I was wrong: It takes longer!

Early on in this crisis a group of High School principals from across North America asked me to share some of my experiences with online learning since they were anticipating being shut down and were considering moving online. I've been teaching online for years and I am the principal of a fairly new online Christian school so I've got some knowledge of the field. I figured that I could help.

Somewhere in that conversation I said that a student in online learning can do the work in half the time it takes in the classroom.

But I was wrong.

You see, these schools aren't doing online learning. They are doing emergency distance learning, or emergency remote learning, or emergency at home learning or whatever you want to call it. Whatever it is, it isn't online learning.

So my experience about how long it takes students to do the work is quite wrong.

These students are attempting to do the work in a crisis. Their mental health is under attack, they are busy learning entirely new modes of learning, and trying to do this in a new location for learning. They do not have their normal capacity to do work. (Neither do we!)

In this situation it is taking students at least twice as long to do the work they would do in a bricks and mortar classroom.

We must take this into account in what we are doing right now. Student work and expectations must be reduced.

But we must also take this into account after this crisis is over. When our heads come up from the crisis and we are able to start thinking about the future we will need to realize that there is a difference between the emergency learning we are doing now and what online learning can look like.