 Rise of Online Learning During the Covid-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has locked the doors of organizations, markets, factories, schools, and even universities around the globe. In 2020, people were forced to stay inside their homes.
As we have entered 2021, the world is gradually moving back to business as usual. However, in the extended lockdown, students are witnessing a positive trend as online learning platforms have emerged and opened hundreds of windows for learning.
Massive Rise in Virtual Education
Online learning has come a long way in the past year. More and more students want to engage in meaningful learning using virtual educational platforms. School and university students are more inclined towards academic courses while professional workers want to utilize their time to progress their knowledge and skills.
Challenges Faced During Online Learning
With changes comes challenges. Online learning, too, caused a lot of unexpected challenges for both instructors and students. Switching from a physical school environment to home-based learning came as a blow to the community that was not prepared for it. Let’s look into some of the common challenges that were faced in virtual learning.
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Rise in Cheating
The control of students has lessened with the introduction of e-learning. Teachers are unable to supervise them as they could before. This has given students the opportunity to copy work from the internet without putting in their own efforts. Although plagiarism check tools have proven to be a constant companion during this phase, which we will read in detail in the following article, students’ ethics have taken a turn.
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Distractions and Time Management
While studying at home, the distraction from students’ home is more than usual with the family and younger siblings around. School and university operate in a timely manner, which is difficult to maintain at home. The home-based distractions aggravate the problems of managing time.
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Adapting Unfamiliar Technology
Given the transition to online classes, students have taken the time to adopt digital educational tools and courses. Not every student or parent is tech-savvy, and adapting to technology is taking their efforts and time. Moreover, most students are unaware of what digital courses they can use to enhance and improve their learning.
Digital Tools to Aid Online Learning During COVID-19 Pandemic
Hundreds of digital tools have been created with the purpose of giving students the autonomy to study online. With these tools, they can improve their learning. Some of them are as follows.
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Plagiarism Checkers
These are utilities for both students and teachers. The plagiarism checker is designed to detect and highlight duplicate content in your work. A plagiarism check can compare your work with billions of online and offline databases for similarity.
Students can use the duplication checker to check plagiarism in their assignments before submitting them. While on the other hand, teachers can ensure that the submitted work is free of duplication by passing it through an online plagiarism checker.
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Grammar Check Software
Not having a teacher by your side to correct your grammatical mistakes can cause problems. At school, teachers could at least take a quick review of your work and point out spelling and grammatical mistakes, if any.
Grammar checking software has changed the way students study at home. They can pass their work through these advanced tools that highlight and auto-corrects such mistakes. Most tools even provide reasons for the mistakes you have made.
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Online Scheduling Tools
Time management has been seen as the main problem in an online learning environment. This can be well managed by online scheduling tools. With such programs, you can create your study schedule and also add deadlines. These apps are a great way to organize all your daily tasks as per priority. You receive a notification every time a new task comes up or when your deadline is near. You can even set up extra reminders to help you know what is next on your calendar.
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Note-Taking Software
In an online class setting, you have to watch videos and PowerPoint presentations. It gets overwhelming compared to physical learning. This limits you from noting down new vocabulary and important points. To compile your learning from online classes, you can access speech to text note-taking software. These are amazing tools that dictate notes for you. In this way, you can keep your hands free and concentrate on the lecture while the software takes notes for you.
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Online Collaboration Apps for Students
At school and university, you could collaborate with your friends and study as a group. With online learning, group studying has taken a back seat. What if I tell you that even virtually, you can set up a group study program? Yes, there are apps that allow you to collaborate with others and share important documents, presentations, slides, and sheets. These files can be edited by multiple users at a time.
Conclusion
These are some of the crucial digital tools that a student should have to ace their learning during COVID-19. Whether you opt for plagiarism check software or online scheduling tools, make sure to pick the right software that can provide you the most benefit.
