Enhancements for Covid-19 Distant Learning Tools

Enhancements for Covid-19 Distant Learning Tools

With the start of 2020-2021 academic year, many schools and many countries keep relying on distant education tools to continue education. Even schools who have announced face-to-face classroom learning have rolled out a parallel distant learning program for anxious parents and students with sickness. Analysts assume distant learning will keep being a complementary part of education for the coming years even after the Covid-19 pandemic is fully contained.

K12NET has had taken prompt actions to answer the needs of schools from March 2020 to enhance distant learning features. Up to date, hundreds of thousands of online tests are administered, virtual classes created and lesson plans submitted through our system. And as per the feedback we received from our user community, we have introduced some new functionalities and enhancements in the system.

1. You can now track the coverage of lesson plan sources by students.
   Schools were able to add sources to lesson plans for students but were not able to ensure whether students have used these resources or not. With our new feature, students can specify completion of coverage for these sources. On top of that, in case of YouTube Videos, K12NET can keep track of the time spent to watch the video by the students.
   
2. Faculty can now decide when to publish various sources of a lesson to students and specify prerequisites
   Teachers can add multiple learning sources for a lesson, like a number of attachment files, URL’s, homework assignments and online tests. Many schools requested the ability to release and publish these sources to students in a sequence and with prerequisites. For example, a common lesson is composed of a diagnostic test, documents and URL’s providing content and finally a homework assignment to ensure delivery. With our new enhancement, teachers now can make sure that students first take the diagnostic test, after that they cover the documents and URL’s in a sequence and finally they work on the homework assignment in desired order.
   
3. We can now create meeting links for homerooms
   K12NET has already been able to attach meeting links for each section and for each teacher. These links have been visible in both teacher and student portals and were made accessible over the weekly timetable. Some of our users have mentioned that they are using licensed software and they are willing to reduce the number of meeting links as few as possible to minimize their online meeting license cost. And some other schools mentioned that some of the younger students are confused when they have to click and join a separate meeting for each period of the schedule. Accordingly, we introduced a new feature where K12NET can accommodate and publish a separate link for each homeroom. For example, homeroom 8/A has a meeting link, which will be active for the whole day. Students will not need keep entering enter or exiting links during the day. They will simply join the same link for once only every morning, and teachers will enter and exit the online meetings according to timetable throughout the day.