The Importance of Teachers in Online Learning
The COVID-19 pandemic was a worldwide problem that was rapidly becoming a serious threat to humanity’s safety during 2020. Everyone was mandated to stay and quarantine in their own homes to prevent the virus from spreading. Thus, giving rise to the popularity of online learning. Despite its usefulness during the lockdown, it was still facing a myriad of complications. However, there were several studies that provided ways to diminish some of the issues. Based on these issues and solutions, it is clear that many of these depend on the teacher. Therefore, educational institutions must prioritize making effective policies and systems that can allow teachers to work well in the online environment.
Although online education has existed for more than three decades now (Harasim, 2000), it still has a number of issues worth looking into. A couple of examples are, easily distracted students due to insufficient understanding of lessons, poor academic performance caused by the underutilization of body language from teachers, and technical challenges brought by technological illiteracy. According to Das (2022), students are not invested in focusing during live online class sessions because they usually do not have enough understanding of the concepts needed in order to learn from their lessons. The author argues that this mostly stems from long lectures that are not very engaging to the students. Das (2022) also mentions that communication in online learning suffers from the lack of body language that teachers can usually provide during face-to-face lectures. As a result, the author claims that the ability of students to follow their teacher’s messages are reduced, which might lead to worse academic performance. Besides these disadvantages, technical and software difficulties can pose as barriers to the success of online education (Roddy et al., 2017).
The discussed drawbacks may make online learning seem ineffective. However, there are some studies that already propose workarounds and methods to mitigate these issues. For example, the problem about poor engagement from students can be alleviated by instructing teachers to make use of tools such as podcasts, videos, discussions, and assessment methods like quizzes (Das, 2022). Secondly, teachers should focus on meticulously planning activities and assignment deadlines, and also actively communicating with students, so that they can overcome the obstacles introduced by the lack of body language in online learning (Das, 2022). In relation to technical difficulties, Roddy et al. (2017) suggest that educational institutions should train teachers to be technologically competent. This prevents them from being unable to deal with technology-related problems, which can possibly be detrimental to the accessibility of the students’ learning materials.
As seen in the problems and solutions discussed in the previous paragraphs, instructors play a crucial part in online learning. Pedro and Kumar (2020) assert that they are integral to all aspects of an online course. Hence, they believe that educational institutions must do their best to ensure that they can successfully teach in these online environments. This means that effective systems, supports, and policies aimed in improving online education are provided for the faculty. For example, Roddy et al. (2017) states that it is important for educational institutions to train their teachers to have decent communication skills, technological competence, and administrative skills. Furthermore, the author notes that teachers should also be trained to have the ability to provide informative feedback, to supply students with support, and to be very responsive.
Online education may have been around for a while now, but it still suffers from several problems like poor engagement from students, worse communication due to the lack of body language, and technical difficulties. Nevertheless, researchers have suggested some solutions to these problems. Interestingly, a common pattern that can be observed from investigating these issues and solutions is that many of them revolve around the faculty and instructors. For this reason, educational institutions must focus their efforts and attention on helping the faculty and instructors so that they can flourish in this mode of education.
References
- Das, U. G. (2022). Online Learning: Challenges and Solutions for Learners and Teachers. Management and Labour Studies, 48(2), 210–213. https://doi.org/10.1177/0258042X211069501
- Harasim, L. M. (2000). Shift happens: online education as a new paradigm in learning. Internet and Higher Education, 3(1–2), 41–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/s1096-7516(00)00032-4
- Pedro, N., & Kumar, S. (2020). Institutional Support for Online Teaching in Quality Assurance Frameworks. Online Learning, 24(3), 50–66. https://doi.org/10.24059/olj.v24i3.2309
- Roddy, C., Amiet, D., Chung, J., Holt, C. J., Shaw, L. K., McKenzie, S., Garivaldis, F., Lodge, J. M., & Mundy, M. (2017). Applying Best Practice Online Learning, Teaching, and Support to Intensive Online Environments: An Integrative Review. Frontiers in Education, 2. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2017.00059