Parents, students, and teachers all are concerned if or whether schools will open. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the teaching and learning process has transformed where educators and students ventured into academic cyberspace. According to pediatrics and virologists, being physically present in educational institutions is not ideal in the current scenario. Thus, many governments took to alternative teaching methods from the traditional ones to keep up with social distancing. And that alternative technique is remote education through online schooling. This is why large-scale effort is being applied to utilize technical support to successfully execute remote learning. Influence distance education during the pandemic, thereby evolving the educational system quickly. Educational software is being developed for teaching and self-learning.
Benefits of education software
Educational software helps with integrating multimedia content to offer the users a higher level of interactivity. Graphical images, pictures, and sounds are some of the multimedia content that helps students engage in their lessons. Online education software helps educators to better connect with the students. The teachers can help students keep their interest in the lesson by providing them with real-time content. So, they would not have to search for videos or other online-based content related to the lesson themselves. With the help of virtual classroom software, software development promotes a productive learning environment.
Remote learning software
Remote learning is when the learner and the instructor engage with the source of information while being separated by time and distance and can’t physically meet in a traditional classroom setting. Thus, remote learning software has a set of tools that enable the educators to give lessons & assignments. Even take attendance and grade the students without having to communicate in person. This way, software development allows learning tools to bridge the communication gap between not only students and teachers but with the students’ parents too.
The difference between online learning and remote learning
Online learning and remote learning might share many similar scenarios, but they are not alike. Both learning system provides the benefit of getting an education from home, essentially removing the need of commuting to school. While remote learning has more liability and requires scheduled class times, online learning can be more flexible but requires the learners to be self-motivated. Remote teaching would require virtual classroom software to give lectures, doing assignments, do less group work and discussion boards. Basically moving content to cyberspace. Online education uses interactive modules, assessments on the basis of real-time scenarios. Discussion forums that are designed for discussing and solving issues, etc., which basically provides synchronous learning sessions.
In order to select the right learning software, you should know about the differences between both systems apart from the learning processes.
Location
In online learning, the students and the instructor can be together in the classroom. But they would have to work on lessons and assessments they receive from video content or presentations of the online course platform. However, in remote learning, the learning process is not conducted from the same location since the teacher and students are from different locations. In this system, the teacher would assign the task and even evaluate them digitally.
Interaction
In online learning, the teachers and students can communicate in person during classes. However, in the remote learning process, there would not be any in-person communication between the teachers and students. Although, a teacher can make interactions with the students via messages, video calls, and discussion boards.
Purpose
The primary purpose of the online learning process is to provide the users a high-quality learning experience. While conducting classes by utilizing internet technologies. But with remote learning, the teacher assigns tasks digitally, using the internet and various communication tools and software. Almost all remote education tools differ according to their purpose, functionality, and end-users.
Various remote education tools:
There are various educational techniques and tools to efficiently help students and teachers conduct a proper online classroom session. Few such examples are mentioned below:
Virtual (Digital) classrooms
Virtual classrooms are some online learning environment, which allows teachers and students to communicate, interact, collaborate, and explain ideas. With the utilization of virtual classroom software, the students are able to contact their teachers from any location as long as they both have a reliable internet connection. The software enables the classroom to engage in assignments that involve group projects. The teacher uses the virtual classroom for distributing assignments among the pupils, collecting them, grading them, and then sharing feedback with the students and even their parents. The key distinction of virtual classrooms is that the live learning process is carried out in a synchronized manner.
Video streaming platforms
Video streaming is web-casted over the internet, which enables the contents to be accessible for the learners in a synchronous manner. Software development allows the video streaming services for the teacher to teach a lesson while students would watch them in real-time. The tech companies develop professional streaming platforms so the students can check the live videos over their sites. This concept is very much suitable for education broadcasts such as conferences and lectures, irrespective of the student and lectures’ location. These platforms use high-quality technologies that allow learning to not stay restricted to the physical limits of a classroom in a particular location in this present-day digital era.
Assignment software applications
Assignment applications are just for sharing assignments among students, but to track them too. Due to the implementation of software development strategies, all the student, teacher, and course details can be stored in the application conveniently. This way, the teacher and students don’t have to go anywhere to obtain those data since you can access them anytime and anywhere. Using these assignment applications, the teacher determines if the students understood the lecture or not. In those platforms, the educator can design assignments or quizzes, and the learner can easily enter their answers into them and share. Some applications can even automatically generate corresponding reports. Students just have to type up their responses to the questions and upload their answers to the platform. Once all the assignments are submitted, the teacher can review them and include the students’ grades right in the auto-generated reports. The report would show them the pending and submitted assignments, submission details, and marks rewarded to the answer.
