With the recent weather upsets that the Sultanate of Oman and the UAE have faced, the impact on education came into discussion once again.
While snow days are common in cold countries, rain days seem to be becoming all too regular in the Arabian Gulf, and smart solutions are the need of the hour.
Online classes and work from home modes are more often being implemented as a response to such weather emergencies.
Online learning is now more common than ever before — whether done individually by learners who want to lean a new skill or gain access to more information on a topic in which they are interested, or institutionally, where classes, or some portion of a class is offered online.
Now that online learning has become part of our educational ecosystem, the accompanying question is, how do we know whether the given course has been a success? Of course, that is itself a complicated question because it involves success from two different stakeholders: the teachers and the students. One’s success does not necessarily mean the other’s.
For the present, we can focus on the teachers. There are a number of digital course providers internationally and some of them are suspect in terms of their goals and delivery systems.
There are also many gaps between the stated outcomes and actual, measurable results.
A good online course, from the teacher’s or the provider’s point of view is one which has clear objectives, goals, strategies and assessment systems.
This means that the content of the course is understood at the outset, the ways in which learning is to take place is set with a teaching plan, and that the ways in which grading or evaluation is going to be made is transparent.
One of the simplest ways of gauging the success of an online class is to ask the participants themselves.
Although a necessary and important step, research has shown that learners are not always reliable in their assessment of a course as there may be many other factors that interfere with their learning process.
Other methods of measuring the success of a digital course includes tracking the progress of students through compulsory pop up quizzes which need to be done to proceed to the next unit.
While doing so, even the marks of the quizzes can offer an idea of what is being learnt and understood. The next unit could then be tweaked to suit the learning levels and goals of a class.
As learning is more than just knowledge acquisition, working on the practical applications of the course content would be more beneficial.
This could be achieved by setting up real world scenarios like mock sales pitches where language has to be used or creating websites for a target audience.
Another effective strategy to measure the success of a course is to make the students teach an online class or two, using the strategies developed in the class.
Online teaching is an integral part of our lives now, and teachers will need to re-invent their course content to be able to be fully or partially capable of shifting to online modes whenever necessary.
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