Virtual online instruction
The global education that developed the flow and exchange of educational resources in human studies, sciences, and technology, was growing slowly and spreading firmly all over the past twenty-five centuries. Recently, with the huge boom in telecommunications, the internet became an important incubator of a tremendous amount of teaching materials and resources. Social media created an easy and effective tool to present the instruction process in what became known as online instruction.
The online teaching/learning process is not a new invention, nor that we discovered it recently. However, this pandemic mandated all education systems in the world to go virtual in no time. This shift was almost the only way to rescue the scholastic and academic year that was a few months from the end of the term.
That unplanned shift revealed many heterogeneous responses from students, faculty, schools, and families. But the most important outcome was the elimination of political/natural borders. Millions of students in various countries navigated the virtual contents of the internet, studying, and interacting, regardless of the location or the nationality of the instructors, teachers, or professors, and this time it was on a large scale.
As students could reach any teaching resource, whether official institution or individual teacher on youtube, that started to raise a big question mark about the feasibility of travelling, living and studying in a specific college in one part of the world, meanwhile, all the world educational institutions are opened online.
Nevertheless, online teaching may be considered an infant that needs to grow to reach a maturity level in the few years to come, up to maybe a couple of decades. As observed in this last shift to online studying, the motivation of the students severely declined. That could be attributed to several major factors. One is the lack of self-discipline, where for many students, it doesn’t look like a good idea to sit in front of the screen for several hours a day, in his or her bedroom, where they used to feel like sleeping or taking rest at the end of the school day. The psychological intimation of the place and the environment is not an assisting factor.
A second factor is the lack of time management skills, where the tasks in one of the subjects may consume the time of many other subjects, assignments, or even tests. A third factor is the diversity of the procedures, plans, or techniques that various instructors use to present their courses. This could distract some of the students and reduce their motivation, and consequently the time commitment towards the obligations of this or that course.
Many other factors could be added including the psychological status of the students and their families due to various conditions amid the evolution of the pandemic consequences. Therefore, academic and psychological counseling both for the students and teachers, in addition to further guidance for the family, all become an urgent factor.
In a different theme, the practical (laboratory) part of the virtual instruction is still a big challenge both for the teacher and the students. Using simulated and interactive software and applications may work on the simple scale, for some of the introductory level courses. However, more advanced and deeper practical involvement needs another, higher level of interactive engagement.
Under the recently evolving conditions, online instruction is growing to become equivalent to the classical (in class) instruction. The hybrid courses are now posted to form an intermediate point between the two instruction methods. I believe it will be a matter of time to see changes in the schooling systems to pursue making the two faces of teaching methods (in-class and online), available, simultaneously and at equivalent levels of quality and effectiveness.