Some Ideas for Helping Parents and Teachers Make the Best Use of e-Learning Resources: This Fall and Beyond
Since lockdown will likely remain in place for most of the country for the near future, and most schools will conduct classes virtually, “home learning” has become the norm. This means that many learners will be accessing e-learning websites on a regular basis, either from their schools (or libraries) remotely or on their own. Parents who normally home-school their children are generally better prepared than parents who have always depended on classroom teaching for their children’s success. But both cohorts of parents need to rely on digital products for at least a portion of the learning process. And this dependency has dramatically increased since the onset of the global pandemic.
There are many excellent educational websites available, covering all subjects at all levels. Public libraries in most cities and suburbs subscribe to many of them, which can be accessed free with a library card. Schools also subscribe to relevant e-learning sites that offer e-books, supplementary research resources, test preparation, and digital curricula.
However, not all educational online resources are created equal. Some are better for self-study than others. Some are specifically designed to be used with a content specialist or experienced facilitator and encourage collaboration with other learners.
Here are a few general guidelines that may be helpful when choosing online resources to use for at-home learners.
- Age-Appropriate User Interface (UI)
Look for an age-appropriate interface or on-ramp. The UI (user interface) should make it clear immediately whom the site is designed for—whether it’s most appropriate for elementary, middle-school, or high-school students. If the site is designed for multiple age groups, it should have a different UI for each one, and it should be easy to travel from one UI to another, which is best done with the use of a toggle or tabs at the top of the screen.
- Saving Work
The best sites for learning are interactive sites that allow learners to save their work. This will enable learners to come back to the site and pick up where they left off. The best sites will automatically save a user’s work in a personal folder. This feature will require a user to log in to the site with a unique password. This will be true whether the site is free or not. This feature will avoid a lot of student frustration and make it easy for the student to pick up where she or he has left off.
- No Additional Downloads
Avoid sites that require plug-ins, such as Flash, which is no longer supported. Some downloads may introduce viruses or malware, which is worse than the lack of support.
- Appropriate Artificial Intelligence (AI)
AI is not a mandatory feature. When done well, it can help learners build their skill levels. But it’s not always perfect and may be too restrictive for some learners. In addition, when AI is not used correctly, or used to solve a problem that it wasn’t designed for, the consequences can be dire. For example, in the UK just this month, AI was used to assign students grades on their “A” Levels, which is roughly the equivalent of our SAT or ACT college entrance exams. Because of the lockdown, they did not have the resources or time to manually evaluate student achievement as they normally would and instead used a combination of a student’s historical achievement and AI. This resulted in thousands of students getting lower grades than they deserved, which led to social uproar and mass hysteria, as many students were denied entry to universities that they had planned on attending.
- Reading Level and Other Standards
Like AI, some learners like knowing how they match up against state and national standards or tiered reading levels. But others may like to move up or down levels at their own pace and prefer to work outside the boundaries established by standards. In short, standards can be useful in establishing curriculum guideposts and general benchmarks. But they may not always be relevant for a student’s personal learning objectives.
- Up to date
This is critical. Make sure that the sites you are using are continually being updated. Some sites have sections labeled “What’s New” or “Today’s Topics” that signal their currency. Check the copyright notice at the bottom of the home page and make sure it’s up to date.
- Web Links
Try to shy away from sites that have too many links to external sites. Not all Web sites are curated, and some can be either out of date, inappropriate, or flawed in some way. Some may be taken down and return error messages.
8. Feedback
Finally, there is the issue of feedback. In some cases teachers may conduct online classes ”synchronously,” meaning they appear “live” on the site simultaneously with their classes. But more often, online teaching is done “asynchronously,” where students access the material whenever they want. Sometimes there is a “discussion” area on these sites, where the student can pose questions to the teacher or classmates and get feedback some time later, usually within 24 hours. Although this is useful, and certainly much better than not having it, try to find sites where the teacher or facilitator has online “office hours,” where the students can interact live with the teacher, ask questions, get additional help and immediate feedback without having to wait a day or so.
