CHALLENGES AND ADVANTAGES FOR DISTANCE LEARNING
Technology is revolutionizing the way that we learn. Regarding education, despite the fact that the curricular material is always updated with the latest trends and knowledge, the content delivery model is also reinvented in an innovative way, making learning more attractive and enjoyable. Today, a school with a good Distance Learning Plan supported by the use of applications for smart devices, educational platforms and taking advantage of the internet, can customize learning according to the needs of each of its students.
Today there are web-based learning management systems used to plan, implement and evaluate a specific learning process. These facilitate differentiation in student learning by providing a way to create and deliver content, monitor student progress, and evaluate student performance. They can also provide students with the ability to use interactive features such as collaborative documents, video conferences, and discussion forums.
Many schools are using technology to offer a high quality online education. Distance learning programs are suitable for different types of students with different needs. These focus their value on convenience, diversity, and educational innovation. Benefits that enrich virtual education, transferring learning to the student, who becomes the one who determines the path, time and rhythm of their own training process.
Convenience is the key. There are situations that lead educational institutions to reinvent their academic proposal in order to continue fulfilling their mission as leadership educators. These may be due to the changing times in which we live, the constant technological innovation that leads us to the fourth industrial revolution or simply a health situation that from one day to the next changes the way the world works. A pandemic that confines us to the protection of our homes, limiting access to traditional training spaces and transforming the way we learn. Society is in an accelerated digitization process, where every day there are more digital devices, sensors, artificial intelligence, data exchange and therefore a digital world from which we must appropriate ourselves to get the most out of it.
Schools take advantage of this world to build distance education plans that allow differentiation in the learning processes of their students. Academic planning focuses its efforts on empowering each student, understanding their own needs in their training process, offering tailor-made teaching options. There is diversity in the delivery of content. These can be asynchronous, through the use of videos, podcasts, audio and multimedia files, allowing the student to learn at their own pace, in the ideal space for them and, above all, in the time they decide. If the delivery is synchronous, teachers schedule their classes or tutorials using digital tools such as zoom or Google hangouts. There are also forums and virtual chats to exchange opinions. Both seek interaction between peers, teachers and even people from all over the world.
The diversity. This is easily done through online learning platforms, which identify specific needs of each student, providing information to the teacher to make decisions based on concrete data. These allow a teacher to provide curated content that the student will need to achieve the learning goal. Additionally, there are online forums and communities
throughout the world that can enrich discussions with your knowledge. We are able to connect with a student in Africa and have an online conversation to see how they can devise a solution for the drinking water problem in their city. This broadens their world view and increases intercultural knowledge, a great benefit in a global context.
Technological innovations have empowered the education sector through improvements in online learning tools. They are able to recreate real-world experiences. A student can visit the Louvre museum, recreate historical moments and even tour the space station if the latter so wishes. There are no experiences that cannot be recreated in a virtual reality world. Today you can relive iconic characters from history, who would be programmed to tell them about the experiences they went through, transporting the student to a real context typical of the time; greater degree of appropriation of knowledge.
Solutions such as virtual education or E-Learning as it is known, facilitate training spaces that develop critical thinking skills, the sense of research and collaborative work. Likewise, they contribute to a greater degree of responsibility on the part of the students in the appropriation of their learning processes, the effective management of their time and the fulfillment of their academic obligations. For this reason, educational institutions must make their teaching processes go beyond the conventional and advance towards the use of digital tools, artificial intelligence and data analysis to train highly competitive people who respond to the demands of this world.
