Online learning: an option for schools in times of crisis
Implementing an online learning system is the best alternative to continue offering services in times of crisis.
E-learning or online learning has gained ground over the past decades. For both institutions and students, it offers undeniable advantages: cost reduction, flexibility in scheduling, and time management, among others.
However, online learning has rarely become as relevant as now. In times of crisis, such as the one we are experiencing, e-learning has become the best, but the only alternative to continuing to offer educational services worldwide.
This represents an enormous challenge, especially for those schools that have not yet implemented this type of teaching.
Thousands of teachers have begun to teach classes remotely with the tools they have: social networks, video conferencing platforms, and email.
Although this is a huge effort, using these methods for virtual teaching has at least two disadvantages:
- On the one hand, teachers have to make use of more than one of these resources, be housed in different places, teach the contents of the class, and communicate with the students. This becomes especially difficult for students of all levels who have more than one teacher and therefore, must use different platforms.
- On the other hand, using resources not designed for online education hinders teachers, and administrators, as long as it is not possible to keep strict control of the activities that are being carried out, as well as compliance with schedules and objectives. This lack of control has negatively impacted parents’ and students’ opinions regarding the educational level they have received during the crisis stage.
Therefore, an excellent option to implement online learning efficiently, quickly, and easily is to have access to a specialized platform ( School Management System ) that allows teaching content, as well as managing and evaluating the teaching process. Learning at both the pedagogical and administrative levels.
The virtual classrooms or platforms designed especially for learning online offer these advantages:
- Firstly, they have content creation tools to design courses taking into account the needs and characteristics of distance education; It is possible to share documents and links to videos or interactive presentations.
- Second, they have multiple interaction tools in the same place, which has a higher number of possibilities to present, communicate, and present the contents. These platforms facilitate the marking of tasks, the real-time evaluation system, and the preparation of personalized monitoring reports.
All these tools allow not only teachers but managers and administrators, to keep constant monitoring of the activities of students and teachers. Through these reports, it is possible to register students or teachers who have remained inactive and the average time they have spent within the platform.
This ensures that the objectives set are met with the highest levels of quality and, above all, efficiently taking advantage of the multiple possibilities offered by ICTs in the educational field.