The lessons of online teaching

The post-Covid shift towards remote education has reshaped the educational landscape, presenting both opportunities and challenges, as well as valuable lessons for brick-and-mortar schools.

- By Mark Potterton

The sudden global school closures in 2020 forced a massive, unplanned experiment in online education, which scholar Professor Neil Selwyn aptly calls “temporary distance education”.

This emergency measure, not to be confused with sophisticated digital learning, required teachers, students and parents to quickly adapt to remote teaching and learning as a stopgap solution.

The experience revealed critical lessons, highlighting that true “digital competence” must account for deep-seated inequalities, as students’ ability to engage was heavily influenced by the varying levels of technological and social support in their households.

Teachers learnt they could not simply transfer classroom activities online and instead had to adopt more flexible, asynchronous timetables and provide offline options to accommodate the diverse and challenging realities of learning from home.

The South African scene

Since the pandemic, the South African online education market has experienced significant growth, transforming the educational landscape by offering families flexible and personalised alternatives to traditional schooling.

The expansion has been driven by increasing internet access and affordability challenges. It includes a diverse mix of providers such as Curro Online, Brainline, UCT Online School, Evolve Online and Impaq, to name a few. An exact student count is not available, but the market value of this sector reaches into the hundreds of millions and is growing.

The shift towards online learning has reshaped the educational landscape, presenting a mix of unprecedented opportunities and significant challenges, especially for school-aged children.