The pandemic brought with it, among other things, the forced arrival of remote education. During 2020, the vast majority of educational establishments around the world operated with online classes. While it is true that this brings with it some benefits, it is also difficult to put it on the same level as face-to-face education.
Indeed, the following elements are praised as some of the attributes of remote education:
It can work asynchronously: You have the freedom to choose your study schedule, which allows you to do other activities such as working and studying.
There are no geographical barriers: The person can be anywhere in the world.
Autonomous training: Promotes the development of the student's ability to analyze, research and work individually.
Saving money: These types of classes are usually cheaper than in-person classes, philippine pie telegram as they reduce the cost of materials and transportation.
However, the effects that have appeared on children and adolescents due to having remote classes for a large part of these two years are evident. Therefore, the urgency of resuming in-person classes in the classrooms since not having classes in person leads to asymmetric situations in the opportunities that students have: inequality increases in the most vulnerable, in those who do not have connectivity, who have a smaller home, parents or responsible adults with less cultural capital, with less capacity to contribute or support, or even those where responsible adults have to go out to work.
Furthermore, emphasis should be placed on the differences between the socioeconomic level of educational establishments and the importance of promptly resuming in-person classes, since a school with more socioeconomic precariousness only has the possibility of something asynchronous, compared to schools with better conditions, where 100% of students are connected. This has demonstrated the social and economic inequality that we have in the country, which is why much has been lost in terms of developing fundamental skills and abilities that only live contact and socialization in the educational community provide.
Children and young people need to have social contact. Human beings are social, during the evolutionary process we have developed skills that allow us to create a community, and that also gives us security, we also learn by imitation, we learn from others, and in a space where you are alone in front of a computer, that is lost.
The problem, by the way, is not online education itself, but the exclusion of in-person classes, and, worse still, the extent of the damage that absence from classrooms may have caused to children and young people is still unknown. Mechanisms will have to be developed not only at an educational level, but also from the psychology and social skills of children to deal with it, since the exclusive online system can impact the development of social, communication, and teamwork skills.
In the case of technical education - of great importance to Simon of Cyrene - remote education has been a challenge, since empirical training has the added value of putting the emphasis on "doing", constituting a greater challenge for institutions, students and teachers. This is because one of the characteristics of technical-professional training centers is their practical training based on specialties and their pedagogical model based on work competencies, as well as those activities that require land, workshops and laboratories.
With the arrival of online classes, teachers have had to adapt their teaching resources and teaching materials, as well as prioritize content and teaching resources to achieve student learning objectives. From the student perspective, they have had to develop skills in terms of self-regulation, self-learning, planning study times and deploying metacognitive processes.
For all the above reasons, there is no doubt that face-to-face learning is crucial in the learning process, not only for the mere delivery of content, but fundamentally for those intangibles - such as sociability - that face-to-face learning provides. In the case of Technical Professional education, its orientation towards the work environment makes remote education particularly difficult, since fieldwork is a substantial pillar of training.
We hope that, after two long years, in-person classes will once again become the priority in the country, without leaving aside - obviously - the advances that remote classes have brought and which are undoubtedly a valuable complement to education.