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December 4, 2021

Why NC State is a leader in online learning :: WRAL.com

By Abbey Slattery, WRAL Digital Solutions

This article was written for our sponsor, NC State Online.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated periods of social distancing and isolation, remote learning went from an exception to a norm. While many schools, universities and colleges were experimenting with online learning for the first time, at North Carolina State University, online learning has been around for decades.

In fact, the university even offered correspondence courses for years before there was an internet, mailing students VHS tapes, then later CDs and DVDs of instructional material. Students would watch or review that content and mail their assignments to their instructors. Today, N.C. State’s online graduate programs and certificates prepare students for in-demand jobs and career advancement.

N.C. State’s DELTA, or Digital Education and Learning Technology Applications, started in the year 2000 and aimed to support teaching and learning with technology both on and off campus. Now, two decades later, DELTA is still going strong — and N.C. State’s online programs are benefiting greatly from the wide variety of available services including course development and faculty support.

Michael Kanters, a professor in the university’s College of Natural Resources, has been a long-time advocate of online programs, and even serves as a coordinator for two fully online graduate programs.

“I’ve been a college professor for 35 years, so I’m always looking for creative ways to keep students and myself engaged, because the two go hand-in-hand. I’ve always been intrigued by the online environment, and I’m constantly looking for ways that technology could be integrated into my teaching, both as an opportunity to capitalize on my own interest, as well as to reach a broader audience for courses,” said Kanters. “There’s no perfect methodology for teaching out there, but I believe that online learning can cater to a wider array of people. It makes the courses more accessible, it accommodates a wider range of learning styles and it allows for flexibility for both the students and myself.”

In order to provide robust and refined online programs, N.C. State faculty members put in the time and effort to become experts in teaching with technology through attending workshops and conferences of all types.

By leveraging available resources and technologies, N.C. State is taking online learning to the next level — which proved to be an asset of distinction.

“We at N.C. State really are leaders in online education in the nation, and I think that’s a testament to the university’s dedication to prioritizing online learning, and pushing the envelope all the time as far as new technologies and techniques,” said Kanters. “The online world is an environment that is always moving and always changing. N.C. State has outstanding professionals that have a passion for not only bringing innovation to online learning and technologies, but also for sustaining the university.”

While Kanters has been accustomed to quality online learning, the shift to emergency remote teaching and learning has meant that every faculty member has been exposed not only to multiple learning technologies, but to new pedagogical approaches and the awareness that online education, when intentionally designed, can help students by supporting a more flexible approach to student learning.

Faculty who may not have thought about online learning before can now see the potential to reach more students by offering online sections of their courses — and N.C. State and DELTA are the model to follow.

“With the experiences we’ve had, not only during the pandemic but because we have a long history of offering outstanding online courses, N.C. State is in an excellent position to consider how we continue to offer a range of course types to students that match their needs, whether that is in-person, online or some blend of the two,” said Donna Petherbridge, interim vice provost for DELTA.

“Moving forward, the key to our success will be to keep the student experience as our front-and-center touchstone, ensuring we are delivering courses via innovative technologies and pedagogical practices, and paying close attention to other support services that students may need to be successful.”

“Having come through the pandemic has really highlighted what people can do and how students can learn online — it’s one of the silver linings of the pandemic, because it’s brought some attention to online learning,” added Kanters. “But there are still people out there who may be afraid of it and students that don’t think that they can learn effectively in this environment.”

“If those courses are structured well, I truly believe there isn’t a course out there that can’t be taught effectively in this medium.”

This article was written for our sponsor, NC State Online.

December 2, 2021

Can Online Education Be a Force for Equity and Institutional Sustainability?

Many reviewers, in my judgment, have misread Robert Ubell’s new book, Staying Online. It’s been largely treated as a compendium of practical advice about how colleges and universities can successfully embrace online learning.

Ubell, a pioneer in online program development at the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University and Stevens Institute of Technology, certainly offers a great many sensible recommendations about:

Formulating and implementing an online strategy, including calculating the right price for an online degree and making solid enrollment and revenue projections.
Designing, developing, delivering and growing online programs and providing online student services.
Integrating active learning into digital instruction.
Mitigating cheating in online courses.
Managing online course ownership.
Using data analytics to improve online instruction.
Deciding whether or not to partner with an online program manager.

But at its core, the book offers a compelling argument that online learning can be a force for equity, despite the widespread claim that low-income and first-generation college students fare relatively poorly in online courses.

