Hong Kong Government just initiated a mandate to suspend face-to-face classes by Friday for all kindergartens and primary schools. This news doesn’t give school systems a lot of time to change delivery modes from offline to online but luckily for at least my child, his school is using an LMS to facility their services.
As a parent, I am not worried about the unknown. I know what my kid will do and how he will do them for his online lessons. I know where he will check his schedule, how he will attend his lessons, where to find his homework assignments, how he should turn in these assignments and where to check for his grades. It’s all there, in a web application that is easy to access.
As a teacher, I know in general what my son’s teachers are doing to prepare for this transition. Since they have already used LMS during the last school shutdown, they will not need much time to familiarize themselves with the different delivery processes. They just need to make some tweaks to their own teaching processes. For instance, I once did online teaching for Math and I didn’t have to change my teaching materials or homework assignments. What I did have to do was change my mindset from interacting in-person to online and how I will distribute the homework assignments and receive them.
As an administrator, to have an existing relationship with an LMS vendor, you will know the service levels that you will receive from the vendor’s post-sales support team. You will know who will cover what when issues occur with the system, what the escalation processes are and the general turn-around times for resolutions. Notice that I mentioned post-sales support instead of just maintenance support since involving the sales team to handle certain types of problems is an effective way to manage priorities. It is a lot easier to negotiate these service levels before a crisis than during one.
At the end of the day, an LMS gives peace of mind to all stakeholders involve in the education of children. When government needs to quickly mandate policies to prevent COVID outbreaks, LMS provides schools with the much-needed business agility.
I hope for a quick end to 100% online learn as this is not the most effective way to teach kids who are still quite young. A hybrid online-offline model works a lot better. However, I am glad that my kid’s school is prepared for it!
