Screen Ed: Pathway to learning or obstruction? |
By Subine Lee
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These days, high school students check their Google Classroom for their assignments, and teachers have a meeting with students online to teach. Since the coronavirus pandemic started, all the classes turned into online courses. Now, high school students are divided into two cohorts and are following the one-week-per-course system used by Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB). A lot of things have been changed. Some people are unsatisfied with this system, and some people prefer online classes.
However, most people don't talk a lot about the problems they are experiencing with online classes. They just accept it, because everyone knows this is the only guaranteed way students and teachers can safely interact during this pandemic. Teachers and students are striving for a better education, however we need to discuss what we feel in our online classes. That will be the starting point for developing the quality of virtual learning. Here, we have some opinions about virtual learning and the one-week-per-course system. The hardest part of the online class is the disturbance of the communication between teacher and students. "In offline courses, I can ask any questions to my teacher and get my answer right away without having to deal with the frustration of waiting for my teacher to respond to an email," said Riley Kim, a grade 10 student who prefers offline classes. Communication is not the only thing that is cut off. Students feel less "learning pleasure" in online learning than they thought from offline classes before the pandemic. Online English class teacher, Yoonhee Kim, said that it is not very easy to be interactive in a virtual learning environment. "Students cannot adopt different social responsibilities in the variety of situations that would happen in the actual school in virtual learning," she said. |
I could also find these types of problems with Joon Bae, a grade 11 student I interviewed. "Making new friends, talking to each other face to face, and learning something REAL. That is the reason why I prefer offline classes," Joon said. These two were the major problems that students from the interview are equally had. But not only these two, but they're also are some other issues teachers and students had about virtual learning. Some teachers struggle to mark students --especially subjects that require group projects. Internet connection problems and volunteer hours are also significant problems. This may read as a series of complaints, but it is also the truth, and we are now going through a hard time. Everyone is working to get back to life before the coronavirus pandemic shut everything down. It is the same for schools, teachers and students. The challenge is to start recognizing problems with online learning and make changes to improve the system, Hopefully one day, students and teachers will turn off the screen and teach without a mask in the classrooms. |