With mounting financial pressures of unpaid fees and continuing costs most schools have jumped onto the bandwagon of providing online education. Whether real learning is happening is a moot point.

School principals and academic coordinators are pushing their teachers to “keep the students occupied” so that at least one part of the problem appears to be solved. And in these pressured times, the most that is happening is that teachers are trying to replicate what they know best, traditional lecturing sessions- and are using the same lesson plans in the online sessions.

During this sudden transition, the school leaders have had little time to integrate the Institution’s own core values for which their institutions stand for. The transition has led to the creation of yet another online enabled school.

What about parents? What do they feel about all that is happening with their child’s education? They see that their children are not paying attention, are distracted and on their own, even if present in an online session. They are unsure of what the child had learnt at the end of a session. The kids are just a few feet away you see, not tucked away in a classroom far away! And they don’t like what they see! They see teachers unable to control the children, total lack of discipline, children coming in and dropping out of the sessions randomly, lot of background distractions; in short a chaotic online class.

Why are we telling you all this? We’d like to share a list of 10 critical and decisive insights from our own experiences to make these sessions better & more effective:

1. An Online Live session should be for 25 minutes ideally (at max of 40 minutes)
2. Teacher should focus on clarifying about the difficult / complex areas not understood well by students and should limit the instruction time to 10 minutes. This part of the Live Sessions should be recorded (especially the 10 mins of teacher’s part) & made available for reference to students, post live class.
3. Research shows that children (especially upto ages of 12) are better engaged with familiar faces and voices. They are distracted with “indifferent content “ (some non-curated arbitrary content being displayed from Internet by unfamiliar people”)
4. Form smaller Groups for live session (of 8-12 nos. of Students), to ensure better engagement and personalization.
5. Create opportunities for student engagement time – Each student should be able to get to talk /present / demo about their work, at least for 1-2 minutes in each session, This helps students to also feel connected with the rest in the group
6. Create engaging Micro-modules* each one of 8-12 minutes which can be completed by students on their own, at their convenience post the live class.
7. )Teacher to Communicate the deadlines and expectations after each live session.
8. Schools management can the provide the critical support for content curation and creation – either via partners or via online freelancers to develop content (production of videos, audio recording, editing, animation as required).
9. Focus should be on long term, which requires investing In partnerships to Curate and personalize content which would be useful post Covid as well.
10. Another area to invest on for the School managements is in having on single INTEGRATED PLATFORM (so that attendance tracking to, LMS, Video Conferencing, Fee collection modules, etc ) is at one place & not an additional burden for teachers.

From a child’s perspective, these suggestions would take us a step further to limit the total Screen time to 3 hours per day (including live sessions and assignments) and give much needed time to them to explore and learn from more engaging and sensorial hands-on activities using easily available stuff at home or in some specific cases, using some of the DIY projects delivered via online media.

To further share your specific requirements feel free to write to us at connect@butterflyedufields.in or whatsapp us at +91 94902 17677.