culture / education

E-Learning

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Due to the tropical storm/hurricane/excessive rainfall, my school is virtual today.  Indeed, the public schools in the county are also virtual, which they call “e-learning.”

That name always strikes me as being akin to some defunct 1990s Dot Com Bubble startup geared at teaching kids math through cheesy raps about the Pythagorean Theorem.  I prefer my school’s usage of “virtual learning” and “remote learning.”  Of course, back in my day, “remote learning” was watching reruns of Three’s Company.

A friend of mine with a couple of children in the public schools reminded me of the term “e-learning.”  As I told her, e-learning is “like learning, but not as good.”  That’s a fairly accurate description.

That said, it gives yours portly a chance to catch his breath—and to work ahead on some World History slides.  I’ve been composing like a madman lately, and managed to finish Spooky Season III and get it submitted to my distributor on Wednesday, 25 September 2024.  I’ll release it one week from today, on Friday, 4 October 2024.

Stay dry out there!

—TPP

5 thoughts on “E-Learning”

  1. I’ve impressed my view on remote learning in the past on these pages so I don’t need to repeat myself. I’d probably describe it as ‘happy hour for the kids.’ You might be able to see them sitting in front of a screen but it doesn’t mean they’re looking at you.

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  2. My son can rarely sign-up for a university class that doesn’t have a good portion of it as E-Learning online in conjunction with in class instruction. And the university tuition is never less for those classes. Have a great day!

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    • Haha, of course it isn’t! Most courses now use some kind of virtual learning environment (VLE) to supplement in-person learning, which I think is fine; we use Google Classroom as a way to push assignments and announcements to students, for example, and it works well. I upload my lecture slides and study guides to Google Classroom, as well as all assignments, but I always give paper copies of everything (except for my slides; I’m not printing all of that stuff off, and they should be taking notes anyway).

      Fully virtually is another matter. It works very well for some students. I would wager those students are the minority, but they really love it. During The Age of The Virus, several of my more self-motivated students thrived with digital learning.

      But for the majority—perhaps the vast majority—of students, online/distance/remote/e-learning was an open invitation to cheating and disengagement. Parents realized very quickly how difficult it is to keep teenagers and little kids on-task, especially when they’re forced to sit at a monitor all day and complete busy work.

      That said, I was teaching fully online at a local technical college well before The Age of The Virus, and I saw similar trends. Some students really thrived with the independent and self-paced nature of those courses. Others struggled. I found that the best approach was to make certain assignments and quizzes due every week—Friday nights in my case. I made everything available from the first day of the course, and some students would finish a fifteen-week history course in two or three weeks, they were just that motivated to knock everything out. Most students just kept pace with what was due weekly.

      But those weekly deadlines gave them concrete goals. Some online teachers will just have one amorphous due date sometime in November or December, and kids and even young adults (and old adults!) struggle to manage their workload efficiently that way. I also wasn’t keen on grading a massive influx of assignments at the end of the term.

      It’s a mixed bag, like most things. I would do well with a self-paced course, and would prefer it now. As a teenager, I would have been sunk.

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