Due to schools being closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, students are now being required to learn online starting next Monday. We’ve been given instructions on what to do, but I think there’ll still be some issues. This week I’ll be writing about how our online learning system is being used.
For the past few weeks, the school hadn’t given much information on what to do in terms of learning. At the start of March break some teachers gave out a small amount of work, but that was about it. However, as of this week, it’s been announced that we will begin online learning using platforms such as Google Classroom. Supposedly teachers will post class material in the morning, and students will have the rest of the day to work on what has been posted. This allows for students to choose which subjects they want to work on first.
Posting the classwork for every single class all at once happens at the beginning of the day at around 9:00-10:00. I’m not too sure how it will affect my workflow, and which subjects to work on first, so we’ll see how it goes. Students should be able to ask questions to the teacher through email which would be helpful since the whole online learning thing is quite new.
In one of the emails the school sent out, they stated that high school students will receive “three hours of work per course per week”. From my interpretation, that means that class time will effectively be cut in half since the usual class time is 70 minutes. In my opinion, I feel like this is quite strange because each day you’d only be working for around two and a half hours each day. That seems quite little since we’d usually be at school for six hours. The material will either have to be really efficient to process or else we’d be slowing down on the curriculum. With my experience of my last semester, each class was planned out so that we could get through the entire curriculum before exams came up. By cutting class time in half I’m not too sure whether not we’ll be able to get through the material in the same amount of time.
Another thing that I’m curious about is how things will turn out if students don’t do the work. Some students don’t even do their work at school, and now that teaching is being done online, it’d be up to the parents to make sure that students are doing their work. With everyone staying at home I’m pretty sure that some people are going to end up not doing their school work.
Overall, the online learning plan seems to have some holes in it, but I think that there will be improvements to the system as time goes on. However, I think the main question will be whether or not classes will be able to progress through the curriculum according to schedule while also having the students understanding the material.