Online Learning Might Be the Future of Learning
The pandemic will shape how learning will look like in the future
The COVID-19 changed my entire life. Just a year ago in 2020, I was living in Vancouver, and I was waiting to start freshman year at a new high school I got into that was one of the finest in Canada. Then, the virus appeared and started to bite away my life bit by bit. All the tennis tournaments that I was supposed to play got canceled. The gym that I went to was closed. All the club meetings that I had with my friends had to be postponed. Most importantly, my family had to move back to Korea. I applied to a new American school in Busan and fortunately found a space amongst the many other students who were returning to Korea from North America due to the coronavirus. At the time, though, it was still March (2020) and my school back in Canada started online classes for everyone until the summer break. I thought this would be the first and the last online class that I would ever have. I was wrong; it was the start of my series of online learning. After one year of online learning in various forms, though, I believe online learning might be the future of learning.
Zoom was the first thing that I was introduced to as an online learning tool. Zoom is the heart of online learning. It allows students to see each others’ faces and participate in a live class that assimilates an offline class. Frankly, I have never heard of Zoom before this pandemic. I never used a lot of video calling softwares, but I did know about FaceTime or Skype. Zoom? Never. According to Zoom, however, they invented the program in 2011 in San Jose, California. Before the pandemic, video conferences were not as popular and were rarely done. With quarantines and lock downs from the pandemic, video conferences were the only ways to get learning and work done. CNN says that the easy-to-use interface as well as a stable video quality is what brought Zoom to the spotlight recently. I agree with this because I can remember my Skype days when calls were always lagging and disconnecting. Zoom on the otherhand is much more stable and it almost feels like sitting in a room with the other participants while some of them are thousands of miles away. Overall, video calling softwares are expected to improve a lot in the coming years with the market size growing and more companies jumping in the race meaning online learning will take place in better environments.
Just because the environment is good does not equate a good learning experience. A school with top-tier facilities may be a terrible school for learning. Is online learning like this? Many investigations are proving that this isn’t really the case for online learning. Capstone Core reported that IBM found out students learn 5 times more materials than they do in the traditional classroom environment. This is because students can go at their own pace and they can go faster, slower, or at a regular tempo depending on the material. I have attended online classes with my school in Canada, Korea, various classes, and now the NYT camp. What IBM found is absolutely right: I learned more efficiently and progressed quicker than before. BrankSome Hall Asia also says that online learning can be an opportunity for shy students to speak out and participate more actively in class since speaking behind a microphone is beter. I noticed that in the classes I took online, the learning experience seemed to be better for most people with more diverse participation and people moving on at their own pace.
Online learning has its advantages, but there are also clear disadvantages of it as well. Medium writer Joanna Henderson claims that online learning can distract kids and hinder them from getting hands-on education for some subjects. Say a notification bleeps in the middle of class. It is from the student’s favorite game, and it informs the student of coming online for some kind of a reward. There is a low chance that the teacher even knows this because microphones are mostly muted, and the angle of many laptop cameras cannot reach the sides where the student could be holding the phone. Naturally, with a powerful distractiton and no force stronger to stop it, the students would be sold to the distraction. Moreover, if there was a science class, experiments cannot be done. I know this because I watched a disection video as part of my biology classs during online learning. When we were let back into school a few weeks later and did the same experiment by hand, I thought, ‘Is this even the same experiemnt?’ because there were so many more aspects to the experimentt than it appeared in the video. Online learning, therefore, will never satisfy these parts for students (unless there is a super hologram AR program).
In whatever circumstances, whether you think online learning is good or not, online learning is bound to stay for a while. Many people have developed a paranoia about catching viruses and getting sick. Parents are still reluctant of sending their kids to school where the kids might get the coronavirus. In Korea, the Korean government announced that there would be more in-person classes, yet this is nowhere near the reality. Schools open for a week, there is a confirmed case, they close for a month, and the cycle repeats. In other words, we’ll probably be typing in our Zoom codes for at least a few months down the road. Do not be sad, though. Like I talked about previously, there are more advantages to online learning like being efficient and awarding chances to more students. For instance, I am not a huge fan of PE (sorry Mr. Galles) and the online learning allowed for me to put minimal time while enabling me to spend more time on the things I like such as English and science. Besides, you don’t have to eat frozen beans that the school ‘chef’ makes, or the cold sandwich packed by your mom at the busy cafeteria table anymore. I consider that alone makes it a win.