Done properly, Ubell contends, online learning can boost outcomes for marginalized students, increase retention rates, improve student learning and stabilize institutional costs.

Staying Online is, in short, a clarion call for institutions to mainstream virtual learning.

In addition, he is convinced that digital instruction can be the savior of many traditional institutions, not just during the pandemic, but beyond, as they seek to sustain and increase enrollment.

Online teaching offers a practical and pragmatic way to address the market forces that are upending institutional finances: the shrinking college-age population, deepening economic inequality, rising numbers of adult learners and stiffening competition among institutions for undergraduates and master’s students.

Were it not for lower-cost online education, he argues persuasively, the national decline in postsecondary enrollment would have been far worse than it has been.

As economic inequality intensifies, Ubell contends, it is more important than ever that colleges and universities take steps to bridge the economic divide. That will require these institutions to deliver an education that is more affordable, flexible and convenient than they have historically offered.

Scaled online education, in his view, must be a big part of the solution.

Myth busting constitutes a big part of Ubell’s book.

Must it cost tens of thousands of dollars to develop effective online courses? Absolutely not, he insists. High-end production values are far less important than effective online pedagogy.
Must a digital education be more expensive than a face-to-face education? Certainly not. It’s undeniable that some institutions do treat online learning as a revenue generator. But any accurate cost accounting shows that online classes can be cheaper to deliver, especially if campuses are willing to embrace alternate staffing models that allow the classes to be scaled.
Must lower-income and other nontraditional students perform less successfully in online classes? Nope. Ubell cites numerous examples of online students outperforming their in-person counterparts.

But if institutions are to succeed online, campus leadership and faculty must recognize that delivery methods aren’t the only difference between face-to-face and virtual instruction. Pedagogy, assessments, curricula and support structures all need to change if online students are to succeed.

In Ubell’s opinion, the keys to effective online learning involve:

Rejecting the notion that effective online instruction should replicate the conventional in-person experience.
Recognizing that online students differ markedly from their on-campus counterparts; they are much more likely to work part- or full-time, to be older, and to have to juggle demanding work and family responsibilities.
Re-engineering courses around a more student-centered approach to engaging, motivating, instructing and assessing students that emphasizes active learning, peer-to-peer interaction, inquiry, digital exercises, virtual labs and guided projects.
Treating student support not as an afterthought but as central to academic success in an online environment.

Among the many important arguments that Staying Online advances are these:

An online education need not be inferior to an in-person experience. Online learning generally allows students to process information in their own time, to take part in online discussions and ask questions without losing face, and to engage more actively with peers and in interactive activities.
A scaled online education can also be a more personalized education. Data analytics can allow instructors to identify students who are disengaged, confused or at risk of failure so they can address these challenges in near real time. Such data can also pinpoint material or skills that are particularly difficult to comprehend or master and prompt instructors to develop tutorials and activities to help students achieve proficiency.
Cheating is more a consequence of misguided approaches to assessment than it is to students who are unethical or unprincipled. Here, Ubell is one of many innovators calling for more frequent low-stakes assessments distributed throughout a course.
Online learning need not be alienating or isolating. The design challenge is to make online courses more participatory, collaborative and interactive than their conventional in-person counterparts.
Institutions without an online strategy will deprive themselves from key sources of future enrollment. One of the greatest benefits of digital education in this century is its capacity to offer greater access to colleges and universities to students who must work while they advance their studies. It allows campuses to serve not only nontraditional students but growing international markets as well.
A successful online strategy at the postbacc level requires institutions to convert individual courses into bundles of steeply discounted, connected classes that carry credit in targeted high-demand fields. He also stresses the importance of branding these programs effectively. Here, he cites the example of Specializations, MicroMasters, Nanodegrees and Professional Certificates.

For many academics, the pandemic has been a wake-up call. It’s among those once-in-a-generation occurrences that forces a reconsideration of many taken-for-granted assumptions.

Many of us now recognize that the kind of education that we offered in the past, for all its virtues, hasn’t served many of our existing students well, while ignoring the needs of the nonstudents who could benefit from a college education. Cost and a rigid academic calendar are part of the problem, but so too is pedagogy and delivery modalities.

If we truly want to address postsecondary equity, online—or hybrid or low-residency—education must be part of the mix. Short-term certificates and certifications and alternate credentials, too, need to be part of the future.

