The Virtualization of Education

The covid-19 pandemic has forced educators and schools to think outside the box: how to recreate the in-person environment in the virtual space? This has created a number of implications, such as, the loss of peer-to-peer interaction, faculty-student interaction, increased stress, among other things. My colleagues Dr. Morgan Yarker, Dr. Matt Benus, Dr. Meena Kotecha, and I will discuss some of these issues in the upcoming Royal Statistical Society (RSS) conference.

The 2020 RSS Conference

This year’s conference will be entirely online. Our session is called The art of blended and virtual learning in statistics and data science – insights from coronavirus quarantine. We will discuss lessons learned from the covid-19 lockdown. We will also provide tips and tricks, as well as a brand new framework on how to translate in-person teaching into the virtual environment.

Translating in-person teaching

Translating the in-person teaching into the virtual environment is not a straightforward task. Learners may come from a younger generation – used to new technologies and virtual communication. Traditional practices for in-person education, such as teaching long classes may become too tiresome for students in the virtual space.

In addition to that, recreating the school environment, where participants can: talk to each other outside the classroom, have some coffee together, or study together may become a challenge. This can seen as a loss for students, which implicates in students complaining about having to pay the same price of in-person learning for the virtual counterpart (See the New York Times article on this).

Welcome to our workshop session

If you attend the RSS in 2020, please, stop by our workshop. But in case you can’t make it, feel free to get in touch with us. We would really like to hear from you on the challenges of visualizing education.

Also, we will be using the following hashtags to refer to our session in social media: #RSSConf2020 #OnlineStatsEd

Michel d. S. Mesquita

Contributing Author

This topic was originally posted on Michel’s Blog.