While online education was not a normal that we expected to have to adjust to at the beginning of 2020, it has become our daily normal. Around the world, students of all ages are joining online lessons every day and continuing their educations from the safety of their homes. With this has come a lot of frustration and adapting, but it has also unveiled some strong advantages to this learning approach as well. We expect online learning to play a key role in the future of education even past the pandemic.

Virtual meetings and online learning has been around for a long time. Let’s face it, for years now colleges and organizations have been leveraging the ability to use virtual platforms to their advantage. After all, virtual conferencing allows people to meet and work together even if they are not in the same location. Similarly, it allows colleges to recruit students who do not want to reside in their area. These are only a couple examples of institutions that are taking advantage of the world wide web in this regard, and they have been doing it effectively for years already. We’ve also been using the internet to communicate in this same way in our personal lives. Think of all the times you FaceTimed someone or started a Skype conversation.

The idea of communicating via the internet is not a new one. So what’s suddenly the big deal around online learning? Well, clearly we were thrown into entirely new ways of teaching classrooms of students this past spring. Teachers who had been trained to be able to guide a class of 7-year-olds through various activities in person were now told to figure out how to present that same educational quality to students through a computer screen. What resulted was overly-stressed teachers and students receiving questionable levels of quality education.

And yet, we learned so much. The internet is an incredibly valuable tool when it’s used right, and we’re finding more and more teachers being able to do just that.

Now, we don’t necessarily think online learning will ever ideally take the place of an in-person kindergarten classroom, but we do think that virtual learning is going to remain a staple, particularly for older students who do not need as much in-person support. This could include high schoolers and college students obtaining much of their educations online.

Why is the future of online learning so promising?

We see many pros to online learning in 2021. We understand that these may not apply to every educational setting or every student. As a company focused on supplemental education, we are looking primarily at how these types of extra learning opportunities will be more available and accessible than ever before.

Availability & Accessibility

At the heart of progress through online learning are availability and accessibility. Where once an educator had to sit down at the same table as a student and walk them through lessons, tutors are now doing this same thing around the world with students who are worlds away.

We literally have a world of information and resources at our fingertips. This is an asset that we use every single day, and it is an asset that can be applied to education as well.

Consider the student that lives in a very rural area where there may not be qualified tutors to help him or her reach their goals in a desired skillset. With the help of online learning, now those students are given equal access as students living in large cities where there tend to be more resources present. The student from the small farm town and the student from New York City can both have the opportunity to work with the highly-rated ACT test prep tutor that lives in Minneapolis. This equals the playing field for rural students who are often at a disadvantage in terms of educational development.
In the 21st century, we’re living in a very interconnected world. Our reality is that we can host virtual meetings with clients on different continents, we can hop on a plane and be a world away in less than a day, and we can talk to virtually anyone via the internet. This is a phenomenal thing to think about and something that is quite new to our world.

When you consider in-person education, you’re limited to the resources that are available in your location. If I live in Minneapolis, I need to find a tutor that lives in Minneapolis and who has time to meet with me and help educate me. But if I look to online learning, I suddenly open many, many doors of possible resources. Perhaps the tutor that I think will be the best fit for me is located in California or New York. That’s no problem. All I have to do is take time zones into account and get on my computer at the agreed-upon time. Just like that I have access to many more resources, and perhaps one of these is a better resource for me and my individual learning needs than a resource that I could have found at home.

This is just a glimpse at why we love online education and why we see it sticking around. Of course, there will always be a place for incorporating human connection via in-person environments into education, regardless of the level. But the amount of in-person time may not remain what it has been in the past.

The world continues to adapt to the everyday changes that this pandemic has brought upon us, and we will keep navigating the storm together. For now, online learning is the safest option to keep all of us healthy and safe. For the future, we think online learning might be here to stay.

Are you looking for supplemental online learning for your student? Do you have a high schooler preparing to take the ACT or SAT? We can help! To discuss one-one-one tutoring opportunities, contact us or visit our Inquiry Page.

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