But as Staying Online makes clear, it’s not enough to deliver conventional classes online. We need to radically rethink the academic experience and our pedagogies, curricula and assessment strategies. Ubell’s most important takeaway: input from the learning sciences and instructional designers and educational technologists won’t simply help online students; it will benefit more traditional on-campus students as well.

It’s a lesson we should take to heart.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

December 1, 2021

#FocusDisruption: How Online Education Affected Students and Professors Alike

When students and educators were sent home in March 2020, they quickly had to figure out what to do without being in person. Our ways of teaching and learning were disrupted by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and so we had to make do with what we had: online learning.

Around a year and a half later, online learning has turned the way we think about education on its head. Even today, as we are still slowly making our way out of the pandemic, virtual education is still implemented. Whether it be the virtual days due to inclement weather or the asynchronous classes that students are still taking this year, online learning is the way that we dealt with COVID-19 interrupting our education.

Students at Montclair State University have a lot to say about their experience with learning via Zoom. Although experiences differed in some ways, they left a lasting impression on most. Cam Martin, a junior sports media and journalism major, described how he handled the initial transition to learning online.

“Using Zoom for the first time was definitely unique to me partially because I’d never experienced an online school,” Martin said. “I can sleep in a little bit, but this is still kind of new to me. I’m good with technology, so I could find a way to successfully complete this, but it’s just really a matter of, ‘Can I really do this at the moment?’”

Cam Martin, a junior sports media and journalism major, was one of many students who had to make the transition to online learning. -photo courtesy of Cam Martin

Cam Martin is one of many students who had to make the transition to online learning.
Photo courtesy of Cam Martin

Mari Zuniga, a senior communication and media arts major, had a more difficult transition into what became the new normal for education.

“I find it hard to concentrate on the computer,” Zuniga said. “It’s really difficult for me because I’m looking at this and looking at that. I’m hearing them, but I’m not listening. I’m not paying attention.”

Mari Zuniga, a senior communication and arts student, had her mental health affected by online learning. -photo by Sal DiMaggio

Mari Zuniga had her mental health affected by online learning.
Sal DiMaggio | The Montclarion

Dr. Erik Jacobson, an associate professor in the teaching and learning department, noted how different students reacted in different ways to the initial switch over to virtual learning.

“[For students who prepared for online learning], it might’ve been slightly different than they were expecting, but I think classes still worked for them,” Jacobson said. “I think they got maybe not 100{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} of what they would have gotten normally, but I think they got a good chunk of it. And the students who were not prepared for it, I think really suffered.”

Dr. Erik Jacobson, an associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, had much to say about how online learning impacted our way of education.- Photo by Sal DiMaggio

Dr. Erik Jacobson had much to say about how online learning impacted our way of education.
Sal DiMaggio | The Montclarion

Students weren’t the only ones impacted by the move to Zoom. Professors had to deal with this change as well. Dr. Michael Koch, an adjunct professor for the School of Communication and Media, was one of many.

“[Online teaching is] not my preferable way to teach, but I wasn’t completely against it either,” Koch said. “I wanted to be safe, and I wanted everybody to be safe, too. So it was challenging, but I made the best of it that I could and I tried to be as accommodating as [I] possibly could be.”

Dr. Micheal Koch, an adjunct professor in the School of Communication and Media, said the online learning made it difficult for him to engage properly with his students.- photo by Sal DiMaggio

Dr. Michael Koch says online learning made it difficult for him to engage properly with his students.
Sal DiMaggio | The Montclarion

Mental health was also something that online learning affected. Going to classes has a social aspect to it as well as an educational one, and being forced to learn from home took that away.

In addition to being a professor at Montclair State, Koch is also a therapist, and he saw students struggling with their mental health. But he also noted that sometimes it’s hard to know what students are going through.

“I think that it’s a bit of a cliché to say everybody is struggling, but there is a lot of cumulative impact of this,” Koch said. “Maybe six months ago, some people [would say], ‘Yeah, I’m fine. I’m doing alright.’ But as it drags on and on, it just gets tiring. I think there’s a lot of mental exhaustion. [Even] myself and [other educators] are not immune to that at all.”

Zuniga went on to discuss her struggles with mental health while learning over Zoom.

“Before COVID-19, [my mental health] was already on the rocks,” Zuniga said. “So when online learning happened, it slightly got worse. [I thought] ‘How am I going to get through this? Are we always going to be on Zoom?’”

According to Jacobson, the decline in mental health wasn’t quite invisible to professors, but it was hard for them to tell exactly what was going on.

