Opinion Article on Virtual Classes

Opinion Article on Virtual Classes

Virtual classes: a necessary evil or a new paradigm?

An important debate has taken place within the Covid19 pandemic and has to do with distance education or virtual education. It is an idea that has many detractors at the same time that many promoters, although in reality those who defend it, for the most part, consider it little more than a necessary evil. Does that mean that when, eventually, the pandemic ends, everything will go back to the way it was before? It is very unlikely.

The idea of ​​taking advantage of the new information and telecommunications technologies to lead education to a 2.0 model is not new. For decades, different educational schemes have been designed to attend to the population from remote areas, what we have known as “distance education”: first it was by post, then by electronic messaging, and there is even now a wide offer of internet portals with more or less formal courses, in which the video recording of a class or a teacher is proposed to us as a substitute for the real experience of the classroom. Useful dynamics, of course, but more as a complement to the educational system than as its true replacement.

But it is also true that never before had there been the possibility of broadcasting a class live and massively through the internet. Tech giants compete fiercely with each other to provide the service more stable, more dynamic, better able to emulate presence, and with often amazing results. But the online educational experience still has many drawbacks.

On the one hand, it is uncomfortable, extremely sedentary and confines the student to the screen, one more at a time when the effects of the information bombardment and the abusive use of information are beginning to be felt. gadgets electronic devices in our children: their limited attention span, their tendency to disperse, their chronic boredom with the real world.

The school, seen like this, represented an oasis of reality and presence in the face of so much virtual experience of the world: a place in which to learn, between other things, to deal face to face with the other, to be part of a group, to connect with others without the need for any intermediary other than language verbal. Are these tools so obsolete that we can do without them in the future?

It is also true, no doubt, that the world of work is increasingly betting on the virtual and the computer science, and that perhaps that tendency to autism that many parents observe with concern in their children is an adaptive response to a world of overload informative.

The problem, if anything, is that those same parents seem more willing to blame vaccines (the ones that save their lives! life to their children!) than to the fact that, from an early age, they accustomed the child to being distracted from the real world through a screen.

In fact, there is the explanation of why so many parents are uncomfortable with virtual classes: because they cannot separate the world home from the daily world, virtual classes force them in many cases to assume a leading role in the formation of their sons. They can no longer be content with going to the school to complain when their child has a problem, such as customers dissatisfied with a service provided by a company. With virtual classes they are forced, paradoxically, to be present.

The future will tell if the school will also go virtual, and to what extent. Sooner or later, the pandemic will pass and we will have to decide how far we want to participate in the formal education of our children. But the school will continue there, serving those who cannot even consider this dilemma, for whom presence is mandatory, either due to lack of technological or monetary resources (assuming that both are not the same thing), or because their parents do not have the dubious benefit of the "home office ". The pandemic will pass, and we will see.

References:

• "Opinion journalism" in Wikipedia.
• "Virtual classroom" in Wikipedia.
• "Are virtual classes classes?" on Amphibian Magazine.
• "Virtual classes are not for everyone" in Infobae (Argentina).

What is an opinion piece?

A opinion piece it's a kind of journalistic text in which the author exposes to the reader his personal position on a specific topic. It is essentially about argumentative textsThey use the information to promote a perspective, that is, to convince the reader to take their point of view. For this reason, they are usually signed and of a personal nature (with the exception of press editorials, in which reflects the institutional position of the newspaper), since the reader may agree or disagree with what is stated in them. it states.

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