Empowering Student Voices: Navigating Education in the Age of COVID-19

We are immersed in a century-defining moment right now. There is no hiding the fact that we are in a tough period and we want to do our best to maintain our focus, sanity, and ability to be there for one another. But this can also lead to a generation of students who will help to transform how we think about the world. From collaboration platforms to network resilience, choices made now will impact workflow, processes, and expectations for the future post-COVID-19, especially for educational institutions.

Every choice matters. Every opinion counts

This will produce a real need for us to empathize on every opinion from students on how they feel about this drastic technological shift in their way of learning. So, we can provide a better platform for them to keep learning.

Never stop learning, for when we stop learning, we stop growing

The shift to online teaching and assessment has underlined just how difficult this vital, but time-consuming, task has become. Right now, video-conferencing apps like Zoom and Webex are throwing universities a lifeline. However, lecturers are still struggling to maintain the same depth of engagement with students they could have in a classroom setting.

Is it time to reconsider the paradigm of teacher-student feedback altogether in these strange times of enforced distance learning? So, what are the other kinds of challenges in which we will get entangled due to COVID-19?

Challenges

1. Students are unable to focus on learning and have high levels of anxiety.
2. Students’ loneliness is increasing even though digital tools are offering ways to connect.
3. Parents are overwhelmed with the plethora of resources being shared without steps on how to use them.
4. Parents are planning daily activities but are not trying innovative educational practices at home.
5. Parents and teachers are lacking resources to discuss pandemics and uncertainties with their learners.
6. Students are worried about having an unnatural closure to the academic year.
7. Lecturers are scrambling to go digital without much support & training.
8. Difficulties maintaining a positive student-lecturer parent relationship.
9. Collaborative play based learning is challenging online.

To outsmart this disconnected model and overcome these challenges, educational institutes must access their current systems’ potentials. They should make a multifaceted digital learning approach that addresses both short and long term goals while adjusting the risks. The journey of empowering a full-scale digital transformation at short notice isn’t a cakewalk, it is indeed a challenge, but if implemented right, it can work wonders for students.

One can identify these problems only when they’re heard

So, we should be using some medium for them to express their thoughts, gather the data, take them seriously and actually work on it. When using perception data to provide educators with feedback or to chart progress against a strategic plan, it’s important to have confidence in the quality of the data collected. Students, when surveyed correctly, can identify potential issues that you as an educator may be unaware of. Through surveys, many schools have been made aware of student challenges and have developed programs to support students during Covid-19.

Dropthought lets you centralize all the feedback you collect on one single platform for the student feedback data to make sense. With holistic insights by your side, it naturally becomes easier to use feedback data in process improvement.

Let’s give them a voice. Let’s hear them. We’re all in this together.

Education cannot wait

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