom distractions’ is shared by a considerable portion of students across the globe.

Moreover, remote learning has paved the way for personalized learning. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all learning approach for all students. Instead, they can learn at their own pace and in a method that best suits them. For instance, students can always refer to a recorded lecture at a time of their convenience and don’t necessarily need to attend it at the given time.

Looking at the benefits of remote learning, many argue that this urgency for using the personalized learning approach on a large scale should have been explored well before the pandemic. There were already virtual educational apps like the Yup Math Tutoring App that have provided on-demand learning and support to students since 2016. Such avenues should have been explored beforehand. This could have helped enhance the level of education and simplified the process much earlier.

Challenges With Remote Learning

There can be no doubt that remote learning has proved to be a boon for students. However, when it comes to teachers, it poses several challenges. Teachers’ primary challenge is utilizing remote teaching tools and platforms effectively. This can be primarily attributed to inexperience in using such platforms. All these years, they majorly used the ‘traditional’ teaching methods. Online teaching was something that was ‘out-of-curriculum’ for them too.

 Jonathan Schor, the CEO and Co-Founder at CodeMonkey, explained, “This challenge was clear to us from the very beginning. One of our goals was to make it possible even for teachers with a very limited coding background–even none – to teach coding through the platform.”

The Rise of Third-Party Remote Learning Providers

Taking advantage of the pandemic’s teaching gap, many online learning platforms have developed specialized courses and programs for school settings, especially coding and computer programming, that help teachers and students.

The program options are diverse. They include customized options for K-12^th grade in coding based on blocks, Python, game creation courses, and more. This can help improve both the teaching as well as learning standards.

Conclusion

Remote learning isn’t going anywhere. The benefits it provides to students and teachers are too significant to shelve the remote learning method. So, now that remote learning has become a permanent part of the education sector, why not make the best of it?