After the pandemic, the nationwide introduction of mass online tutoring was expected to address deepening educational disparities. It also attracted attention for its ability to provide high-quality education, especially STEM education in high school, to areas with a shortage of teachers.
However, as of 2023, the effectiveness of mass tutoring is gradually declining due to low student participation rates and skepticism from educational authorities about the actual educational effectiveness of online mass tutoring. Some school districts are choosing to conduct a large amount of tutoring in-person. So, is the ineffectiveness of mass tutoring simply due to its online nature?
To answer this question, it is important to investigate the conditions that enable online teaching and explore how EdTech technologies can address educational disparities and teacher shortages in the education system.
Currently, most online intensive education services do not provide students with the same quality of instruction as face-to-face classes. To effectively implement high-dose education, teachers should not only explain and repeat, but also encourage students to play a central role, solve various examples on their own, and explain their understanding to the teacher. We need to find new ways to help students understand difficult concepts, such as Be educationally effective. Especially for students with low academic ability, students themselves often do not know where they need to improve, so it is important to diagnose what they do not understand through various questions.
However, attempting to conduct such “advanced communication” using only 2D video, or showing pre-made lesson slides through screen sharing, will hinder student participation and make it difficult to achieve the lesson goals. It can be difficult. So what additional elements are needed to enable frequent problem-solving communication in online education?
Throughout history, humans have used a variety of media, including stone, wood, paper, and blackboards, to explain and learn abstract concepts and complex knowledge. Blackboards are often used by teachers to explain concepts, but they also serve as a medium for students to come forward and problem solve to ensure understanding. In one-on-one tutoring, blank notes between teacher and student replace the blackboard. Even students who don’t ask questions because they don’t know what they don’t understand can reveal their true abilities to their teachers by explaining what they’ve learned to their teachers and classmates, and by trying to solve problems. In this way, teachers can help students achieve lesson goals by providing more diverse examples and problem solving.
During the recent pandemic, mass online tutoring was not well-received by teachers, students, and parents for a variety of reasons. Teachers have had to rely on their voices to adapt to unfamiliar remote teaching methods to capture students’ attention and motivate students who only appear on video. However, despite the teachers’ efforts, students remained passive participants and were not able to actively participate in the lessons as they could in a physical classroom. Observing these unengaged students, parents have come to believe that offline classes are more effective.
In other words, in order to achieve online education equivalent to offline education, a whiteboard function that replaces a blackboard is not essential, but essential. This whiteboard should not be just a rudimentary function that allows you to draw rough underlines and lines with your mouse. It should provide a writing experience similar to using a pencil on paper or writing graphs and equations with chalk, recreating the feeling of taking notes offline. Only then can online education achieve the same quality as offline.
You might think that typical video conferencing solutions already have whiteboard functionality. However, the standard whiteboard feature is intended to aid business meetings rather than a classroom whiteboard. There are clear differences between educational whiteboards and business whiteboards.
According to operational data from page callprovides whiteboard functionality to educational companies, and teachers and students enter approximately 20,000 strokes of communication data during an average 60-minute online class. Unlike business whiteboards that simply underline or circle presentation materials, educational whiteboards require real-time synchronization and graphical representation of large amounts of input data that is rapidly generated between participants. Furthermore, implementing such real-time communication and graphics rendering functions on tablet devices is quite difficult because the hardware capabilities are lower than on PCs, and pushing performance to its limits will cause problems with battery consumption and heat generation. technical challenges arise. However, just like offline classes, only when teachers and students can communicate effectively in this way can we feel that the quality of online education has improved.
Recently, South Korea is one of the most competitive countries in the world in terms of educational services. Soltab Our services have grown significantly. There are no video capabilities and communication between teachers and students relies solely on audio and whiteboards. Still, it continues to grow, attracting thousands of users across the country. Seoltab has grown into an online education service that students and teachers love. Students and teachers use tablets with stylus input capabilities, so they can communicate effectively in a non-face-to-face environment, as if they were in a meeting, as if they were explaining things on a practice sheet. . Personally.
Disappointed with mass online tutoring, some school districts are moving back to offline instruction. As it becomes more difficult to find teachers who can adequately cover the subjects and study time required by students, the disadvantages of online learning will gradually fade, leading to a shift in attention to online education. This transition will be accelerated by advances in AI technology, the proliferation of digital textbooks, and the emergence of vertically integrated super apps for edtech solutions. However, the starting point for this change is the digital transformation of the blackboard, which has been a core element of the education sector for millennia.
