How COVID-19 is Reshaping Education and Distance Learning?
The Impact of COVID-19 and Distance Learning
During the current unprecedented times of the novel Coronavirus outbreak, life on Earth has changed drastically as we knew it before. COVID — 19 has brought global economies to collapse and pushed people inside their homes while observing quarantine and maintaining social distance to help mitigate the spread of the Coronavirus outbreak.
COVID — 19 health crisis has not only affected businesses, economies and health care systems but has majorly impacted every aspect of an individual’s life including education.
As the year 2020 started, the COVID — 19 pandemic outbreak wrapped up the whole world, hitting hardest in global tertiary education centers. China and South Korea which are considered as the ‘powerhouses of emerging tertiary education’ were the first to fall victim to the novel COVID — 19 outbreak. And immediately after that, countries and nations all around the world started getting affected and took instantaneous actions to prevent the virus from spreading.
The abrupt and immediate actions were to shut down all — be it world-class universities, technical colleges or any form of tertiary education facility. Education institutions all over the world, sent the students home while shutting down campuses and started providing instructions remotely and accepted academic loss where internet isn’t easily accessible.
Today, 99% of the students all around the globe who are enrolled in formal tertiary education are greatly affected.
Not just student’s lives but also their academic programs are badly disrupted due to the coronavirus pandemic.
For many students belonging from the lower economic group or insecure and unsafe families or nonexistent family environment, dormitories and hostels are the only places these students have near to home. While many other students completely depend on the facilities provided by the campus such as food, support services and health care along with mental health, academic and career counseling.
Reshaping Learning
Risk control decisions have pushed many students into temporary homeschooling scenario. The pandemic has certainly become the cause of many inconveniences. However, those inconveniences have led to the prompting of educational innovations. While it’s way too early to deduce how the COVID — 19 would impact the education systems globally but the signs suggest that the impact would have a long-lasting trajectory of learning revolution and digitization.
In the current times, education systems are nudged and pushed to transform which might lead to surprising advances in the education field. Simpler yet no less creative solutions are being implemented all across the globe to help preempt the school closure.
As the 5G technology gets more prevalent in countries such as Japan, United States and China, both the learners as well as the solution providers will actually embrace the perception of digital education ‘learning anywhere anytime’ in various different aspects.
Traditional classroom teaching and learning would be switched with new learning models such as live broadcasts, educational influencers and virtual reality experiences. Learning would become a part of our daily lives.
Top 5 Learning Management Systems in 2020
Here is a list of top 5 learning management systems with all the essential details. This list would help you select which learning management system which is appropriate for your purpose.
- Talent LMS
Talent LMS is designed to create the most instinctive yet compact, simple and stress-free learning experience.
Talent LMS support team offers exceptional response which makes the work lot easier as the issues are resolved instantly.
Talent LMS offers a free version as well for up to 5 users and 10 courses but the premium version costs range from the US $29 — $349 per month if billed yearly.
Pros:
Talent LMS offers solid management over course branding, course authoring along with course catalog and course marketplace. It is a content friendly platform.
Provides an amazing customized homepage along with reporting, branding and various other fields which gives flexibility to the users according to their needs and desires.
Supports e-commerce, notifications along with examination engine, multi-organizational structures, training metrics and many other features.
Allows the user to import and export data, displays transcripts, web conferences, testing, ILT support with excellent registration management.
Talent LMS offers individual plans, mobile accessibility, has an already defined user role and grading system to users.
2. Moodle
Moodle — a famous learning management system, designed with a particularly safe and secure integrated platform to connect the instructors, administrators and students providing a customized learning experience and platform to its users.
Offers multiple dynamic programs as per the concept of learning anywhere anytime and can be used for both learning and teaching purposes.
Moodle is an open-source platform with easy localization and high configurability as it has support from the global community of developers.
Moodle has a free version for its users too. The customized version is offered by a quote that is about $80 — $500 USD annually.
Pros:
A single platform providing learning, multiple courses designing along with fast backup and appropriate data management.
Includes collaborative tools and their plans, instant notifications and alerts with thorough logs and reports and consistent security updates.
Has a personalized dashboard with self — assessments and peer, safe authentication procedure and mass enrollments supporting open standards.
Offers a customizable design and layout, embeds external resources and handles user’s responsibilities and permissions.
Provides multimedia integration, multilingual abilities along with outcomes and rubrics and multiple progress tracking features.
3. Docebo
A globally popular learning management system giving users an unmatched automated and personalized learning experience.
Supports onboarding efforts and enhances user’s growth via excellent learning. Offers the facility of one web application page that can be accessed anywhere anytime.
The best learning management system because it saves time as it doesn’t have any integration issues while supporting multiple environments.
Offers a 14 days trial version and one-time registration fees are $10 USD per user.
Pros:
Offers a controlling user and UI experience with sales integration, powerful integration mechanism and audit trail.
For users, improvement provides ITL classrooms, good extension with high performing and innovative reporting framework.
Supports good customization besides features such as APIs, gamification, localization, white labeling and language.
Allows users to easily create and import courses, includes lots of pages, rapid notifications, content mark place with coach and share.
Performs automated admin tasks along with scalability, retraining and certification making mobility for users quite easy.
4. Schoology
Learning management system built for instructor-student collaboration designed to create and spread learning material. A flexible platform giving users a chance to experience one of a kind digital learning process. A supreme versatile electronic platform where students can share their work and practices both locally and globally as well.
Increasing users’ general idea and knowledge in regards to a specific learning management system by offering an abundant amount of assessments and quizzes.
A free version is available along with a paid version for teachers and students. The paid version costs $10 USD per month.
Pros:
An instructional tool allowing instructors to create and design assignments rapidly. Also provides tools such as highlighting and annotating.
Strong communication and partnership with analytics, data and personalized learning.
Offers asynchronous learning besides durable interoperability feature and assessment management.
Allows users gamification, employee training, mobile learning along besides synchronous learning and content library.
Also includes SCROM compliance, automated grading system, testing and assessments and curriculum management.
5. Adobe Captivate Prime
Adobe Captivate Prime or also known as the next generation learning management system designed with the ability to deliver a customized learning experience to users.
In order to enhance employees’ skillset, Adobe Captivate Prime aligns and combines every online and local training.
Basic, simple, easy and highly flexible as it allows users to personally customization and easily automates routine tasks.
Best for users who prefer video tutorials along with entertainment such as gamification experience while learning.
Adobe Captivate Prime offers a one-month free trial. For registered users, subscription charges are around $4 — $16 USD monthly.
Pros:
Superfast and highly secured with a 24 * 7 available support team to support any online issues.
A simple e-learning platform that automates tasks by allocating learning tasks and synchronizing users for a unique experience.
Allows the user to create sub instances for a learning management system with a strong API integration and accessibility feature.
With a robust reporting structure provides progress information and tracks learning progress individually.
Uses gamification, mobile learning, video streaming and personalized dashboards to engage with the user.
