Post Pandemic Education

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged educators to consider new and innovative ways to educate students. Most courses were traditionally taught in a face-to-face environment in years prior to the pandemic. There is a lot of research to support the effectiveness of modern teaching methods. As an educational leader, I supported our staff members to enhance the curriculum adopted by our district by incorporating the following strategies: project-based learning (PBL), flipped classroom, virtual/hybrid learning, and gamification as effective methods for teaching in the twenty-first century.

Project Based Learning

In Jonathan Kracijk’s Project Based Learning, project-based learning is becoming increasingly popular at all stages of public schools and within colleges. Students are commonly bored by traditional teaching methods, but most people believe that students should be able to learn even while being disengaged. As an alternative, in project-based learning, students are able to work in the way adults would learn in the real world. Students select a problem to study and figure out and they get information from several places to discover the best solution. Compared to students who received traditional instruction, students that engaged in the project-based learning curriculum “demonstrated positive affective benefits and significant gains in content knowledge as well as historical thinking skills.”

Flipped Classroom

Flipped Classroom is an approach where students are allowed to reverse or switch roles and become the teacher. This approach is based on the behaviorist theory and videos, lectures, and activities are combined to create an independent study of sorts for groups of students. According to Impact on Flipped Classroom on Low-Income Students, compared to an asynchronous online class, students could be synchronous at the team level to complete their assignment any time prior to the deadline such that they could work during class time but they were not required to work at that time. “A universal concern about cooperative learning is the possible existence of “hitchhikers,” team members who fail to fulfill their team responsibilities but get the same high grade as their more responsible teammates.”

Virtual/Hybrid Learning

Hybrid courses are those that combine the traditional learning environment with distance education components. According to Captivating the Crowd with Hybrid Teaching, the authors state that “prioritizing standardization with regard to instructional design and student experience will become more important as course modalities hybridize and proliferate and students are constantly involving themselves in the latest and greatest technology, as evident on most college campuses they can be seen listening to their iPods, reading their smart phones, or logging in wirelessly with their laptop computers; the technology allows for faculty to reach students in a manner that is common to them.” Through a survey, students were asked to evaluate the seven student learning outcomes articulated by the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) during the face-to-face and virtual portions of the courses and survey results showed that students rated their learning outcomes higher for face-to-face instruction for all course types and levels. It is widely selfreported that the remote students feel isolated from the in-person team members due to a lack of social presence. The disadvantages of synchronous online learning include the learning process, technology issues, and distraction. Social isolation, lack of interaction, and technology issue are a few disadvantages related to asynchronous online learning. According to research , student engagement is improved with the hybrid approach and “the in-person students also complain about less engagement from the remote students.”

Gamification

According to Making the Connection: Encouraging Technologyspecific Reading Skills Through Structured Readings of Texts, students grew up with technology, play video games, have an even shorter attention span, and prefer engaged and interactive learning; gamification, also known as serious game, is the use of game thinking and game mechanisms in a non-game context to engage learners in solving problems. Elementary, middle, and high school students are often encapsulated by their devices such as PlayStations, Nintendo Switch, and more and by nature would become excited by the ability to learn through games. Educators may use games to motivate students and build relationships while helping students to learn in a creative way.

Conclusion

In conclusion, educators face multiple challenges while teaching variations of delivery methods in their courses. Some of the challenges are course content design, learning new technologies and LMSs, and effective communication, (Eggleston, A. G., & Rabb, R. J. (2021, July). Over the past decade, we, as a society, have been growing accustomed to consuming bite-sized chunks of information; it is delivered to us over mobile devices with considerably smaller viewing screens than even laptop systems (Chandra, V. J. 2020). What is necessary to create a change is for the department or college, to have a comprehensive and integrated set of components: clearly articulated expectations, opportunities for faculty to learn about new pedagogies, and an equitable reward system, (Akili, 2012).