“I had students who would straight up tell me how they were doing and how they were feeling and others who fell off the radar,” Jacobson said. “So I [would] email them, ‘How are you doing? Is everything okay?’ But then there were students who showed up, did their work, were engaged and their personality wouldn’t lend themselves to saying, ‘Actually I’m struggling right now.’”

Despite this, online learning may have its advantages going forward if used correctly, especially here at Montclair State where traffic and parking seem to always be cause for concern for students, according to Jacobson.

“It certainly provides flexibility, right?” Jacobson said. “In terms of time, schedule and physical location. Montclair State has a lot of students who work outside of school. We have a lot of students who are commuters, [and] we’ve got terrible traffic and parking problems on campus. So certainly Zoom and using online learning platforms may be a way to address some of those things.”

As the future unfolds, the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to shape our education systems. No one can predict the future and tell what it has in store for us, but at the end of the day, one thing is clear: online learning has changed the way we think about education forever.

November 30, 2021

Teen who endured tragedy finds success through online education

Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes

One of the great lessons from the pandemic is that education must include flexibility. While some students struggled during a year of mostly crisis virtual instruction, most flourished with intentional online learning. Utah Online School is leading the way in online education and has been for years.

With more than 15 years of experience in a flexible learning environment and serving more than 10,000 students each year, UOS has time-tested methods for accommodating the needs of students.

UOS emphasizes student success by tailoring learning to student needs with the support of certified teachers, adult mentors, and counselors. Best of all, UOS is an accredited public school, free to Utah students.

How UOS helped one student

At 15, Kelly has experienced a lifetime’s worth of trauma, including multiple moves, her parent’s divorce and eventually the tragic death of her father days before the start of her freshman year in a new school.

A few months later, COVID hit and effectively ended her schooling for many months.

Kelly moved to Utah to live with her grandparents. She was short on some credits needed, so during the summer, she enrolled in and completed two classes through UOS. Best of all, they were courses she couldn’t take at her boundary school because demand exceeded capacity.

“The Utah Online School experience was great,” said her grandfather. “The courses were thorough and the process was smooth. There was no pressure, so Kelly was able to work at her own pace. Anytime there was a question or concern, the teachers and staff at UOS responded the same day.”

Now a junior, Kelly is able to make up some of her missing credits at her boundary school, and she also plans to take additional summer courses at UOS.

Focused on needs and flexibility for students and families

Even with the current school year underway, students have options of taking courses from UOS while still attending their local school. No matter the situation, UOS can support the needs of students through their expansive course offerings and supportive learning environment.

Early high school credit available for 6-8th grade students

Many students are eager and able to get a head start on their high school credits. This allows flexibility in their future high school schedule or early graduation for students interested in this option.

Grade replacement

Utah Online provides students the opportunity to retake a course to replace a grade on their transcript.

Credit recovery

Utah Online helps students recover failed credit needed for graduation. Students may sign up for credit recovery during the school year or summer.

Expansive course offerings

At many schools, popular elective courses are often restricted to seniors or are filled by random selection because demand far exceeds available slots. That’s not a problem at UOS. In fact, UOS offers far more courses than many boundary schools.

In addition to traditional subjects like reading, art, history and math, UOS has courses like computer science, programming, coding, world languages (20-plus), music (guitar, ukulele, music theory and more), wildlife and marine biology, honors courses and ACT prep.

Do you have a student who will be old enough to drive? UOS offers drivers education that includes the curriculum and simulator requirements. Students can also earn physical education credit for participating in any physical activity they are involved in, privately or through club sports. Students receiving private music instruction can earn high school credit through the Independent Studio Study course, which can be taken repeatedly as long as they are in music or voice lessons with an instructor.

You can see the vast list of course offerings at the UOS website and the list of available subjects is constantly growing.

A record of success

Utah Online School serves more than 10,000 students each year with more than 150 teachers, counselors and staff. In 15-plus years, the cumulative total of students served has exceeded 110,000. Those numbers continue to rise as parents seek ways to provide their children with the best available education.

Over that time UOS has achieved a course completion rate exceeding 90{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} and a graduation rate of 99{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf}.

Teachers and staff at Utah Online School are highly qualified, licensed and certified. They are also passionate about helping students. “I am able to customize and individualize content for students’ specific needs in a way that was not possible previously. And as someone who went into education because I truly love teaching high school kids and love this age group in general, this has been a dream job!” says teacher Kellie Richins.

