US schools prevent downtime through the use of eLearning

Washington | Thunderstorms or enormous snowfall have a negative effect on school education. Be it mudslides or fires on the west coast or winter storms and hurricanes on the east coast, they repeatedly ensure that school mediation is usually stopped altogether. While schoolchildren may still be happy about unscheduled outages such as the so-called Snow Days, it certainly looks different for weeks of outages. Last year, for example, some North Carolina students were affected by this in connection with damage caused by Hurricane Florence due to impassable roads and damage to school buildings. With this nationwide problem in mind, more and more schools are currently experimenting with e-learning in order to make lessons possible even if the school building is not usable or accessible due to existing dangers to life and limb.

Adam Baker, Indiana State Press Officer, describes the intervention measures agreed with the schools as follows: “Schools have the option to call a snow day and make it up at a later time, or many Indiana districts have already utilized eLearning days this academic year and with great success.” This was preceded by a change in textbook financing in 2009 towards a more technical form of teaching, which, in the state development plan, provided, for example, for a nationwide supply of pupils with eLearning-compatible technical equipment. Since then, schools have been better able to respond to the effects of snowfall, flooding and a high level of illness among their staff. However, the school districts are in various stages of implementation, some schools have been using eLearning for several years, others are starting this year, says Baker. E-learning is already an integral part of everyday school life, as 80 percent of the districts are already using digital learning resources in combination with comprehensive equipment of the pupils with associated technical devices, even apart from avoiding cancellations. It remains to be seen whether the exemplary measures mentioned above will be used to avoid lessons by means of eLearning. Technological progress in electronic forms of mediation should have a positive effect on this.

Beitragsbild: © Sergey Nivens – stock.adobe.com