Flattening the curve … but probably not the one you're thinking of.

Were you thinking COVID-19? Well, you’re not entirely off from what this is about. With any new undertaking, whether it’s with technology, business processes, working from home – basically anything new – there’s a curve. A learning curve.

Perhaps the best example of a learning curve these days has been precisely aligned with learning itself: the unprecedented experience that teachers, students and parents are going through to figure out how to provide education and perform schoolwork almost entirely through online means so that our kids can continue to get the education they would have otherwise received mostly in a physical classroom, but now from home instead, just like many of us adults are performing our jobs.

In mid-March, shortly after our Washington state “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” guidelines went into effect and school districts began making the decision to close on their own before our Governor Jay Inslee mandated all K-12 schools statewide to close through April 24th – and then, later, through the end of the school year – I said to a colleague that a relatively small business today was about to explode: Organizations whose business is to enable, host, and sometimes administer effective online learning in a suddenly new era of education that was likely not going to return to the way it was before the pandemic caused such disruption in our lives.

While some families and teachers would likely struggle with the new online curriculum, I also said to him that others would end up embracing it. The reasons for embracing it would vary. Some families would welcome the end of stressful mornings that are pressed for time, almost all the time. Some would be thrilled to not have to deal with carpooling and the seemingly inevitable waiting in traffic because of school buses or just simply the volume of cars lining up for drop-off or pick-up. Parents would love not having to pack lunches or watch the school lunch card balance keep needing to be replenished.

Many students would be thrilled to avoid being bullied at school by other students because of their perceived differences, and having their learning and self-esteem suffer as a result. Plus, they would be able to do their work on their own pace during the day or week, as long as they had clear instruction and expectations from teachers, and this could make learning both more enjoyable and productive.

While recent May 2020 polls from USA Today and Ipsos (see graph) don’t touch on these factors exactly, they do convey that opinions among teachers and parents about the upcoming 2020-2021 school year and beyond are almost certainly leading to significant changes in how learning and teaching will happen in the future. Perhaps most startling is that 1 in 5 teachers say they are unlikely to return to classrooms this coming fall, with nearly two-thirds of them saying that they haven't been able to properly do their jobs in an educational system upended by the coronavirus.

Basically, adapting to an online learning curriculum could mean replacing the normalcy for some families who are trying on an almost daily basis to flatten a curve of challenges and inconveniences that seemed to always be on an uphill trend before that normalcy abruptly ended in March 2020.

My middle schooler and high schooler use Microsoft Teams for most of their online learning needs, because it’s what our school district has chosen as the platform for hosting virtual lectures, distributing and turning in assignments, sharing forms, and most other purposes for the time-being. [UPDATE: As of June 9th, our district has chosen to move to the Canvas Learning Management System] The local elementary schools leverage Seesaw. Middle schoolers and high schoolers in the district nearest to us use Zoom instead of Teams. But there are other platforms – dozens of them – to choose from, as summarized in these recent articles:

·      30+ Virtual Learning Platforms and Tools for Teachers and Kids, April 1,2020, by Nikki Katz

·      20+ eLearning Platforms for COVID-19 Affected School Students, March 15, 2020, by Steve Glaveski

·      Best online learning platforms of 2020: LMS and VLE for education, April 7, 2020, by Will Dalton and Brian Turner

Time will tell on the percentage of families that embrace online learning after flattening their learning curves since mid-March. But certainly some who like it better – and whose family dynamics allow it – will make the change to it on a more long-term basis. When that happens, the organizations that saw the opportunity coming to provide accredited online learning that families prefer over the traditional in-classroom setting may very well see business thrive. It will be a new normal that nobody saw coming before the pandemic changed most of our lives forever.