With schools across Canada temporarily closing or moving online due to COVID-19, many parents find themselves exploring e-learning as a way to help ensure their kids don’t fall behind during this time of social distancing.
At Ontario Virtual School, we see e-learning as more than just a means to deal with a short-term period of educational turbulence. At OVS, we believe e-learning can play a positive and transformative role in the education of children and teens year-round.
Helping students reach their full potential is at the heart of our mission. To us, e-learning is the most effective way to achieve concrete educational outcomes for students in the 21st century. Here’s why:
1. e-Learning Lets Students Set the Pace
One of the main challenges in a traditional classroom environment is that teachers have to take the abilities and strengths of a large and often extremely diverse group of learners into account. In practical terms, this usually means that the pace of instruction — and sometimes grading itself — is determined by the needs of the average student.
While this may be a practical solution for teachers with limited time and resources, it is no secret that this approach leaves some students behind. Students who can grasp the material quickly and students who require additional time to understand concepts are often left either bored or confused.
With e-learning, students are given a far greater degree of independence as to how quickly they move through their courses. While their teacher will monitor their progress to make sure they don’t fall behind or stop working altogether, students have the option of reviewing online lectures and presentations as many times as they need to to ensure full understanding.
Interested to know how self-pacing can benefit you or your high schooler? Click here to learn more about OVS and how our approach gives students greater control of their learning.
2. A Personalized Approach to Learning
Just as different students study at different paces, they also have various personal needs that must be met for positive learning outcomes to occur. Accommodating different learning styles and targeting learning approaches to different age groups and ability levels is essential to ensure that no student is left behind.
This is much more easily done through e-learning than in the traditional classroom setting, where children are required to practice certain forms of discipline that are not always necessary or ideal (such as sitting still at their desk) so as not to distract their classmates. When learning online, students can make themselves comfortable and process information in whatever way works best for them.
This is one of the reasons why e-learning can be a great way to help your child master their Ontario Secondary School courses. Because e-learning can be tailored to their specific needs, your individual learner is given the best possible opportunity to learn the material in a way that will make it stick.
For more information on Ontario Virtual School’s personalized approach, or to learn more about how we ensure that all of our students get the hands-on instruction they need, contact a member of our success team today.
3. e-Learning Helps Build Self-Reliance
Any experienced educator will tell you that the most important skills students develop during their academic lives have little to do with actual curriculum content.
While it’s undoubtedly important for students to master the basics of math, science, communication, social understanding, and the arts, education is also designed to help students build the integral learning, reasoning, and problem-solving skills they will need to use in their day-to-day lives.
One of the most important of these skills is self-reliance: the ability to handle tasks under your own guidance and direction, without being told how to approach each individual step. E-learning is designed as a self-directed model of study, meaning it excels at helping students develop a variety of different soft skills, including:
• Responsibility —empowering students to complete and submit homework and assignments according to self-decided timelines
• Organization — encouraging students to establish priorities and manage time to better complete tasks and achieve goals
• Initiative — pushing students to identify and engage with new ideas and opportunities for learning
If you want your student to do more than simply meet curriculum objectives, to also learn vital time-management and problem-solving skills that will serve them well no matter what field they enter, e-learning can help achieve those goals.
4. e-Learning Prepares Students for the Future of Working Remotely
As more and more workplaces introduce work-from-home protocols, it is becoming increasingly clear that the traditional in-office arrangement may not be as necessary as we think. In fact, some believe that the mandated social distancing during this time may cause companies to re-imagine how they manage their workforce even once the mandates are lifted.
Studying at home through OVS prepares students for this new world of work – a world where self-discipline and self-reliance are highly prized and where the ability to stay focused and on-task even when working from home is essential. Students who develop these skills early by pursuing their studies online will be well-positioned to enter the remote workforce.
For years, e-learning was considered an alternative to traditional classroom learning, one that could be of use for students who couldn’t physically attend classes. But as e-learning has gained momentum, there is a growing body of evidence showing that, for some students, e-learning might actually be preferable to the traditional classroom, insofar as it gives children a more personalized approach and prepares them for a world where more and more work will be done remotely.
Interested in discovering how Ontario Virtual School can accommodate your student’s needs to help them reach their full potential? Get in touch with us today!