The Karns High School German classes have transitioned from an in-person lesson to a fully online course as of last semester. The original teacher of the German classes, Ms. Fraurmorris, had been laid off and the class was transferred online. In place of an instructor, the kids preside in Mr. Conner’s room.
“I was providing the space, and she [the online instructor] would send me the courses,” Mr. Conner says.
The students would stay in the classroom, working through the class’s material online without the actual German teacher in the room.
“I think having an actual teacher makes it so much easier to actually ask questions and get feedback.” Ariana Gill said.
The difficulty of not having someone there to clarify things was a recurring theme with students. Often reporting it was difficult to get clarification on certain words or phrases when all you could do was send an email or message and hope for a timely response.
“If you try to email someone about a question in German, like ‘I don’t know what this means’ or ‘Could you explain this in a sentence?’ they have a very hard time trying to explain it online,” Caleb Stoner said.
Even if the responder manages to be timely, it’s still hard to explain something like a completely foreign language through a screen. Pronunciation can be especially hard when there is not a teacher there to help pronounce it out loud, all you can do is hope it makes sense through a screen.
Students subject to taking the course online lack a real support system there to help if there is something they do not understand. That loss of information and support is a detriment to the students’ learning experience. Without having anyone to ask questions the students were left to their own devices to try and understand a language that they have never learned before.
On top of the students having difficulties understanding the course material, due to the fact that it was all online, the websites could be a bit finicky. Technology always has its off days, websites crashing, wifi going out, or pages not loading, and having a course that relies solely on this technology can be risky. Certain days when the wifi would be out students weren’t able to do their work online, losing a whole class day of learning.
“…and I know that sometimes the websites were very particular,” Mr. Conner said. Without any alternatives available for when tech goes wrong, students were left without a lesson for the day.
