Digital Learning - beyond eLearning and Blended Learning

Teaching through the pandemic: lessons learned in and out of school

We are in the midst of the most sweeping education experiment in history. The coronavirus pandemic has forced the majority of the U.S.’s 3.6 million educators to find ways to teach without what most of them consider the core part of their craft—the daily face-to-face interactions that help them elicit a child’s burning desire to investigate something; detect confusion or a lack of engagement; and find the right approach, based on a student’s body language and participation in the classroom, to help students work through their challenges.

The good news is that this is happening at the end of the school year, after teachers have had opportunities to build relationships with their students. And in the past few decades, many educators have been experimenting with some promising technology-enabled approaches, sometimes called “hybrid,” or “personalized learning” models—essentially, a mix of in-person and online learning.