It's no secret that online learning is incredibly popular the with home school community. For other families, many of them got a peek into the online educational space during the COVID-19 pandemic. While schools struggled to pivot, parents sought third-party educators who could cope with the changing educational needs of their students and supplement the education system. Perhaps for the first time, many families saw the benefits of paraeducational tutoring, which homeschoolers have known for ages.
Much of the time, homeschooling is not a purely individual activity. Homeschoolers seek communities where their children can develop social skills and find peers that can relate to their educational experiences. Before COVID-19, a lot of this happened in person, as online hadn’t yet developed to the robust degree that the pandemic required. Once the pandemic hit, a whole industry emerged and began to thrive, offering a landscape of opportunities for homeschooled children to connect with each other online for social engagement and synergistic learning.
For families choosing to homeschool, online classrooms can be an absolute joy for their students, and the supplemental curriculums they supply can relieve some of the burden of planning out studies. Moreover, they give a professional edge to the learning experience for the student and gives them an additional resource they can rely on with questions.
Online learning organizations like Mentorhood offer a fantastic opportunity to provide a bit of direction to the learning process. With robustly developed curriculums, an online provider can help corroborate or compliment the curriculum or textbook a student is working through. They can provide benchmarks and a time-bound structure to the experience of that grade level, helping a student keep on pace and a parent feel confident that their student is learning all they should. Engaging in a secondary classroom can help validate that what you're learning is on track with the expectations for your grade level.
Moreover, parents are free to choose a service that best reflects their challenges and priorities. While traditional educational schedules are usually inflexible, many homeschoolers benefit from spending more time on areas that are particularly difficult, interesting, or useful, while moving more quickly through topics that come easy. Students may also want a more intense learning experience that cannot be accommodated by traditional education systems that have to balance the needs of vastly diverse learners. With supplemental online learning, parents can select a service that is laser focused on their educational goals, whether that is additional help or an extra challenge.
Many who have not homeschooled often wonder whether the social aspect of in-person schooling is missed. Homeschooling communities can be thriving places, full of rich community. It may be the experience of some homeschool children, however, that they miss learning with peers if they happen to be the odd one out in their age group or if members of their cohorts are all following different curriculums. Online classrooms can be a fantastic layer to the social experience for homeschooled children as they directly reinforce an environment of learning together. Students can meet other students and work on the same material together, fostering solidarity and giving them the opportunity to ask questions and hear others’ questions being answered as well.
As adults, we can relate to this need. Humans are a communal species, and we thrive on the sense of a joint mission. When we become adults and leave school, we often find that that is the very thing we are missing. Schools don’t just offer us friends; they offer us comrades.
A Structural Incentive
Understandably, many are skeptical about the prospect of online learning, as their experience online learning through traditional institutions during COVID-19 was less than ideal. Full-size classrooms went online and tried to do something that they were not designed to do. In contrast, at Mentorhood, online learning (and in-person tutoring) is our specialty. Class length, frequency, and size for each program is optimized for the online space, designed to allow for each student to fully engage. The material is engineered for online transmission with a high degree of interactivity, often involving games, colourful slides, animation, class participation, and so on. The small ratios ensure that student is accountable for their participation, and some students find that they learn even better online as they are able to engage on a very individual level with the teacher.
For traditional schools that tried to go online, virtual learning was a huge disadvantage because they weren’t set up to manage it. But that doesn’t mean that online learning itself has no built-in advantages. By engaging with services that have structured themselves to harness those benefits, students can profit tremendously from a set of unique advantages that go far beyond what can be accomplished in a traditional school. Our homeschool audience knows best that their favourite online classes can be a huge source of confidence, learning, and social joy.