Advantages of Online Teaching and Learning

     We all know someone that we respect as being of above-average intelligence that seems to have a good ethic and probably even comes off as being quite educated…and we all remember being surprised that this person had performed rather poorly in a brick-and-mortar school.  For me, that person is my husband.  I didn’t know him in high school, but all his friends say that he was just as smart and logical then as he is now.  They affirm that he was an avid reader then, as he is now.  His parents, both biologists, taught him anatomy growing up the same way that most parents teach their kids how to understand a ball game or plant a garden.  So, why did he barely scrape through high school?  Was it an attitude problem?  By all accounts, he had even more attitude than your typical adolescent, but then you have to wonder:  did he develop an attitude because he wasn’t getting what he needed, or did he not get what he needed because of his attitude?  Or maybe you don’t have to wonder about it.  Maybe you can just decide:  you know what?  It doesn’t matter if he had a bad attitude or not, it was the responsibility of the adults to get past the fact that this kid had an attitude and figure out why he wasn’t succeeding.  If the educators at his schools had bothered to get to know him (few did), they would have realized he was highly capable.  So, how could this situation be improved for the students out there that share that story today?

     Back when my husband was in high school, traditional brick-and-mortar schools were the only readily available form of education.  A learning or health disability had to be pretty severe before any other possibilities were considered.  Today, however, we have the option of employing Online Learning.  Online learning can be conducted completely through electronic contact, or select activities can be utilized in a blended course that also meets face-to-face.  Either would have helped my husband.  In college, he eventually identified his problem.  He’s dyslexic, but it was never diagnosed, because it didn’t manifest as backwards letter writing.  It means that he reads very slowly.  He didn’t do the work, because he literally could not keep up.  His teachers knew he was intelligent, so they assumed he was lazy and not trying.  So they gave him attitude, and he gave that attitude back double, and soon, he didn’t even want to try any more.  Instead, he just studied what he felt like studying.

Wait, you are saying.  Dyslexic?  What does that have to do with online learning?  Online learning isn’t a treatment for dyslexia.  But maybe it should be.  An online learning environment ties together a lot of different types of activities.  Sure, there are word documents and text files, but there are also audio clips, videos, games, and other interactive programs.  In the brick-and-mortar schools of two decades ago, teachers couldn’t handout a video and tell students to watch it at home.  They certainly couldn’t expect students to create their own video.  Homework was pretty much reading and writing.  But in a blended or exclusively online classroom, those types of assignments are commonplace.

     Another problem is focus.  He can work on a problem he is fascinated by literally all night long without pause.  He can get frustrated and become completely useless by a problem he has only thought about for five minutes.  Tomorrow, the problem that frustrated him might be the one that fascinates him.  Asynchronous online courses allow students to work, within a particular timeframe (of usually a week or two), at times that suit them.  My husband has clinical insomnia, and it had been diagnosed when he was in high school.  There were days he made it to school in body only, having been awake for days.  When he would lie down at night, his mind would turn back on to high gear, but by morning he would be exhausted and barely able to function.  I can only imagine how successful he would have been if he had been able to do his schooling when his brain took off, and rest when he needed to.

     Here’s a few more considerations:  My husband is 6’4” and built to match.  He reached that size early in high school.  He’s also left-handed.  He prefers cool temperatures.  Well, he’s mentioned many times that he almost never had access to a left-handed desk, and even when he wasn’t at an off-handed desk, he was squashed into a seat that was never comfortable in a room that was usually overheated.  Here again is a situation in which online learning could have benefited him.  In online learning, students have more control over their environment.  If he could have sat at a comfortable desk with a window open while working in a self-paced environment with the aid of audio and visual resources in which he could pause as needed to type out questions, comments, and concerns onto a discussion board or in a chatroom, I can only imagine what he might have achieved!  

     I've only outlined some of the challenges that affected one person known to me.  There are countless other barriers out there that online learning can help to overcome, just as there are countless individuals out there that are looking for the opportunity to break down those barriers.  Every year, online learning becomes more accessible.  Although this can't change the experience that my husband had in high school, I can look ahead to his future.  Our daughter isn't in school yet, but she is like her father in every way.  It will be very interesting to see what her high school experience is like.  I expect that it will be very different from ours, but I am hopeful that the changes will be for the better!