The future is now. Interviews with current high school students share their voices and offer perspectives and insights on remote learning, student support and efficacy, use of technology, and quality online learning experiences to help higher education administrators, faculty, and staff to strategically plan for these perspective students.
During the early part of 2020, educational institutions were faced with few choices to continue instruction during what became a global pandemic. From primary and secondary education schools, to colleges and universities, to corporate institutions and government organizations, all were affected by COVID-19. Facing the emergency health orders to shelter in place and stay at home and to not be in public places, educators fully realized the need to continue instruction especially after what was hoped to be only a few weeks shuttered with a few cases in the country, spread exponentially.
The majority of instruction was interrupted with either a handful of days of school or during a previously scheduled Spring Break. Incredibly, students began missing school and parents, inevitably, longed for their children to be back with teachers, I mean back at school. Educators determined that waiting things out would no longer work and intrepid faculty, staff, and administrator teams began an incredible feat of moving all instruction to fully remote learning.
We can debate if what these students have experienced has been what is widely excepted as online learning, however, the commonality is that these young scholars were no longer physically in their classroom and using some type of technology to interact with teachers and fellow students.
While there has been a mix of the experiences with and effectiveness of the emergency change over to remote instruction and remote learning, there remains the fact that high school students, merely one to three years away from entering college, have had their first experiences with online education.
This session will provide voices from current high school students to share their experiences with remote learning. Initial views on and continued perspectives of their participation during the need for remote instruction furnish institutions of higher education with a golden opportunity to listen, learn, plan, and provide.
Through the lens of the literature and research on effective practices for online learning, we will examine the student perspectives on their remote learning experiences. Voices of the students carry important and valuable lessons from which we can extract complications and frustrations, and determine pitfalls, as well as find what has been constructive and effective.
From the stories, participants can create connections to current practices in online support and online teaching for their students. Additionally, session participants will reflect on lessons from the student stories to create interventions to test out for the next few semesters. Further, participants will evaluate how to strategically plan for the next set of first year students to arrive on (physically or virtually) campus.