Virtual classes: a necessary evil or a new paradigm?
An important debate has taken place within the Covid19 pandemic and has to do with distance education or virtual education. It is an idea that has many detractors at the same time that many promoters, although in reality those who defend it, for the most part, consider it little more than a necessary evil. Does that mean that when, eventually, the pandemic ends, everything will go back to the way it was before? It is very unlikely.
The idea of taking advantage of the new information and telecommunications technologies to lead education to a 2.0 model is not new. For decades, different educational schemes have been designed to serve the population of remote areas, what we have known as “distance education”: first it was by post, then by electronic messaging, and there is even now a wide range of online education portals. Internet with more or less formal courses, in which the video recording of a class or a teacher is proposed as a substitute for the real experience of the classroom. Useful dynamics, of course, but more as a complement to the educational system than as its true replacement.
But it is also true that never before had there been the possibility of broadcasting a class live and massively through the internet. Tech giants compete fiercely with each other to provide the most stable, dynamic service that best emulates face-to-face, and with often staggering results. But the online educational experience still has many drawbacks.
On the one hand, it is uncomfortable, extremely sedentary and confines the student to the screen, one more at a time when the effects of the information bombardment and the abusive use of information are beginning to be felt. gadgets electronic devices in our children: their limited attention span, their tendency to disperse, their chronic boredom with the real world.
Seen like this, the school represented an oasis of reality and presence in the face of so much virtual experience of the world: a place in which to learn, among other things, to deal face to face with the other, to be part of a group, to connect with others. others without the need for another intermediary than verbal language. Are these tools so obsolete that we can do without them in the future?
It is also true, no doubt, that the world of work is increasingly betting on the virtual and the computerized, and that perhaps that tendency to autism that many parents observe with concern in their children is an adaptive response to a world of information overload .
The problem, in any case, is that those same parents seem more willing to blame vaccines (the ones that save their children’s lives!) Than the fact that, from an early age, they used to get the little one distracted of the real world through a screen.
In fact, there is the explanation of why so many parents are uncomfortable with virtual classes: because they cannot separate the home world from the daily world, virtual classes force them in many cases to assume a leading role in the formation of their children. They can no longer be content with going to the school to complain when their child has a problem, such as dissatisfied customers with a service provided by a company. With virtual classes they are forced, paradoxically, to be present.
The future will tell if the school will also go virtual, and to what extent. Sooner or later, the pandemic will pass and we will have to decide how far we want to participate in the formal education of our children. But the school will continue there, serving those who cannot even consider this dilemma, for whom presence is mandatory, either due to lack of technological or monetary resources (assuming that both are not the same thing), or because their parents do not count. nor with the dubious benefit of the “home office”. The pandemic will pass, and we will see.
References:
- “Opinion journalism” in Wikipedia.
- “Virtual classroom” in Wikipedia.
- “Are virtual classes classes?” in Amphibian Magazine.
- “Virtual classes are not for everyone” in Infobae (Argentina).
What is an opinion piece?
A opinion piece It is a type of journalistic text in which the author exposes to the reader his personal position regarding a specific topic. These are essentially argumentative texts, which use the information to promote a perspective, that is, to convince the reader to take their point of view. For this reason, they are usually signed and of a personal nature (with the exception of press editorials, which reflect the institutional position of the newspaper), since the reader may agree or disagree with what is in them. it is stated.