Feedback tools
In remote learning, feedback tools are really handy to encourage students to reflect on their learning process. The teacher has to keep their feedback appropriate and reflective so the student could understand what they need to do for their improvement. Using the feedback tools, the teacher can communicate with students as well as parents if a student’s academic performance is weak. They can attach the student’s recent works and suggest some improvement tactics using the feedback tools. The teacher can also assign the students to meet as groups at specific times to perform collaborative tasks. There they can provide feedback on one another’s work. Tech companies can also provide customization features to make changes in the platforms. They can also develop a school mobile app, so the institution can add the logo, thereby branding the application.
Learning management systems (LMS)
Academic institutes use learning management systems, which is a software application for the administration, to do documentation, tracking, reporting, and delivering educational courses. This allows the educators to store information about their students, their grades, and other associative information in the system for future requirements. The concept of a learning management system for an online schooling platform originally emerges from e-learning. The LMS can organize all the e-learning content in one location, provide unlimited access to e-learning materials, and easily track the learner’s progress and performance in a user-oriented way. This remote education tool is generally operated by instructors, students, and administrators.
Use of Software development for remote education tools
Software development strategies are the primary curating information that makes innovative changes in education technologies. Whether you are looking for a streaming video tool, assignment software, or an all-in-one solution to conduct remote education, tech companies work on developing those software platforms to make the teaching process more helpful for the teachers while being interesting for the students.
Interactive video player
Interactive video players are developed with non-linear, digital video technology, which allows the instructor to share their on-screen contents as well as stream other media files. This way, the students would have their full attention on their educational materials. They can even review each section of the video file as many times as they wish to. Some video player for remote education also permits students to switch among video feeds, make time-stamped notes. A school can develop their own online schooling mobile apps where the teachers can develop their own interactive video and can add clickable elements to make the interactivity clear and concise.
LMSs integrations
LMSs integrations with other remote learning applications are possible all because of the use of advanced technologies in the software development stage of these platforms. This development enables the learning management systems to be compatible with other applications. The teacher, student, or school administrators would be able to move data among the platforms to automate tasks and gain access to integrated reporting for online schooling. This remote learning tool can almost provide access to all types of remote education tools. The teacher can offer dynamic videos for interactive distance learning, where the students can share, comment, and give feedback within the video timelines. Teachers can quiz their students through this system integration along the video timeline; the platform can also automatically save the quiz results. The software can also authorize the teacher to analyze a student’s viewing information. In case the teacher needs instant access to assessment data, the system integration can even measure a student’s knowledge growth and map curriculum.
Media content sharing
Media content sharing tools are one of the most innovative and useful tools developed by the software company. These media content-sharing platforms are abundantly used for conducting remote learning. This tool enables the teachers to easily add media content to their assignments, so the students can gain more in-depth knowledge on certain topics. Some platforms can support videos and document files of any format to be shared. Teachers can send the media materials while keeping parents in the loop so that they can stay informed on what their kids are doing.
Built-in calendar
With the help of software development, LMSs of online schooling mobile apps can make calendar integration. This integration allows the teacher to schedule school events in the application to make sure both students and their parents would stay aware of them. The teachers can set due dates in the built-in calendars to ensure that the students would complete and submit their assignments on time and stay updated with various activities. In remote education, calendar integration makes it easy for everyone to track and adjust the scope of the learning process.
User Monitoring
Monitoring a student is essential, especially if they are attending remote education. A teacher has to go through curriculum-based testing, conduct frequent evaluations, formative assessments, and make observations & interactions with the student in a traditional classroom setting. All these processes are also possible with monitoring tools in the LMS for the online course platform. The teacher can easily access the web-based admin panel to conduct the assessment. They can even control the way the student and parent carry out the communication and which type of information families are getting.
Student behavior management
Student behavior management is a process where the teachers support their learners to make fruitful choices that are associated with their learning process. It is a form of disciplining students. This may seem impossible with online schooling, but with the implementation of software development to a school’s LMS, the teacher would be able to manage and monitor the student’s behavior. Whichever students act promising with their academic performance, the teacher can award them.
Real-time grading
Grading is naturally a delayed process in the traditional academic session. But with an online schooling platform, sharing assignments and grading is more convenient due to the LMS software’s systematic approach. The teacher can review the assignments and quizzes once the students submit their answers and make real-time grading, so both the students and parents become aware of the scoring right away.
Thanks to these remote education tools, the teacher can make the educational process more effective and engaging. Advancement in Software development for promoting education has made the learning process of remote education more interactive, transparent, and relevant.
Are you hoping to find the perfect online schooling solution for your academic institution? You can get in touch with Enozom Software for remote learning software development.