Distance learning – what next?

What aspects of distant learning will stay with us in classroom instruction.

Lilianna Gołaszewska

Undoubtedly recent distant learning experience have shown weaknesses of the education system, not only in Poland but also around the world. Innovation in educational tools has been widely and loudly discussed during national and international conferences, but only a few schools have used it fully. Using applications during class, creating educational tours as an alternative to testing students knowledge, or creating a scientific escape room, up until recent times of distant learning were treated as additional, unfortunately extracurricular, activities for a class. The vision of implementing these methods with a student was becoming more common but it was always put on a shelf named „for the next school year”. In this matter it was the pandemics that made the decision for us, speeding up the process, shaping the pace and the direction of the education system development. Teachers were put in a position where distant, online learning became a necessity. Students, after the first wave of euphoria caused by the unlimited access to their computers, became strongly influenced by the lack of peers interaction. Parents tried to set boundaries between school, work and home at the moment where all three areas were taking place in one space.
How did we get out of it? Quite quickly we noticed an appearance of bottom-up teacher initiatives. The goal was to create a platform to exchange experiences, to learn from each other all the technical aspects of using new educational tools, but also to serve as a place of inspiration to create classes that are not only of factual value but also attractive for already overstimulated students.
Then the following appeared : webinars for teachers, students and parents, online conferences, night events for teachers, teacher rooms online, directors’ on duty online. Schools began to appoint distant learning coordinators, who supported teachers and shared their knowledge about online meeting platforms, how to control their time spent on working from home, digital cleanliness of students. Teachers who were brave looked for answers at the source, asking for help the most technologically advanced individuals, their students.
Teachers started to use new educational methods in their work with students, which required more of their involvement in the education process. How? By activating students to gain knowledge independently or by teaching them project based work. Mobile apps were created, which at this point can be used practically in all subjects to interactively teach pupils, for example how to recognize types of trees, learn the skeletal system of a human or count the area of a spatial figure. We have access to a large library of short educational videos in accordance with the core curriculum which can be used as an introduction to a lesson or complementing knowledge. A large amount of institutions introduced online classes to the market. They connect remotely with a class and conduct a lesson with an interactive involvement of the participants, through experiencing or discussing subjects known by students from school textbooks.
The question arises, now after implementing the innovative education program and adapting new forms of cooperation, will it be easy to give it all up? Not really, as it would be a step back which no-one wishes to take.