The world is changing at an incredible rate and our lives are becoming more digital than ever before. One of the challenges many have to face is remote learning. Schools and universities are implementing courses that are accessible online. Teachers, as well as students, have to change their habits and cooperate on a new level. The demand for online classes software is rising, as is the need to make these lessons engaging and effective. Even though we have access to new technologies, making good use of them is still a hard nut to crack.
It seems that e-learning is here to stay for a long time, so it would be better to create a complex plan for its implementation in advance. It’s a field of continuous innovation, so tendencies are changing with the development of the digital education market. Experts are saying that the leading trends will include hosting interactive videos and virtual conferences. To face new opportunities and seize them, you will need a webinar platform that manages everything.
Let’s see why the demand for online classes software systems is rising and how the education sector can benefit from it.
Why is learning remotely inscribed in the future of education?
The idea of homeschooling isn’t new, yet the extents being reached by remote learning are starting to skyrocket. Years ago, learning from home was mostly a privilege of the upper classes who could afford to hire private tutors. More recently, keeping in touch with classmates via online lessons has been popular among children who lived far from their schools. This is common in Australia, where long distances are problematic, and thus children are often taught by their parents or attend online classes. It’s estimated that there are around 20,000 homeschooled students on the continent, and the numbers are growing. Nowadays distance learning is becoming a hot global trend that even staunch opponents need to keep up with. In 2020 alone, more than 1.2 billion children in 186 countries were affected by school closures and forced to switch to e-learning mode. The demand for virtual tutoring apps and teaching platforms is still rising as the future of traditional schooling remains uncertain and will most probably combine in-person with online classes.
The major differences between homeschooling, remote and online learning
These terms tend to be misunderstood, as they sound very similar. Although they are all forms of distance education, online classes, don’t be misled by appearances! Here’s what hides behind these terms:
- Homeschooling is a form of education in which parents teach their children at home or hire someone who comes to their place of residence in-person to do so. The child doesn’t belong to any public or private school, and lessons are most often conducted by the parent. Distance education, on the other hand, is a school program delivered by teachers frequently using the internet and online resources. So, even though it’s also conducted at home, distance education isn’t homeschooling.
- Online learning (or e-learning) takes place entirely over the Internet. It’s a broad term for any education that takes place remotely instead of in a traditional classroom. Students learn in a virtual environment and connect through internet-based platforms. To make the education process robust and fluent, institutions can use online classes software systems.
- Remote learning takes place when the student and the educator cooperate using technology such as video conferencing and digital assessments, instead of learning in a traditional classroom environment. While online learning is a broader term, it can mean individual education as well as group workshops. In contrast, remote learning seeks to re-create the classroom atmosphere and combine features of both traditional and digital education systems.
These are the most common methods of alternative teaching, but no matter how they are called, all distance education has one common factor. To make digital learning seamless, teachers need to use online classes software systems, but we’ll dive into this topic later.
Hybrid learning is on the rise
As school workflows begin to change, teachers have to learn how to run classes online - either entirely digital or in a hybrid pattern. It seems that the second option is the golden mean between traditional and new approaches to education. In the hybrid model, some lessons are held at school and the rest take place outside of it via online classes. When a school is able to deliver a blended learning experience, it may be able to better handle unexpected events that require switching to remote learning mode. And, according to research, online teaching is eventually expected to completely replace land-based schooling, so preparing for this transformation early could be a smart move.
How to be successful in online classes?
Switching to digital might be a bitter pill to swallow, as the whole teaching environment and methods will need improving. The effectiveness of online learning varies amongst age groups, and is usually more challenging for the youngest students who get distracted easily. Here are a few things to take into account when preparing to lead an online class.
Serving the perfect blend
In general, no matter if we call it online classes or remote education, there are two forms of digital learning: asynchronous (where students don’t learn in real-time classes but can complete their tasks or listen to lectures at their prefered times) and synchronous (where students have to be online at the exact time of the lecture as if they were there in-person). Each of them has their own benefits, so the key for an entertaining online class is to balance these methods and offer the best of both worlds.
The option of evergreen webinars also exists if you decide to record your video so that it can be viewed after the original broadcast time, rather than being a one-time experience. Thanks to this choice, you can either schedule an online lesson that students have to participate in real-time, or record a lecture and allow them to play it whenever they want to. You can also provide students with saved videos after the end of a whole course, to help them revise the material and prepare for exams. It’s always better to have a choice, right?
