MAY 4 — E-learning remains an enigma. On one hand, during this movement control order (MCO) we don’t have any choice but to go online and most likely learning from home is the future.
Having said that, after conversations with some people (including students), you do wonder if we could use this crisis-opportunity to push the envelope a little more education-wise.
I’ve been chatting casually with parents and students (both primary and secondary), all of whom have — since mid-March — been engaging in full-time e-learning.
Without trying to sound “privileged” (especially given how many families are unable to learn from home), there clearly remains some areas in e-education we could rethink and improve on.
Like many educators, I reckon one of the biggest mistakes of e-learning is to view it primarily as a digitalisation of what happens in the classroom; instead, it can and ought to enable a transformation of traditional schooling.
Below are just three baby thoughts on how:
1. For physical classrooms, being present and face-to-face with the teacher is the given; with e-learning, not being “present” is the baseline.
This sorta makes attendance-taking rather superfluous. Yes, of course, there’s always the issue of “reporting” to parents that “your child was present during the class.”
And maybe with younger children, this is necessary.
But let’s all agree it’s less than ideal. Besides, is there some super urgent reason why parents simply MUST have “present in the classroom” as an indicator of learning, not least during a crisis period like a lockdown?
A cute irony here is how, during the MCO, almost no employee is required to “clock in” to work anymore (despite working from home) but teachers still need to take attendance.
The plot thickens (or worsens) because in some cases, children have problems “signing in” to the particular edu-website yet are able to submit their assignments on time (via, say, email) yet get reprimanded because they “did not attend” the scheduled online class.
Now, in a physical classroom, one could argue (tenuously) that being physically present was necessary because the teacher said or showed some things which can’t be recorded.
But for an online classroom, is “real-time” presence all that important anymore?
We’ve got to quit obsessing about attendance and focus more on “deliverables” as a marker of compliance (or, better yet, quality).
All of which flows into the second impasse…
2. In traditional schools, post-classroom assignments (more commonly known as "homework") are seen as an "add-on"; with e-learning, out-of-class study takes precedence and teachers teaching in "real-time" is the exception.
One popular phrase in education today is "flipped learning." This belongs to a family of phrases — like "active learning", "personalised learning", etc. — in which, long and short, the student begins to take charge of his or her own education.
Institutions which heavily implement this philosophy will, inevitably, end up looking "different" from traditional schools.
It will look as it the students are the ones "leading" the learning, doing most of the talking, working collaboratively with each other (instead of "taking orders" from the teacher) and so on.
The teacher, in such cases, usually perform simple facilitation and even behaves like a co-learner.
How does e-learning change this? It should, in a sense, take this trajectory even further.
If flipped learning in traditional classrooms made students look like mini-teachers and teachers look like quasi-students, then e-learning should make both the teachers and students look less like teachers and students and more like a project team.
In a real-world project, 80 per cent of the really important work is done independently and only 10-20 per cent of the time is used for "checking in", calibrating, and so on.
Anything beyond 20 per cent for the latter and the temptation towards micro-management looms large.
Granted this won’t be so easy or practical with lower primary students (and the last thing anybody wants is chaos), but the principle can be cultivated early.
Overall, we should push for less "centralised" meeting time, more independent group and individual working time. Ironically, this may lead to less time staring at the screen, which brings me to the final issue…
3. In the traditional classroom, learning is delimited by time and space; with e-learning, these limitations are removed and optionality becomes key.
You know what’s the only thing worse than having to sit inside a classroom for five hours? It’s having to stare into a Zoom screen-grid for the same duration of time. Yet, isn’t this precisely what many of our school kids are being made to do?
At least in school, kids can nudge their friends, stand up, sharpen their pencils, stare out the window at the other kids playing sports, pass naughty notes, run to the science lab, go to the toilet (four times during the class) and, best of all, look forward to recess or the final school bell.
During online classes? It’s like going from one passive zombified state to another, isn’t it? Especially when kids are "forced" to listen to teachers talk via a screen for hours.
[Isn’t this why the entire “educational CD-ROM” industry didn’t take off? Because, look, it’s already bad enough listening to an educator drone on and on when he’s right in front of you, imagine watching him doing it through a screen? I reckon the inmates at Abu Ghraib had more fun?]
E-learning is a chance to make education seem less like involuntary confinement and more like a bounded choice.
Instead of one or two textbooks, what if kids were given a "recommended" reading (or, better yet, viewing) list? What if kids were asked to submit their own findings of the most helpful vids or articles on, say, climate change, and what points they disagreed with?
Instead of everybody listening to one teacher, what if students were given the chance to discuss answers with whoever they want (and at their own time)?
Instead of one set of exam questions, what about considering the flexibility in choosing the kinds and levels of assessments which is best tailored to their strengths, and so on?
I mean, e-learning already renders the concept of "closed-book exams" null, doesn’t it? May as well rethink assessment strategy as a whole!
Again, I don’t deny that for some children (especially lower primary) their maturity may be as yet insufficiently developed to deal with such independence and options. But I’d insist these are the minority; the majority of school children, I suspect, would love to at least try.
Options — the MCO has wrecked many of them in daily life. Perhaps, when it comes to education, e-learning can redeem a few for our children?
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
