Face to Face Learning v Online Learning
We are going to discuss Face to Face Learning v Online Learning in this article. Why? Well since March 2020 the education world has been scrambling to get their education online. They have been using different tools and systems to bolt something together. However has anyone discussed Face to Face Learning v Online Learning, how they differ and more importantly, how they should work together?
Face to Face learning v Online Learning – During shut down
It is a no brainer that during a COVID-19 shut down (local/isolated infection or gov enforced) the education facility needs to revert to some sort of Online education/platform. To date many of the educators being forced to shut down are “bolting together” temporary solutions. They start running lessons via Zoom or Skype and hope that the content is being delivered or more importantly, recieved correctly.
Face to Face learning v Online Learning – Ongoing COVID Environment
One of our sister companies is Recruitment School. They specialise in providing Recruitment Training to Recruitment Agencies as well as Small to Medium Businesses. They spend a lot of time assessing the market too provide their clients information on what they are seeing or not seeing. They provided their clients with a COVID-19 Recruiter Toolkit. In the toolkit, they have tried to identify what is going to happen as a result of COVID-19. The following graph shows what they think is going on. The roller coast recovery is the one that they and many others are suggesting is going to happen – and we can see that taking place today with the stop start feeling we are all experiencing.
So if this “stop start” recovery is what we are going to experience – in every country, then we need to be thinking how can we come up with a way to not solve the problem, but work around the problem when it arises – and it will, not once or twice, but many times.
Face to Face learning v Online Learning – How should they work together
Communication tools like Zoom and Skype are not online learning, they are simply communication tools. Yes they are important but they are not online learning. As discussed in our last article “Online Learning Solutions”, an Online Learning Solution needs to contain a lot more than just a communication tool.
Educators need to think this through. An online learning platform should work in conjunction with traditional face to face lessons. In times like these, there is no reason why a student shouldn’t be able to participate in face to face learning and should they be forced into quarantine due to interaction with a COVID-19 positive person, continue their schooling/education online AND not miss anything. To achieve this you need a little more than Skype or Zoom, you need to be able to “live stream” lessons and provide the same quizzes and documents to those learning remotely.
Imagine that a High School in a suburb of any country, implements live-streaming for all of their classes. The streams are found in a secure LMS that allows students who are in quarantine (or off school for any other reason) continue their schooling and not miss a moment. The same applies for Universities, Technical Colleagues, Specialist Educators. Now lets take that a step further. You are a parent looking to enrol your children into a school. You find ABC High School that has this innovative system where if education is interrupted for what ever reason, your Childs schooling is not. WOW, now that is pretty convincing.
Face to Face learning v Online Learning – The future
So, how do we do this? Well the first thing we need to do is get an Online Training Platform created for you. The system you create needs to be able to deliver static and live content. The system needs to be secure so that other people are unable to access records or content. Once you have your Online Training Platform we need to think about the technology you are going to use for communication. There are plenty of options around with the most popular being Zoom, Skype, Vimeo and YouTube. These all have a pro level which means you can blck the content from being downloaded.
The one we suggest is Zoom for these reasons.
- It is fairly cheap
- it can be embedded into a LMS and therefore used a live-streaming
- It can record and that recording can be made available to other people later.
I know there are plenty more but having played in this space for the last six years, Zoom is my choice.
Once you have all this tech set up (don’t worry, it sounds a lot harder than what it is), we need to figure out how you are going to live stream your classes. This is easily solved with a cheap laptop, an external monitor, a camera, external speakers and a microphone.
Once set up, all Ms Brown has to do in Year 7 History, is push the start button at the beginning of the lesson. When that happens, Mary, Alison and Michael, who are all at home in quarantine can follow along and, even ask questions of Ms Brown
See, all it takes is a little bit of thinking – oh and years of knowledge in this space 😉
So there are plenty of options for you. If you want to know more then by all means contact us using the following form we would be more than happy to help you through this process – and YES a conversation is free, after all, we are all in this thing together