While virtual classrooms have yet to displace brick-and-mortar setups in the education sector, the sudden onset of Covid-19 has initiated a wide-scale rethinking of the industry, with a specifically enormous effect on learning centers and other small and medium-sized education providers. Although virtual classrooms do not have the same personal touch as a face-to-face set up, there are numerous benefits to be derived for both students and teachers.
The first and most obvious benefit is the ability to, in many cases, replay the class. This not only lets students revisit topics that they hadn’t previously understood, but it also gives teachers the ability to scale the delivery of their lessons, ie., record it once and have it seen by an enormous number of students that would otherwise not have had the opportunity to join the lesson. Students can derive many more benefits from the classes, such as having all of the learning material documented from each session. Unlike what the traditional face-to-face model of education offers, students can now skip past parts that they’ve mastered, while spending a disproportionate amount of time on the parts that they haven’t yet become comfortable with. With the teachers’ ability to pay closer attention to each student before and after the session, the teacher can identify new ways of assisting the students individually, as they’ve now got the time to consider their responses rather than having to exclusively ‘think on their feet’ within the fast-paced context of a live class. This is particularly important for teachers of larger groups who may not have had the opportunity to carefully consider and evaluate their delivery of the material, especially in cases that deviated from their original lesson plan. Another significant benefit for teachers that a virtual classroom offers is the opportunity to watch other teachers deliver similar lessons. In a regular teaching environment, teachers would have to sit in on a class in order to observe it, and anyone who’s been in the position of being either the observed or the observer knows that the dynamics change within the class in a way that can otherwise not be controlled for. This feature alone has many benefits. For instance, it offers new professional development opportunities while it reduces the artificiality and performative aspects of the observed lesson. With lessons being more accessible to evaluators and adjudicators, it also holds teachers to a much higher standard than would otherwise be possible. With all of this in mind, hosting classes virtually should give customers – ie, parents and students – much more confidence in their teachers, as they can be assured that the teachers are always performing to the best of their abilities. With the stakes of a parent’s investment in their child’s teacher being extremely high and consequential, having the confidence that there are numerous checks and balances in place in a virtual classroom to ensure the lesson’s quality every single time your child participates in a lesson should be of obvious importance. Conclusion: The virtual classroom model is still in its infancy. The general public has not yet grown fully comfortable with the concept. Globally, the education sector almost everywhere has not yet been structured to use it smoothly and avoiding pitfalls. EngagePlus is at the leading edge of this rapidly-developing segment of the market and intends to keep driving the concept forward. Our learning management system was designed to react quickly and seamlessly to any new education environment, which perfectly fits into the rapid shift to virtual classrooms in this pandemic period. In short, EngagePlus is the best education management system both offline and online. Everyone who is involved with this new digital movement of adopting virtual classrooms is, without any doubt, at the leading edge of the next tectonic shift in education.
Find out more at www.engageplus.io or info@engageplus.io.