Recent events have forced children to spend more time in front of a screen and the first results or studies should be coming out soon. I have a suspicion as to one of the things we will learn.
I wrote a few years ago about a correlation between extra screentime and poorer grades, and of the possibilities such as flipped teaching and learning that technology allows. Today, I am curious as to what we will find now. We have repeatedly been told that the future of education is to be all virtual and that the age of individualised teaching and learning via online platforms is nigh. Well, we now have a semester's experience so what do we know?
I have read that initial studies are showing private school students have a much better experience and/or are more likely to receive online services, while poorer students may not have internet or a computer or may have to share a device with siblings and even with parents. Poorer sudents may have internet access through a phone data plan only which is expensive and imposes speed or bandwidth limits, and I can only imagine the challenges of writing an essay or a science report.
Apparently one group of students combined to downvote an app so it was removed from an app store. Others have recorded videos which play so the online teacher thinks they are present in a virtual class when they are not, and of course stories of students paying someone else to take a test abound.
These reports are emerging or anecdotal and I am sure that in time, we will know much more and can plan and adapt.
What interests me and what I have not seen studied is the effect on empathy, and on a student's creativity which will ultimately affect their risk-taking and entrepreneurialism.
When a student hears or reads something, s/he is forced to fill in the gaps, s/he pictures what is going on, and s/he puts him/herself into that situation or into that character's shoes. But when things are online, that work has been done by someone else and the student watches what that other entity has thought or decided or interpreted and shaped. This of course has significant implications in a time of "fake news" and one-sided presentations.
I suspect that we will find that our students have changed from being creators to consumers, and this is something we need to know more about. Is it happening, what is this change, what does it mean and is it something we want?
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Reports and other Perspectives
https://inews.co.uk/news/coronavirus-private-school-twice-as-likely-to-receive-online-lessons-state-schools-420007
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/mar/27/school-closures-prompt-boom-in-private-tuition-online-isolation
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