The shift to digital learning is the culmination of months’ worth of efforts to prevent Covid19 from spreading across local communities. Many schools where learners attend school physically swapped their traditional classes for virtual classrooms for an indefinite period of time, forcing both learners and teachers to try to become digitally savvy overnight. Teachers turned out to be unprepared to face such an abrupt switch to remote learning. Moreover, especially younger learners struggled with flexibility, resilience and patience while their interest for learning took a significant dive.
We believe that, in a matter of months, the understanding and implementation of learning and mainstream education have fundamentally changed. The traditional ways of speaking, coordinating, inspiring, using a whiteboard and facilitating learning no longer apply in a virtual classroom environment, with hundreds of digital tools at hand. But how do we choose and then, more importantly, use them in order to continue to craft meaningful learning experiences?
Here, at Lukico, we place understanding our learners' needs and matching them with our teachers’ skills, at the core of everything we do.
Learners, key actors in the tuition process, assimilate, perform and progress at a different pace irrespective of their learning environment or their teachers' input. They can make intuitive leaps or employ unusual approaches and strategies to find solutions. Thus, they respond differently to the same learning experience.
At the same time, the traditional classroom was remodeled to fit the living room and education is delivered safely and more comfortably with the help of devices and accounts. Teachers manifest a more fulfilling teaching experience and they thrive as educators when the learning is facilitated in a meaningful, individualized interaction with their learners.
How can we adapt the in-person learning experience to meet the new needs of our learners in this new digital context?
After a thorough research on the most popular, engaging and efficient digital tools for education, we learned that it’s not the tool, but the skills we possess to use them that will make a real difference in learning. Thus, we know how to identify and nurture our teachers’ strengths to help them choose the best tools in the right educational context and to tailor learning plans to meet our learners' needs.
With a learner-centric pedagogical approach, we enhance the acquisition of skills in the context of a scaffolded lesson, engaging learners into making connections with the real world. Our focus is on building up or strengthening competences in terms of what the learner will be able to do at the end of each activity. They partake in a memorable, purposeful experience to expand their curiosity, ask questions and talk about their prior learning.
Teachers continue facilitating meaningful education in one-to-one high quality experiences, providing more thought-provoking discovery opportunities, incorporating inquiry-based projects into their lessons. Teachers are provided with more fine-grained information about learners' progress, which can help them more precisely identify academic strengths and weaknesses, as well as the specific concepts and skills their learners have not yet mastered. Overall, learners' progress is addressed on specific learning standards, each of which describes the knowledge and skills they are expected to acquire.
As a consequence of the online learning experience, here at Lukico, we contribute with a positive impact on our community. 2% of our annual memberships revenue is redirected to non-profit educational projects with the aim of offering resources to develop and perform informative workshops for disadvantaged communities of learners.
At Lukico, together with our broader community comprising teachers and learners, we are all striving to make a real, meaningful impact on our community.
Thus, Lukico, our teachers and learners are all making a real, meaningful impact on our community.
