Due to the pandemic situation, we see that students have to face significant issues regarding the teaching methodology and its effectiveness. Most teachers had never even experienced giving lectures online, and then to suddenly shift the entire education system online had resulted in extreme negligence by the teachers. Teachers cannot connect with their students as they would like to due to the apparent distance within the teacher-student relation. Hence students are finding it hard to deliver on the required goals and are failing to meet the objective. Kids are even failing to memorize and understand simple 9th grade vocabulary words due to inexperienced teachers. The other school of thought believes that online methods not only bring protection in terms of the pandemic state but also is a much more convenient method to teach students since students anywhere in the world and at any moment of time can easily log onto their portal and can get themselves educated.
The Advantages of online teaching include convenience and flexibility for both the teacher as well as for the student. Having no restriction in terms of time and place reduces the burden from both sides and helps them center their focus to work at hand. This would ultimately lead to better productivity. This process would cascade into a snowball effect, which would render better and efficient results.
The second advantage of online teaching is due to the fact that there is no time stipulation people can log on to the class without worrying about the different timezone. This virtually means that people from anywhere in the world can take the course since there is no stipulation to be present physically.
Teachers can also take advantage of the easy access available, which can be used to send out reading material to students without any hassle of printing or being physically present to provide the content to students. In addition, teachers can easily send out a text message to notify students if there is new content posted on such educational portals by the teachers.
Teachers can also take short one-to-one sessions with students to check on their progress and to test them on whether they are learning things or not. Although the myth of online lectures do little to help students learn to remain valid, the teacher can start one-to-one sessions, which can provide great insight into how students are doing on an individual level. Teachers can also use such a method to test students on things like spelling words et cetera. This would not only give teachers better insight into students but would also help to establish a stronger teacher-student relationship.
Lastly, when working with an online class, the course work can be standardized across almost all domains; hence it also reduces the time and effort of planning course work. Since the online structure is such that it makes for a perfect medium to standardize the teaching mechanism, it helps teachers as well to focus more on the teaching part than to ponder on the planning of the course. There is much online application which can also aid a teacher in the preparation of a course. Spellquiz.com is one website that can make procedures for a teacher extremely convenient. On the website, you can also validate the effectiveness of the website by finding the spellquiz testimonial where several people across the globe have uploaded their videos, many of them being from teachers. Hence, it shows how useful such a method can be.
The negative side of online teaching starts from the fact that teachers need to be on alert if any student requires any help since the online medium does not take time into consideration. Subsequently, the job itself becomes that much more difficult for the teachers to perform since it takes a toll on the mind and the body. Besides, when working online, a teacher, if working as a freelancer or through an academy, is paid way less than a teacher who delivers his or her services on a one-to-one method. Hence, the job also becomes less lucrative.
Secondly, working on an online basis would reflect that the job itself is not stable. In the online method, people can quickly leave your class. On top of this, a teacher is never sure when he or she will be paid and in what amount. Hence this includes a lot of uncertainty and risk.
Lastly, the online mechanism is such that teachers can never entirely connect with people, especially when they are from different backgrounds and cultures. Usually, diversity is favoured in a classroom, but when the teacher has no direct contact with the student, it beings a gap between the teacher-student relationship. This gap means that teachers find it hard to correct students and help them learn the course.