Madison Belnap, another teacher at Utah Online School says, “Teaching for Utah Online High School is a privilege. I love the opportunity to teach students from all over the state, with diverse backgrounds and varying circumstances. Connecting with these different students is so expanding for me as their lives add a level of abundance to my experience as an educator.”

Whether your student is seeking part-time, full-time or concurrent enrollment, Utah Online School has the experience and expertise to help them find educational success.

‘The Exponential Age’ and Online Learning in 2030

The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology Is Transforming Business, Politics, and Society by Azeem Azhar

Published in September of 2021.

Living through in-between pandemic times has made it difficult to think about the future of higher ed. Mostly, we are all trying to make it through our days. Planning for the university of 2030 feels like a luxury that we simply can’t afford at the moment.

Why should we be thinking about the higher ed of the future? One lesson that COVID-19 should teach us is that tomorrow’s institutional resilience is a function of today’s institutional investments.

What should we be doing now to build the anti-fragile university of the future?

One place to start thinking about the future of higher ed is to read (and talk about) books about the future. The Exponential Age is an excellent place to start.

The core argument of The Exponential Age is that 21st-century technologies are changing exponentially, while the institutions that structure our society evolve incrementally.

The difference between the speed at which technology progresses and our ability to change how we think and act leads to what the book’s author, entrepreneur Azeem Azhar, calls an “exponential gap.”

The Exponential Age is full of stories of how this gap plays out in areas of AI and computing, biology, renewable energy, and manufacturing.

Little attention is given to the potential impacts of exponential technological change on higher education. This is not a critique of The Exponential Age, but instead an appreciation that Azhar provides us a framework to think about some possible higher education futures.

What will it mean for higher education that by 2030, computer power will be 100 times as fast?

Today, I would judge online education to be at roughly the same state of development as electric vehicles (EV).

An EV has some areas of superiority to a vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine (ICE) and many other areas of comparative deficiency.

EVs are quieter and require less maintenance than an ICE vehicle, and they can be charged at home.

EVs, however, are today more expensive than comparable ICE vehicles, owing to the high costs of batteries. Electric cars also cannot travel as far on a full charge as a gas-powered car can travel on a full tank of gas. Charging an EV battery takes considerably longer than filling a gas tank. And the number of charging stations nationwide pales compared to the over 65,000 places in the US where you can fill up your gas tank.

Like EVs, online education does have some advantages over face-to-face learning. For adult working professionals, online education’s geographic and temporal flexibility makes this medium of learning and credentialing superior to residential alternatives.

For many learners, however, online education lacks many of the elements that make residential learning so impactful and effective. Online learning can make it challenging to structure one’s time effectively for students who are not well prepared to succeed in college.

The social element of learning, including the connection between educators and students, can be more challenging for some learners to achieve in a fully online environment. And today, creating high-quality immersive learning experiences that emphasize educator/learner relationships and active/experiential learning is not any less expensive for colleges and universities to deliver than comparable residential courses.

By 2030, the advantages that ICE vehicles have over battery-powered vehicles will likely have disappeared. Batteries may not get exponentially cheaper and faster, but they will drop in price and increase in capacity. By 2030, EV batteries will likely be a third as expensive and enable vehicles to travel twice as far between charges as today.

Will these changes mean that electric cars and trucks will replace gas-powered vehicles at a faster rate than we might comprehend today? I’d say that is likely.

How might online learning change by 2030?

One possible future is that advances in AI, coupled with a continued rapid scaling of online platforms, could fundamentally alter the economics of online education.

What happens when the integration of artificial intelligence into scaled online educational platforms enables the learning experience to feel entirely social, interactive, and immersive?

One of the points that Azhar makes is that exponential technologies make it harder to predict the future. We can never fully forecast how rapidly changing technologies, business models, and external events might accelerate changes in areas such as work, consumer behavior, and even politics. We are not good at thinking exponentially.

The point, however, is that we utilize a framework of exponential change to help us decide which areas we should invest in research, development, and experimentation.

Colleges and universities, even those fully dedicated to the delivery of a bundled residential learning experience, should carve out some time and space to invest in experimenting with tomorrow’s teaching and learning modalities.

Scaled online learning may never be as intimate, relational, interactive, and immersive as traditional online courses and programs. But it may get better much faster than we think, allowing the costs for teaching and credentialing to fall rapidly.

Investing in experimenting with new scaled online learning methods may also reveal new ways that residential education might be improved.

