Creating better student connection thru online learning

Vicente Andaya National High School, Sigma, Capiz

ONE OF the many benefits technology brings to education is online learning. Students anywhere can access content and lessons from top universities across the globe without physically travelling abroad as long as they have access to the internet.

Online learning is actually nothing new. The very first online class was conducted over two decades ago. Online learning was initially a theory conceptualized by Ivan Illich on his book “Deschooling Society” a few years after the internet was developed by the United States Department of Defense. And now the internet, which started as a military tool, is reshaping education as we know it.

Online lessons are frequently part of a fully online class, a supplemental module for a traditional class or even a method to reach students who are more comfortable with digital communication.

There are various ways to conduct online lessons. Some schools allocate a day in a week when students don’t need to physically attend class, while others use software to present lessons, prepare and gather assessment data, and create reports. But across different virtual platforms, problems regarding online lessons are the same: text- heavy, passive, disengaging, confusing, isolating, and artificial.

If students need to read text, they could have just read a book instead of going online. What makes online lessons beautiful is that most

effective lessons are interactive and engaging.

In his article “Isolation: The Pitfall of Online Learning” published on PBS website, Jason Lineberger, a digital learning coordinator, shares how to use online classes i n a positive and interactive way that promotes student engagement.

According to him, students will find online lessons isolating if they aren’t interacting with their classmate or teacher. To solve this problem, he writes, teachers must get out of the way and give students the opportunity to think, explore and connect.

He shares that during one of his classes, he allowed students to create social media profiles for the characters in the novel that his class was reading. Students went all-out – costuming, making conscious choices about which words to use in posts, and reacting to each other in character based on the events of the books. This all contributed to a much richer learning experience than in-class discussion, he wrote.

But not all lessons are most effective when delivered online. When designing online lessons, teachers should be actively aware of the online environment and how it could be effectively used. Think about whether the lessons will help students to connect with you, each other, or with the subject matter. At the end of the day, students’ holistic learning and better communication skills should be our main goal. (