Education Shortform
Online Learning
Bitesized…
With the rise of the internet came the rise of online education, with existing distance learning offerings (such as the UK’s Open University) switching from postal courses to online platforms.
Mainstream university and college courses began adding VLAs to complement their face-to-face teaching. And even before the Covid-19 pandemic, most high schools had already begun using some kind of online platform to support classroom learning.
More broadly, education-focused websites and apps have sprung up, and new ones keep appearing. Some of the biggest worldwide are Quizlet, Udemy and Duolingo.
In this context, digital literacy is commonly seen as a core skill for young people, and homework activities often draw heavily on online sources (which is, of course, not always a good thing!).
Some authorities have introduced a one-laptop-per-child policy, in part to tackle the inequity that arises when some families have computers and others don’t.
However, there is pretty limited evidence for such policies boosting attainment, and some cognitive scientists have argued that it would be better for education to prioritise evidence-based teaching practices instead.
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This is one of a series of shortform education articles. You can download a simplified summary of my ‘A–Z of Educational concepts’ here.
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