Learning without school?

How could our children learn if the schools remain closed after Easter?

If you listen closely to the leading virologists in Germany, such as Prof. Christian Drosten from the Berlin Charité or Prof. Lothar Wieler, head of the Robert Koch Institute, it quickly becomes clear that the coronavirus is not a matter of four weeks. By the time a vaccination is available at the beginning or middle of next year, one-third of the German population will be infected. Anyone who has children knows that schools and daycare centres are one of the biggest virus hubs in our society. No matter how well teachers and childcare professionals look after them, the smallest in society simply cannot realistically implement “social distancing”. Also, it is not very conceivable in our culture at the moment that all children and teachers will be wearing mouth guards for a whole school day in three weeks after the Easter holidays. So what to do if the schools do not open again or if many parents do not want to send their children to school because of their fear? In addition, thousands of school children in Germany will fall ill in the next 6 months. Most of them will survive the infection well but still will not be able to attend school for several weeks. If siblings or parents fall ill at a later stage, many children may not be able to attend school for several months, even though the schools may officially reopen. 

In the business environment of modern information workers, the remote work alternative has become reality from one day to the other. “We” are used to jumping from one video session to another and can be productive for weeks with minimal physical contact. For schools in Germany and Austria, however, all this is a new territory! Of course, millions for digitalization have been dumped into schools. That money, however, has gone into immobile smart boards or IT workstations with fixed desktops. Often, there are hardly any teachers at all who can make sensible decisions about investments or who can handle digital concepts with confidence. No public school known at present has even begun to think about including sick children with online lessons or even started to work out a digital emergency plan for long-term school closure. Technically speaking, you do not need too much and, thanks to the wide range of offers from the major technology providers, it is often for little money or free of charge at all. Therefore, with this article, we try to help at least a little bit to support digital literacy in schools and to give decision guidance.

So what do you really need to implement a digital classroom?

• Video conferencing and recording. What we mean with this is an easy-to-use video conference solution that works on any standard end device (browser, PC, Mac, Android or iOS tablets and smartphones). It is important to be able to conduct a real-time video conference with minimal effort on the part of the teacher, in which virtually “present” students can be called and ask questions. In addition, the digital lessons must be able to be recorded directly, so that absent students can watch them later to catch up on missed lessons. Some of the commercial systems are too complicated for a school child. But once you see how confident a third grader is in using video games or video apps like TikTok, it is realistic to expect them to participate in a video class on their own. The tools just have to be intuitive to use.
• Persistent & structured chat. Many parents now know the class-parents chat channels that are currently being used intensely. Everything, official and unofficial information, worksheets and sometimes meaningless comments of some parents enriched with discussions about leisure activities that have nothing to do with school, appear in one stream. What a mess! No wonder that many teachers deliberately avoid this channel. And yet we are not even talking about the Facebook group’s spying in the WhatsApp connection data. Nevertheless, classic e-mail is completely unsuitable as a medium for an online class. Schools need a structured and easy-to-understand chat platform for lessons with the children and a second channel to communicate with parents. The chat with the kids is supposed to be based on the lessons. In other words, everything that belongs to a subject should appear in a dedicated stream; whether it is the announcement of a lesson, the live video lesson, the homework done there, the questions the school kids ask about it or, finally, the recording of the video lesson if you missed it live. Only then can a platform be used to help both, the virtually present children and the kids learning in a time-delayed manner without additional administrative effort and involve the parents in a meaningful way.
• Document’s platform. Even today, schools still print and copy heaps of paper. Classroom teaching in primary school and in the first classes of secondary schools works with textbooks and worksheets. Most households also have a printer at some Internet terminal to provide children in quarantine with worksheets. Today a teacher does not even have the email addresses of all parents. Many parents with several children would also not be able to print out the current worksheets of an online school day for all their children. A virtual classroom must therefore be connected to a cloud drive from which the children themselves can print out their worksheets with a simple smartphone or tablet. 
• Course management. Course management is known from commercial e-learning systems in adult education. There, for example, the submission of work tasks by the students is controlled or even grades are given. Much of this is not needed in a public school. Nevertheless, learning control is a great challenge for every teacher who only sees his students via video. Simple tools that at least document participation in live video lessons or watching a recording are an indispensable means of ensuring learning success.

Pros and cons of different platforms

See a quick market screening and recommendations for software or cloud services at the full article in Cloudflight.io

Take care and stay healthy.

Stefan