Despite the fact that 2020 is now in the past, we are still feeling the effects of that tumultuous year. Children suffered negative effects from repeated lockdowns affecting their social skills, motivations and academic standing. Friends of mine in school environments, to this day, despair at the effect lockdown has had on multiple year groups. The last minute ’lock down’ homeschooling was very jarring in comparison to the group-based face-to-face educational input to which students had always been accustomed. The sudden change highlighted numerous problems that had been lurking under the surface.
There has since been a lot of discussion in the media about the long history of inequality in the educational system, where students from less affluent backgrounds or those with disabilities have had less access to their education by right than other students. This conversation needed to happen and the highly devastating Covid-19 pandemic appears to have been the important spark that lit the fire of dialogue around this issue.
However, perhaps one positive aspect to come out of that time was the emergence of increasingly effective online education. Over time, we have discovered, in both the education and professional community, that in many ways online learning gives us numerous learning possibilities that in-person instruction does not.
By destigmatising people’s attitudes about online learning, all the way up to Open University, these conversations can perhaps also contribute to the emergence of a more egalitarian social perspective on education.
One huge advantage is that the compulsory use of technology for online learning has encouraged nationwide family discussions on the significance of online safety. To complete online projects, students must have an Internet connection. Parents cannot realistically keep an eye on their kid’s devices and Internet usage at all times. By nudging parents to talk with their kids about this properly through mandatory safeguarding measures introduced during the covid pandemic, it resulted in many families putting new safeguarding technologies on devices and giving them and their children the confidence to use the Internet more confidently and safely.
A generation of children has now been exposed to extensive media and school dialogues about issues that were typically taboo, like the darker side of Internet safety, out of sheer necessity. Better online behavior and safeguards can be ingrained in kids from an early age and adds a new level of trust to the family dynamic. It could persuasively be argued that it has, in some ways, led to a better set up for children to learn from home in a post-pandemic world. Children are increasingly developing better computer skills, which have been historically largely disregarded in schools.
Online education is now enabling a whole generation of children to improve their subject knowledge, technological abilities and computer literacy from home. Children picking up these technological abilities at an early age may well reap endless benefits down the road, possibly even assisting with future breakthroughs in fields of technical development and communication in a world where we are becoming more and more techno centric.
Although online learning is a growing area of education in both size and effectiveness, it cannot fully replace the traditional classroom setting, especially for younger children. Nor should it. Nonetheless, in the constantly shifting covid environment, pupils showed emotional fortitude and displayed enormous amounts of resilience and unexpected abilities to learn new skills during numerous lockdowns.
For many, online learning has now even become their preferred mode of learning. Many schools that now offer additional tuition to pupils through schemes such as the famed National Tutoring Programme, opt to offer this support via online tuition rather than face to face tuition, due to both its effectiveness and convenience. Just a few years ago that would have seemed utterly impossible, let alone unlikely.
Focusing on the advantages of online learning and what it can facilitate outside of the classroom will help us see how the pandemic actually acted as a gear shift in the right direction in the area of online learning. Out of disaster can indeed come unexpected breakthroughs. Online learning differs from face-to-face instruction but we, more than ever before, are discovering what boundaries it can break for the better as learners grow up in an increasingly techno centric world.