Teaching & Learning from Home

Education is not an easy endeavor. Learning, designing a lesson, standing in front of eager or anxious faces, all of these activities are time consuming and difficult. Educators spend countless hours, not only teaching, but preparing lessons and grading student work. That has been the life of most educators for the past few hundred years. Then the world changed. The current COVID-19 pandemic required everyone to socially isolate. Overnight, teaching and learning became an online activity.

For the past 150 years, education was moving in this direction. First with correspondence classes, then radio course, and eventually courses were delivered via television. Then, 39 years ago, Western Behavioral Sciences Institute offered the first online college program through its School of Management and Strategic Studies.

Today, students and instructors at Lower Columbia College, are participating in what is most arguably the single largest socio-educational experiment on distance education ever conducted. Students and teachers found themselves in an online education environment overnight. Learning how to teach and learn in a fully online environment. Learning about synchronous and asynchronous delivery. Using products like Zoom. Listening to children, dogs, cats, and lawnmowers while they were attending an online lecture or listening to a prerecorded video. But it didn’t end there.

Everyone’s world had been turned upside down. Students and teachers with children at home, children who were also learning at home and had no daycare resources, where now having to share computer time with the whole family. Students and teachers were online early in the morning or late at night when young children were asleep. Everyone was competing for bandwidth. Bandwidth necessary to do their job, entertain their families, play games, and to teach and learn. What is the future for online education? For now, we can only expect that education is forever changed.

So, pull up your favorite chair and join Laurie, James, Chris, Catie, Mindy, and Adam – just a few of our excellent educators, as we take a tour of the home offices behind their online classrooms.