#Remotely meaning series

Remote Teaching is actuated by teachers doing their very best to re-engineer an entire school year’s worth of work into an online space–sometimes multiple online spaces using tools they don’t always get to choose while adjusting it all to be accessible to every single person in the (now remote) classroom. It would, of course, be clumsy and absurd.īut when a school is forced to ‘move’ the ‘class’ online for an extended period of time, compromises have to be made.

#Remotely meaning series

Imagine how difficult–and not ideal–it would be to take an online course and almost overnight turn it into a series of in-person units, lessons, and activities. Courses developed to be used online can be created to take advantage of the benefits of online learning while adjusting for its disadvantages. Of course, this is not ideal and illustrates the shortcoming. In a very short period of time, schools had to shoe-horn their existing teaching and learning process and all of its parts (i.e., curriculum, assessment, and instruction) into an eLearning space.

Most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic emphasized remote teaching and learning as an effect of school closings globally. Why not just call it online learning or ‘Distance Learning’? Implied in the phrase ‘Remote Learning’ is the temporary nature of it–that there was some need to take a traditional classroom and move it online. While it’s clear what the word ‘remote’ means, there’s more to this to understand. Remote learning, then, is a kind of Synchronous Learning. In The Difference Between Synchronous And Asynchronous Learning, we said that “asynchronous and synchronous learning are thought of as types of eLearning, but most physical, brick-and-mortar classrooms are technically ‘synchronous’ while a self-directed learning environment where students learned ‘independently’ of one another–especially the same content–would technically be asynchronous.” While there isn’t one single definition for remote learning any more than there is a single definition for ‘learning through play,’ the big idea is generally consistent: a temporary move from face-to-face teaching in a physical classroom to a digital space accessed ‘remotely.’įor teachers, this means a reconfiguring units and lessons to work with online teaching strategies while developing new learning materials optimized for learning online.įor students, this means you’ll be using new tools to learn, more or less, the same ‘stuff.’ There are pros and cons to this, as you might have already learned. Remote learning is the practice of moving a formerly in-person learning process online–usually temporarily.