Reading and talking about The Exponential Age might be a tool to help us at colleges and universities to think beyond our day-to-day challenges and to imagine what higher education might look like in 2030.

What are you reading?

November 28, 2021

Chaos to Clarity: Teaching Kindergarten Online

Online classes have been painful for every student around the globe, but it has been even more problematic for kindergarteners and, of course, their families and teachers.

A five-year-old sitting in front of her computer screen during class time and crying in frustration has been a daily scenario in most households and children who are enjoying the online classes and also at a loss, since they have very little to no practical knowledge at all.

The most important thing is to know if the children are in clarity or chaos.

Hassle for teachers:

It is definitely not possible for teachers to teach and give 100{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} knowledge during online classes. Conveying a lot of things during online classes is hard and often not possible.

Teachers and their kindergartners can watch teaching videos and discuss, but that needs focus and young students often do not care about focus.

However, kindergarten teachers can help students develop literacy skills as well as things that can only be learned once in a lifetime, such as vocabulary and background knowledge during online classes.

Kindergartners usually need a lot of movement and exploration, and these are the things that you can’t really do remotely, especially having to sit and stare at the screen.

The good thing is, young teachers use various methods to help their younger students get to know each other through distance learning.

This year and in the future when children are unable to attend schools due to the pandemic, it is important for kindergarten teachers to view their students as parents and give them their respective time to understand things.

A kindergarten teacher, Monisha Arora, says, “when such young students are made to study and understand things online, it poses greater difficulty for teachers to make them understand.”

She believes that technical issues can hamper concentration and interest in children. Students need to invest a lot of interest in understanding in online classes. Hence, teachers have to put in extra effort.

Children psychology during online kindergarten classes:

The biggest problem about missing kindergarten in person is the least emotional growth. It is impossible for them to learn to work in a group, make friends or be socially acceptable.

Children’s psychologist, Kiran Yadav says that everyone has been affected by the current pandemic but it is affecting kids even more. They are missing the playful environment which is very important for their growth.

She also believes that staying at home can badly affect their mental and physical growth equally. They become less interactive, lack of concentration, become frustrated, deal with social anxiety, low self-esteem and nervousness.

Approaches that can make online kindergarten teaching better:

But it is said that necessity is truly the mother of invention. Faced with the imperative of teaching kindergartners online, the teachers have learned, adapted, innovated and transformed the e-learning experience for KG students.

The new paradigm has now moved from chaos to clarity through various measures and reforms.

Dhwani Jaipuria, Director, SRJ Edu Services, says that kindergarten education is aimed at initiating life skills in children, such as linguistics, logistics/mathematical, spatial, bodily, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal and naturalists, and teachers, students and parents should do that even during online classes.

She also says that active learning, student engagement, proper comprehension, peer bonding, a good learning environment and making e-learning at home interesting can solve all issues faced by such young students during online classes.

Parent’s take on online kindergarten class:

Having a parent or guardian to assist kindergarten children with online learning makes a big difference.

Children with such support are more likely to do well with remote instruction, while those without it are more likely to struggle.

Visual distance learning is a way to help families teach their children at home. Students learning at home need projects, large displays and a good sound system to record teachers’ voices and peers in the classroom.

Ankita Balkrishna Sharma, who is a mother of a kindergartner, believes it is important to keep the child engaged during the whole session.

She says the teachers help with making classes more interesting for our child and we do not encounter any difficulties when it comes to maintaining focus during classes because we as parents are equally involved and keep a check every now and then.

What schools can offer:

Schools are tasked with figuring out how to maintain a sense of normality for students and teachers are the first line of defence when it comes to implementing it.

The lessons children learn should guide them when it comes to the future of schools and work to ensure that students learn.

Today, preschool teachers have covered a lot of ground in streaming online kindergarten teaching.

The main aim has been to keep the children curious to explore fresh ideas and learn new concepts through oral lessons, activities and role-playing.

A special emphasis is also being laid on their health and physical fitness. Baby yoga sessions and workout workshops are becoming a big hit among the little ones.

Do It Yourself (DIY) online activities nurture life skills in them and help to develop their fine and gross motor skills.

Virtual groups and games have led to the resumption of peer bonding.

It is true that only kindergarten education can never be a substitute for in-person teaching, but it has acquired a lot more finesse and clarity to optimize children’s learning outcomes in today’s exceptional times.

– Vaishnavi Parashar

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