Leverage team workflow with breakout rooms and brainstorming tools
There are many ways to make your online classes more engaging with rich student interaction. Besides knowing the features of your omnichannel webinar software, you can read teaching guides to get inspired and improve the overall experience.
Try not to think of running online classes as a substitute for real-life ones. Don’t just make a survival plan whilst dreaming of getting back to traditional lessons at school, but create a new, digital-oriented solution. By completely focusing on the present, digital classrooms are given a better chance to run smoothly. If you have ever had problems with working in groups via online classes, you should try out our breakout rooms. It’s a complex solution that enables you to divide participants into teams consisting of people of your choice, or those randomly selected by the system. Take your teamwork to a higher level and make online classes and brainstorming easier than ever. What’s more, you can use a whiteboard so that every student is able to take an active part in the discussion.
Plan in advance and create a friendly environment
There are more things you can do that don’t rely on the features of an online classes software system, but rather on your actions. The most important is to plan your classes to avoid chaos, but be flexible enough to fit the needs of your students. Create a plan, but don’t stick to it rigidly. Always ask for feedback so you can hear about what should be improved to make the workflow better. Also, make sure to take into consideration these 5 techniques that can help with making remote lessons just as good as traditional ones, if not even better. We know that you probably don’t have much free time to spare, so here you can learn how to be successful in online classes as a teacher in a nutshell.
Engage your students with online classes software
We’ve already spilt the beans and showed you a few features that can improve online classes. Well, it was just a warm-up. To run engaging webinars, there are even more options available to use.
Presentations that hit the sweet spot
Nowadays one can’t imagine a class without a presentation, so showing it online gives it a new spin. No matter if you integrate your software with Prezi, or use any other programme to share your screen, your visuals can become fully interactive with embedded videos or articles. It is often said today that it’s hard to capture the attention of students, as they tend to multitask and can’t focus for long periods. That’s why using various content types might help keep them focused.
Repeat & test
It has become popular to interact with an audience by creating real-time questionnaires. It grabs the attention at online classes of every attendee and lets them openly use mobile devices. While this works perfectly fine in real-life presentations, it can be a bit bothersome to switch between tabs online. To make the process smoother, go for a tool that enables you to create polls and quizzes within its system. It can also help you with automatic data gathering so that no answers are missed.
That was the fun part, so now onto the necessities. As a teacher, you need to check and evaluate students’ knowledge. By creating surveys, you can establish a feedback loop to see where students are struggling. Plus, you can make real-time tests to award your students relevant grades at the end of each day. With automatic data collection, you can be sure that no student is left behind. Thanks to that, you are provided with all the relevant information to help your teaching decisions during the whole semester.
Let the attendance control the system and spend more time focusing on your work
When speaking about necessary data and automation, an attendance list is key for every teacher and online calsses in order to know which students are always present and which aren’t. It’s useful to have an automatic list of participants, instead of creating it in a traditional way. To help you save time for truly important things and avoid chaotic situations, such a list can be made automatically with our tool then exported and downloaded later to give you the right data collected in one place.
Make the most of remote classes
Having the ability to adapt to the changing reality of education and online classes might be make or break in the near future. Top-notch universities and schools are following the trend of democratizing their classes and at least partially moving lectures to the digital world. Although it’s a huge challenge, with the right preparation and use of robust, omnichannel systems it can be a smooth process that opens up new possibilities.
Here are the key takeaways to implement when running an online class:
- interact with the audience and ask for feedback
- plan your lessons in advance and decide whether you want to record them for later use
- don’t neglect brainstorming sessions and group work, but try out breakout rooms to keep your students engaged
- test knowledge with polls and surveys (we have added an automatic score counting system to make this seamless and transparent)
- track the attendance list and gather relevant data about participants in one place
- be flexible and think about hosting a webinar in a complex way, not just as a solution to wait out the current situation
- read articles about e-learning to get inspired and implement new elements to your online classes
LiveWebinar ticks all of these boxes and goes beyond them too. It is fully customizable too - check out all of the features on our website or ask us personally. We would be delighted to answer your questions and start a new digital-based journey together.