Education: on the line

Rethinking virtual classrooms

Have you ever read a novel on your laptop or desktop screen?

Have you ever watched a feature-length movie where one person talked the whole time? 

Have you ever wanted a Zoom call to last twice as long?

Me neither.

Yet in 2020, education providers made students read thousands of words within PDFs and e-textbooks, watch hours of talking head videos, and worst of all—attend long PowerPoint lectures on Zoom every day.

Why? Because they had no time and no choice. COVID forced universities, schools, and private training providers to upload their physical classroom materials to the first cloud in sight. Unthreaded chat windows and glitchy forums replaced focus group discussions. Slide decks from teacher presentations became standalone learning content. Using common digital tools, educators created “emergency virtual classrooms”. 

And it worked… for a while. But like reading a book on a laptop, students and instructors became fatigued and frustrated with the new format. Zoom overwhelm was real. So the question arises: are these emergency tactics going to become the new normal? Hopefully not. Because there are better ways to learn online, and failing to embrace them would be unfair to future students like you.

Social media and social learning

Bringing human interaction and experience into the digital space is the key to successful online learning. But it isn’t simply a matter of moving real-life inside a device or screen. Just as you don’t need a salesperson to greet you at an online checkout, you don’t need online learning to mimic a classroom. There is no requirement for consistency with the real world. 

In other words, just because you can learn in a Zoom lecture, doesn’t mean you have to.

Instead of a poor copy of a lecture hall, why can’t online learning be something else entirely? Something that harnesses the best aspects of our most used technologies? Social media apps are the world’s most widely adopted tech platforms. And they have reimagined the social and behavioral aspects of the real world to create a new online existence. A nod is replaced with a ‘like’, group excitement morphs into sharing, and walking into a room becomes ‘join group’ or ‘follow’. Content becomes the teacher and the topic. But despite these adaptations, social media shows us that we still have the same strong desire to connect with other people. Online educators should not ignore this.