Ontario teachers' unions slam province for considering permanent online learning
beta.ctvnews.ca
beta.ctvnews.ca
It could cost some teacher jobs in time if the best teacher and course becomes standard and broadcast to all.
What we are not talking about is the online model. The one used during covid where the teacher acted like a babysister and made sure she could see all eyes on all cameras for 6 hours a day needs to be examined. The lessons learned for many successful homeschooling families is structure and schedule should be flexible. We tried to import the best 1900 offered on how to structure a classroom to a group of 2100 century kids and wondered why they weren't engaged staring at their teacher through zoom. It is not like we weren't asking why kids are not as engaged in the classroom before covid. We had a huge rise in add.
The answer for many kids is going to be online education with the missing experiencial component where learning involves exploring, knowledge driven education. We need different types of teachers who will challenge students outside of the classroom. We need flexible local groups of students who can socialize and learn and explore together.
One size can't fit all anymore.
I know that I was in a distinct minority, and frankly - while I might have prospered more educationally, I would have left school with many many more rough edges socially.
School is more than just nuts and bolts knowledge, half of it is supposed to be society with training wheels where the normal rules of adulthood don't yet apply, so you can make mistakes without life altering consequences.
That in and of itself is educational for the world students will eventually enter. It creates some level of shared experience and social cohesion and underlying social reality. It's not done very well admittedly with a lot of time wasting and poor education and lowest denominator and propaganda flavor of the decade, but the principal still applies.
The thing I'm afraid of with parent and neighbors doing the socializing exclusively is reality bubbles and a fracturing of shared culture.
As our communities become less diverse, our schools follow. At least in Canada from my experience having lived all over the place. For example, a White suburb leads to white schools, and the house value of the suburb is always roughly the same so the socioeconomic status of the students is pretty close. There’s no bussing kids from different areas around to achieve diversity targets.
Where does teaching come in? The lecture or the help after?
The class was giving feedback to teachers, verbal and non verbal.
Having to slowdown the entire class because you need help helps you but not a percentage of the class. Going quicker for you hurts a different segment.
The answer is personalized education.
better to consider something like Coursera (live teachers, material access is not an issue as everything is delivered in the course) or Khan Academy / Duolingo where there is no teacher but interactive learning modules and immediate quizzing/feedback. Even Masterclass, which at least features engaging performances by the celebrity teacher.
MIT OCW videos are 100x more well made where the professors explain complex topics in a simple way and is pretty enjoyable to follow through.
Coursera on the other hand has courses which are almost always quite poor and basic in quality and mostly tailored to make students “feel” like they learnt something (when mostly they just learnt the basics in a random way) so that they don’t apply for a refund.
MIT doesn’t have any of that And is pretty enjoyable to go through , Maybe the difference is because of the high quality experiences of their professors
But I’d take MIT OCW over Coursera any day.
I think Edx might be a better comparison , they tend to have better quality content than coursera.
It seems obvious for instance that kids having access to better computer and networking as well as their own calm place to study will be able to perform better in remote learning. Not to mention adults who can answer their questions. Schools allows those differences to disappear.
I don't even care about exact practical and psychological reasons for it. I know that I would not picked online school for my kids whenever there is choice.
And beyond the cost on kids, the cost on parents, specifically on mothers who took brunt of it is considerable too. In terms of losing jobs and this pushing whole familly into problems, in terms of exhaustion and isolation too.
Classroom sized video conferences with elementary school kids are a big mess though. A teleconference operator could go a long way.
Having an option to do things online for students where it works better seems good to me.
In some ideal world, students could work on some of their curriculm online where it made sense for them, and other parts offline. Kind of hard to coordinate a classroom that way though.
A lot of exercises and tasks are never done, because it's much easier to pretend that you're studying online than it is in person. It leads to less experience with the exercises. This isn't all that bad in subjects like History or Literature, because if you miss out on ancient Rome then you simply don't know about ancient Rome. However if you miss out on mathematics or chemistry, then it's going to affect you down the line. What you learn a year from now is most likely built upon what you're learning today. It makes learning future topics harder.
Online learning for kids might work, but I think it needs to come with a change of teaching materials. Printed out workbooks and exercises from textbooks written into your notebooks don't work well with online learning. Teachers don't really have a good way of getting kids to consistently do the exercises they need to do. Teachers only have so much time.
I'm not in Canada though. Perhaps the situation is better over there.
I went through the Ontario school system, and I hated it. Unless it has changed drastically, high school seemed particularly ineffective, being both too broad and aimed at post-secondary university-level education. Of note was the lack of education for skilled workers, which, predictably, there's a shortage of now. I went through the 5 year program, which was particularly awful (decades ago they aligned it with (all?) other provinces and made it 4 years).
Personalized education through technology, at least as a supplement to on-site education, is already here. Ensuring that all children have access to it, by making it government funded, seems like an awful thing to be up and arms about.
(1) They do claim that this will be a problem because of the digital divide, but the gap between poor and rich students (putting it simply) is well known, and growing, so how exactly would this make it worse?
The article explains that teachers are primarily unhappy because one of the options would involve moving online education to a for-profit corporation, which would not only ostensibly divert funds from public education, but also operate without the oversight of the pub ed system.
But according to the article, the option is for it to move to TVO/TFO - a crown corporation that answers to the ministry of education and is non-profit.
Whether he's made an honest mistake or is trying to deceive, like I said, he isn't very compelling.