Essay on Adapting to Online Learning: The Challenge of the Quarantine

Today the world is facing a global challenge that has affected all spheres of human activity including education. Under the conditions of the quarantine and social distancing classic forms of face-to-face teaching are no longer an option. The switch to online education has been stressful and overwhelming for many students and teachers. Though elements of distance learning have already been in place for a long time, they performed a supportive role aiding the face-to-face teacher-student interaction. When learning from home has become the sole solution, it is high time both the educators and the learners reviewed the potential advantages of the virtual classroom. "At the highest level, a shift in mindset would be required," writes Stephen Merrill in his article "Teaching Through a Pandemic: A Mindset for This Moment" (Merrill). Probably, the most important step in this process would be to reconsider the general attitude to online learning in a more positive light. In this essay, I will argue that for the XXI century students online learning is better than the traditional forms of education.

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The first important aspect to consider is accessibility. Digital materials provided within the framework of online education can be used by any number of students for an unlimited period of time. Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, a joint online education project of MIT and Harvard, in his inspiring TED-talk "Why massive open online courses (still) matter" (2013) highlights self-pacing as a key feature of MOOCs defining it as an essential prerequisite of the accessibility and flexibility of online learning. Online lectures can be watched at any convenient time, paused, rewound, and replayed as many times as needed. Students get an opportunity to virtually attend lectures of the leading experts in the filed without having to break their daily routine. Course participants can download all the necessary materials and read them from the screen of any of their devices or print them out. What is more, they can take tests when they feel comfortable with the material and are at their productive best. These features make high-quality education more accessible. Online learning is an ideal study format for those who work, have special health conditions, take care of small children or the elderly, struggle with the material, are non-native English speakers, and, in the first place, are quarantined at home because of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Another significant aspect to be considered is the cost-effectiveness of online education. Learning from home allows students to reduce their expenses by sparing the money they would have to spend on campus premises to pay for the accommodation, travel, food, nightlife, etc. Students who live at home are also able to find day-to-day jobs. Apart from that, they do not have to buy paper textbooks as materials are usually provided in the digital format. Shai Reshef, founder of the online University of the People, in his inspiring speech "An Ultra-Low-Cost College Degree", offers three examples of students who seized an opportunity to receive higher education online and succeeded. Patrick, born in Liberia to a family of 20 children, had to flee from the country during the Civil War. Currently, he is working hard to be able to send money to his family. Debbie from Florida has worked her whole life, but still, her savings are not enough to pay the tuition. Wael from Syria, a country going through awful disaster and misery, believes in a better future with a college degree (Reshef). These amazingly brave and hard-working students would never have been able to graduate but for the online education which has offered them access to high-quality resources on a reasonable budget. Online education gives students coming from all social backgrounds a precious gift of choice. In times like this, when struggling with the pandemic has weakened even the strongest world economies, cost-effectiveness seems to be one of the benefits of online education that cannot be ignored.

No doubt, online education is not perfect. Its opponents will argue that high-quality video and audio materials cannot replace the unique atmosphere of the real classroom and will not provide the equivalent level of knowledge and skills acquisition. This argument would be difficult to rebut if it needed being rebutted. But the leading experts in the field of online education completely agree with it which has inspired them to work hard on improving the digital learning environment and developing effective strategies for teaching and learning online Anant Agarwal summarized the main ideas that allow online education to function effectively. The first principle is active learning through "the ultimate Socratization of education", i.e. learning through questions (Agarwal). Students are actively engaged in the discussion of the material with the help of interactive exercises so that they do not doze off over monotonous online lectures. The second principle is self-pacing which is enabled through a range of recorded lectures and downloadable materials. Studenst can return to the most informative or challenging fragments and work on them at a time convenient for them. The next principle is receiving instant feedback. Many tests and exercises are checked automatically which allows students to control their progress more effectively and choose either to revise or to proceed to the new material. The fourth principle is the peer learning. Students are supported by a large community of their peers who can answer questions and provide help without resorting to teacher's help. This approach teaches students to work as a team and hones their critical thinking skills. Finally, the fifth principle is gamification which focuses on making the process of study more effective through interactivity. "You know, they would sit down and shoot alien spaceships all day long until they get it. So we applied these gamification techniques to learning," says Anant Agarwal, explaining the motivation behind this principle (Agarwal). So, of course, online education still has its weak spots, but it is evolving, making natural human curiosity, playfulness, sociability, and spirit of competition its allies.

Another important concern to be addressed is the completion rate. On average, for online courses, it constitutes around 10% of the students enrolled (Lewin). For example, when Duke University published data about its first MOOC "Bioelectricity" in 2013, it turned out that out of 12,725 students only 313 earned a certificate (Catropa). These figures are shocking, of course, but they can be approached from a different perspective: 313 people succeeded in completing a course that was offered in a new and unfamiliar format. Today online education has evolved and learned from its mistakes. More and more students are choosing it as an additional or alternative option. The data provided by the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics shows that before the pandemic broke out a third of all students took at least one online course (qtd. in Lederman). Thus, it seems, digital education is ready to become an answer to the dilemma that the Coronavirus pandemic is posing before humanity.

Hopefully, the civilization will be able to defeat the virus and recover from the consequences, but, unfortunately, this pandemic is only one link in the chain of potential global threats. The system of education has to be ready for the upcoming challenges. Online education is a game-changing strategy that will help question the fossilized stereotypes, put different educational paradigms in dialogue with each other and also make students a part of the bigger dialogue by empowering them and allowing them to take ownership of their own progress.

Works Cited

Agarwal, Anant. "Why massive open online courses (still) matter." TED, TED, Jun. 2013, www.ted.com/talks/anant_agarwal_why_massively_open_online_courses _still_matter/transcript?language=en#t-527882.

Catropa, Dayna. "Big (MOOC) Data." Inside Higher Ed, 24 Feb. 2013, www.insidehighered.com/blogs/stratedgy/big-mooc-data.

Lederman, Doug. "Inside Higher Ed." Inside Higher Ed, Inside Higher Ed, 7 Nov. 2018, www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/article/2018/11/07/new-data-online-enrollments-grow-and-share-overall-enrollment.

Lewin, Tamar. "Universities Abroad Join Partnerships on the Web." The New York Times, 20 Feb. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/education/universities-abroad-join-mooc-course-projects.html.

Merrill, Stephen. "Teaching Through a Pandemic: A Mindset for This Moment." Edutopia, George Lucas Educational Foundation, 19 Mar. 2020, www.edutopia.org/article/teaching-through-pandemic-mindset-moment.

Reshef, Shai. "An Ultra-Low-Cost College Degree." TED, TED, Mar. 2014, www.ted.com/talks/shai_reshef_an_ultra_low_cost_college_degree.