Involving Parents in Virtual School Learning

Virtual learning is a necessity now. And this situation is likely to continue for at least the foreseeable future as the world grapples to combat and contain the Covid-19 pandemic that's menacing the world since early 2020.

Importance of Virtual Learning

With the pandemic barely showing any signs of abating schools are increasingly turning towards virtual learning systems. They're well aware that students can't afford to miss an entire academic year since it would hamper their future prospects of higher education and perhaps employment.

Furthermore, virtual learning is also important for schools to prevent their campuses from becoming areas for the Covid-19 contagion, given the alarming propensity of the deadly virus.

In these situations, it's important for schools to encourage and involve parents in virtual learning too.

Involving Parents in Virtual Learning

This brings us to the question, how to encourage and involve parents in virtual learning? Understandably, this is a fairly difficult question to answer. However, we'll explore some ways and means to encourage parents and get them involved actively in virtual learning activities of schools for their students.

Understand Schedules of Parents

The new normal that's rapidly evolving in the aftermath of the pandemic is bringing about what's globally known as the new normal of work. This means millions of parents across America are working online from the safety of their homes, instead of attending office.

This means parents would generally be busy working from home during regular office work hours. For obvious reasons, it would be unfair to ask them to disrupt work to involve them in the virtual learning of schools.

Therefore, any school and its management that's serious about encouraging and involving parents in virtual learning first need to take into account, the schedule of working parents. This would help arrive at realistic timings to hold virtual learning classes.

Get Parents Interested in Their Favorite Subject

Obviously, parents were also school students at some point in time. Like every student, they too had their favorite subjects. Therefore, a school teacher or management can leverage such favorite subjects to parents and get them involved in online or virtual learning.

How's that? The answer is simple. Ask parents that's good at a specific subject to check homework, create and assign projects and conduct informal learning activities online. However, these would have to be done during their spare time. Schools need to also ensure that parents aren't unduly stressed out due to their own work-from-home jobs and the additional responsibilities of getting involved in virtual learning activities of schools.

Conduct Virtual Events for Parents

Any school that's serious about encouraging and involving parents in virtual learning can also conduct online events for parents. These could include anything from online quiz contests and games to a simple exchange of ideas between parents and teachers.

Look for feedback from parents during such events. Because they'll be able to provide better insights to teachers about the success of their virtual learning programs as well as drawbacks. This could definitely help schools to improve their virtual classroom experience for students and help better learning.

Involving parents in fun activities also serve as a morale booster to school students that are under immense stress due to lockdowns, lack of adequate outdoor activities due to needing for social distancing and spending long hours indoors.

Start a Facebook Community

Facebook is an excellent resource to start a community of parents and students to get involved and interested in virtual learning. A school can open a closed group on Facebook that consists only of parents and their children or exclusively parents. This Facebook community could prove useful for parents to exchange their views and thoughts with others, including teachers.

Encourage parents to speak about problems their children are facing with online learning. Teachers need to understand that children nowadays are under intense stress due to a lack of proper recreational facilities and arrangements. Left unattended, such stress can develop as serious learning handicaps and psychological problems. Therefore, a Facebook community can help address such issues virtually behind "closed doors" too.

Get Parents to Conduct Extracurricular Activities

There would definitely be some parents that continue to pursue an extracurricular activity they were interested in during their days as students. School teachers can enlist the help of such parents to conduct online extracurricular activities, given the prevailing constraints on outdoor ones.

For example, you could get a parent to speak about the sport they're interested in and narrate personal experiences as school students in their days. Others could talk about places they've visited during a Geography class. And yet few others can simply impart general knowledge that's vital in all spheres of life.

In Conclusion

Encouraging parents to involve themselves in virtual school learning isn't really difficult. All it requires is some thought and creativity on part of teachers and school management. Every parent is interested in the educational growth of their child and would willingly participate if given the right conditions.

Author Bio: Daniel Wyatt

Daniel has been working with writing challenged clients for over three years. He's passionate about blogging and writes web content for a variety of clients. He is currently dedicated to Online Jobs Academy as a gig worker, he understands the benefits and challenges of the industry. Blogging about education and career regarding ideas to grow is something that he loves doing.