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| Distance Learning Has Been Around for 100 Years. Why Can’t We Get It Right? Photo: Qu Tianran |
When
authorities issued stay-at-home orders at the onset of the Covid-19
pandemic, schoolchildren worldwide entered what has to be the largest —
and probably least welcome — distance-learning experiment in the history
of education.
Across the United States, parents and kids were struggling, teachers were losing their minds, and political leaders were asking, “Why weren’t we ready?” But in a few obscure corners of the K-12 education world, some schools were ready,
and they’ll tell you they’ve handled the crisis just fine, thanks. It
turns out teaching K-12 kids at a distance isn’t something that arose in
the United States with Covid-19, or even with the advent of the
internet — it dates back almost 100 years...
This
need for individualized attention is why several veteran distance
instructors I spoke with also emphasized the need to build distance
courses from the ground up. Just pointing a webcam at a teacher’s
regular class, in most cases, isn’t going to work.
“Don’t
go in at the beginning and just talk to your student and think that the
student is going to be able to get it,” said Michael Moore, a professor
of education at Penn State who founded the American Journal of Distance
Education in 1987...
The Covid-19
pandemic isn’t the first time large groups of students have turned to
distance learning in a crisis. During the flu pandemic of 1918, some
school districts in Los Angeles offered mail-in courses
for homebound high school students. During World War II, many thousands
of young men fresh off baseball fields and farm pastures had to be
taught to operate radios and bomb sights and battleship guns quickly and
with great stakes.
Source: Medium
