How technology can enable parents to play a key role in online education

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It seems like yesterday when the early mornings of most parents were filled with the bustle of getting their kids ready for school and dropping them off in time at the bus stop or the school gate. A lot has changed in the last one and a half years. Schools have transformed into eLearning institutions. What seemed like a possibility once is now a reality! Online classes have become the lifeline for students for more than a year.

As children spend considerable time at home, they are constantly under the eyes of their parents. Parents spend more time with their children and can keep a check on the status of their assignments. They want to be informed about their learning so they can witness it and be engaged in the process every day.

For a long time, parents have been the first teachers of children – guiding and raising them, but once formal school starts, the schools take a significant part of this responsibility.

Now with the pandemic, parents are more involved than ever before in the education of their children. It all started with the need for parents to support children during online classes – helping with logging in, using video conferencing apps, submitting assignments, etc. With not much opportunity for peer learning, students are also dependent on parents to complete home assignments and have an exchange of thoughts and ideas with.

However, as things are progressing, shortage of time, difficulty to manage work and a lack of understanding of the material have put a lot of pressure on parents to stay on top of things. While there is a desire from parents to enlist themselves in the learning process, the inability to get a quick understanding of what is going on with children’s learning is putting them at a disadvantage.

Learning institutions should consider parents to be stakeholders and capitalize on their commitment to driving better academic outcomes and close-out learning gaps.

Students learning from home have several privileges like access to the internet, apps, games, and websites of their choice within the comfort of their homes.  However, this also increases the probability of them getting highly distracted during online classes which leads to the perception that online classes aren’t often academically as rigorous as a traditional classroom-based model. Students have a lot more time at their disposal, which in parents’ views is wasted. These perceptions create a lot of friction and constant pressure on the students to rise to the expectations of parents.

Technology can ease some of these problems by providing easily digestible information that helps in setting ground expectations while also making parents feel involved in the day-to-day learning process of their children. A few ways in which this can be achieved has been captured below:

1. Consolidated Dashboard for Scheduled Classes: It provides a quick pulse of what is happening every day with the learning schedule in the online class. It can also mention the assignments to be done and check students’ extent of participation. It will help parents to engage constructively with their children.
2. Tracking App Manager: Technology can be enabled to track the primary app on the children’s screen during online classes. It largely alleviates the anxiety associated with children getting distracted and will help parents to monitor and intervene appropriately.
3. Application for Scanning Documents: In several cases, children need to upload classwork, homework, and assignments at school learning portals. It requires constant juggling of multiple tools. Technology solutions can plugin into synchronous learning platforms for scanning, verifying the quality of the scan, and uploading of the documents at the right place.
4. Using Analytics to share Insights: With learning happening through digital toolsets, there are opportunities to employ technology to track learning activity. From the time students log in, one can track various learning events like the accessed content, time spent on a particular content, class participation, etc. This information can be carefully analyzed to find significant insights into the learning behavior of students. For example, the fact that a child learns faster in a simulation-based approach than the lecture-based approach provides parents the ability to engage with students in their most preferred way of learning.
5. Filling the Learning Gaps: The loss of class time has resulted in a few learning gaps. Technology can enable focused reviews to identify areas in which students need additional support and reinforce the same through micro-learning and continuous short assessments. Parents can be self-assured that pandemic-induced learning gaps are taken care of in one way or the other.

While the above are some examples, the key is to enable parents to understand the part they play in their children’s education. Technology can provide them with enough information to create an amicable environment for students to cope-up with the online schools. It can play a very important role in this entire process making sure the right information is made available at the right time in the right form that is easily comprehendible and actionable by parents.

Viswanath Subramaniam (Vish), Senior Director and Head of EduTech at Happiest Minds is closely invested in the intersection between education and technology. Having worked in the education industry for two decades, Vish has a deep understanding of how digital technologies can be used as a key enabler in facilitating better learning experiences. At Happiest Minds, Vish works with some of the largest EdTech and publishing companies across K12, Higher Education, Professional and corporate learning segments globally to help them leverage digital tech to deliver better learning outcomes.