The recent pandemic, and more specifically the hard lockdown, forced many parents to consider home-schooling their children via online schooling platforms.
Managing Director at ADvTECH Niche Schools, Chris van Niekerk, said they have also seen an explosion of new online "schools", where in many instances, previous non-entities in education miraculously became overnight experts in matters of learning pedagogy, curriculum, and child development.
"As a previous school principal and now MD of a group of schools, I have watched this process of education evolution, on the one end and shameless opportunism on the other, unfold with much interest. There is a sense of excitement at the possibilities inherent in intelligent online school design, but an equal feeling of dread, seeing the irresponsible opportunism that too many unsuspecting parents and children are subject to in this space," he said.
As the country moves out of the Covid-19 pandemic and children return to school, many principals have reported that the damage done by some of the more unscrupulous online schools is evident.
Van Niekerk said children had either fallen behind, were given inflated marks that did not reflect their actual ability or both.
He added that in most instances, the children are from online schools that have become well-known during the past two years, not because of reputation but because of their marketing efforts.
"These schools make bold claims about liberating education or being a real school in your home, but the evidence point to the contrary, with disappointed and disillusioned children who have been let down by opportunists," he warned.
Van Niekerk said from his experience in brick-and-mortar education, as well as overseeing a home-schooling offering as part of the ADvTECH group of school brands, he would like to encourage parents to look for the following two salient red flags when considering online home-schooling:
Emulating a brick-and-mortar school timetable
“What many schools, including the brands I work with, did during the hard lockdown, was to switch to an online timetable that emulated the same daily learning routine that the children would have had at a traditional school. This was an acceptable short-term solution given the context of a hard lockdown,” van Niekerk said.
However, he added that to take that concept and now continue to promote this as a real school at home is irresponsible and educationally unsound. He said the thought of hundreds of South African children placed in front of computer screens for six hours a day for the duration of their young lives, instead of proper holistic schooling, should be terrifying to any objective observer. “Parents must never put their children through this for any other purpose other than dealing with a temporary emergency.”
Record lessons with 'help'
As far as education goes, the only thing worse than a child sitting and watching lessons on a screen for six hours a day would be if these lessons weren’t even live. Imagine a 14-year-old child, alone at home with nothing more for educational stimulation than organised recordings of school lessons!
The service providers selling these products suggest that teenagers have the discipline to manage their own school days with the help of a mentor whose role is to effectively curate learning content to the child. In reality, the children get deprived of any and all real-time collaborative learning, and are expected to equip themselves for adulthood from the isolated confines of their rooms. Again, this is an objectively wrong-headed approach.
Van Niekerk said online home-schooling is possible and has many exciting prospects of improving family and community life.
"It also opens many exciting educational avenues of real individualised learning paths with all the complexity it implies. However, for this to be true, we as parents must first accept that children, of any age, cannot simply be placed in front of a screen for hours on end with the fantasy that they will gain the life experiences required to mould them into well-rounded adults," he said.
If your online home-school curriculum provider does not offer an integrated, well balanced, and intelligent approach to screen time and green time, a clear and evidenced-based methodology to enable individual learning paths, and does not understand and address the integrated social needs of your child, then van Niekerk strongly advise parents not to put their children through the torture of isolation and inappropriate learning pedagogy, regardless of how flashy it may be packaged.
"You have the right to expect more from this prevailing market, and the better offerings are indeed out there," he said.
IOL