Jeremy Kaplan
There are so many amazing resources and services like research paper service PapersOwl available for students these days. We are living in a modern time that puts a myriad of different interesting facts and figures at the tip of our fingers if we wish to find out about things. This has meant that in a lot of ways, the education system has come on a very long way since the days of old. Your parents would just have been dictated to by a person standing next to a blackboard. Now we have superior classroom appliances and teachers are trained ever better to assure they are up to date with the fast moving aspects of our world. One of the things that has grown very popular as a part of this is a phenomenon called distance learning. This is where a student learns, same as they would in an educational location, however they are not in the same area as their teacher or the information they are learning. This could involve a number of different scenarios, maybe the teacher is teaching through a video call, or maybe the teacher sends the student exercises to do via email. This type of learning has become very popular over the last few years, this is because it utilises modern day technology and is seen to save time, money and resources as well. But with all this hype surrounding it, has anyone ever properly explored the negative connotations that come with distance learning? Well, we are going to do just that, don’t sign your child up for that class just yet, not before you read this!
Lack of face to face contact
A lot of the goodness and advantages of teaching come in the fact that the student is able to communicate with the teacher face to face. This is really helpful because at the end of the day, body language and facial expression say a whole lot about how the student is getting on and whether the lesson is sinking in. It also gives the child an opportunity to speak up if they are not sure about any aspect of the exercise or work they are doing. In distance learning, this isn’t as easy. The teacher struggles to communicate with the student in an effective way. Think about it, you’re trying to tutor a child via a video call, the signal starts to go and you can’t properly hear the student. This means that the students learning is completely dependent on the strength of the connection, or the quality of the webcam. Children are hard to grab the attention of, and if you are trying to do it via email or video call, then you are going to find it even harder because the child is going to see it as too much effort to go through and they are going to switch off.
Delayed communication
The communication in distance learning is hard to keep up. This is because the teacher has to create the lessons that you are going to take part in, and they also have to mark the work that has been given to them. This means that the teacher has to pick up the pace if they are going to be able to deliver effective lessons. Also a lot of the time the student will not be replying for whatever reason. And children are a lot less organised with their communication than adults are. They are not going to properly let you know that they are not going to be in contact, they are just going to switch off their computer and that’ll be it. This makes distance learning very hard because when the means of communication is not only not direct, but faulty as well, it risks a complete lack of interest on the students part. And this is a hard thing to try and win back, trust me!
When a new type of technology comes into play, or a revolutionary educational model is invented, it needs to be critiqued and heavily analysed before it can be delivered to students with confidence and assurance. So many people have taken up distance learning, but we are not yet sure if it is beneficial for students at all, or if it is detrimental to them and their learning. We need to find these things out before we start championing things like distance learning!
