Online lessons: Achilles Heel or Undiscovered Gem?
As we all know, these unprecedented times have caused many to scramble to shift classes online. While measures have somewhat relaxed, for the safety of our students and tutors, we have made the decision to stay online for the time being. This decision also factored in the success of our current online lessons.
At IB Lounge, we’ve been planning for online lessons for some time due to international demand with a large number of requests coming from Hong Kong and India.
As such, we came into the Circuit Breaker with adequate infrastructure and some good ideas of how online lessons should be conducted. The question is, are online lessons here to stay? To address this we’ll be looking a several things.
Are online lessons inferior to physical lessons?
Most teachers and students will undeniably agree that they prefer physical lessons to online lessons. Over the screen, there is a sense that we’ve lost the human touch, and that the teacher-student connection somehow seems diminished. This is a fair assessment, and one I believe we can all relate to. Be it an online school lesson, lecture, internship, or even just working from home. Humans are innately social beings. Yet, this need not always be the case.
How have we dealt with this?
Due to our small class sizes of one tutor to four students, we are proud to say that we have maintained the quality and the interactive nature of our lessons. Having all suffered the pains of online lectures before, our tutors have their unique ways to keep students engaged through digital mediums, and we’ve even found things we can bring back to physical lessons to help bolster the effectiveness of our lessons.
Anonymous surveys on our students have yielded extremely positive results, with many students expressing their satisfaction at the maintenance of our lesson quality, with some even going as far as saying that they would consider continuing with online lessons beyond the pandemic – as a complete replacement to physical classes.
In our opinion, this standard of teaching has been upheld due to certain factors.
Our ability in this day and age to utilize various digital resources that help both students and teachers.
Our passionate tutors, who, as mentioned above, have gone out of their way to cater to their individual students and classes during this period.
We’ve also had discussions with others - teachers, parents, and students on their experiences with online lessons. A large number of people point to their school lessons as a key example of the failure of online lessons.
Our stand is simple. Most schools would inevitably struggle to pivot to online lessons. This can be due to a multitude of reasons, such as work being dependent on physical marking or the inability to monitor huge classes over the screen, to name a few.
However, as we’ve stated before, we’ve never intended to compete with schools. We’re attempting to plug gaps in a system we’ve been through ourselves, be it through resources and guides we are compiling on our website or through more individualised, bespoke classes where we teach students what we used - and what they need - to succeed in their journeys.
By sticking to our guns, we’ve managed a seamless transition to online lessons.
Online lessons, a blessing in disguise?
Lessons moving online have undoubtedly brought us benefits, the biggest being reduced travel time resulting in more flexible lesson schedules. Due to the elimination of travel time, both our students and tutors have been able to spend less time travelling. We also have been able to cater to later or earlier timings – something that was especially prevalent with many of our students in the thick of their Internal Assessment submissions. Yet it is still undeniable that most of us are waiting in anticipation of the resumption of physical lessons.
While we all can’t wait to get back to face-to-face interactions, as mentioned above, to err on the side of caution we have made the decision to keep lessons online for the time being. Safety is of utmost priority here.
We have reduced tuition rates, during this period, to help our students out. We have also been conducting free crash courses for the underprivileged during this period. These crash courses are being fleshed out and updated, they will be launched in July for all of you who need that last boost down the final stretch – stay tuned for that.
The Verdict
On the whole, online lessons have been a hugely successful experience for us. While we still believe physical lessons will remain the modus operandi, we are embracing the upsides of online lessons. As such we will be opening up the option of having purely online lessons! Due to overwhelming enquiries from India and Hong Kong we will also be launching our overseas online lessons soon.
