The journey from Classroom Environment to Virtual Environment

Technology is prevailing in every aspect of life; as a result, new types of students and learning styles have emerged around the globe.  Due to the internet, the traditional students have changed and institutions also provide online courses. These online courses have started the new history of the globe called a virtual learning style.  According to some researches, more than 3.2 billion students in the United States are enrolled in online courses. Virtual classes have a positive impact on the number of student enrollments; increase the skills of students, exposure of teachers, and learning demands of learners.

Features of virtual classroom learning and traditional classroom learning

• Video conferencing: Online communication between teacher and student in their free time.
• Digital whiteboard: It is also called interactive board consists of a large screen where students and teachers are interconnected.
• Instant messaging: It offers real-time chat between teacher and students, unlike email.
• Participation control: Students can completely participate in online classes and ask questions about their ambiguity.
• Sub charts and group charts: Breakdown students into groups and make their sub online classes.

Features of traditional classroom learning

1. Face-to-face interaction: In traditional classroom learning, teacher and student directly interact with each other and clarify their views and question without the aid of any technology. This type of study is suitable for children and teenagers.
2. Exercise and books study: Most of the time book study and exercise practices are commonly used in traditional learning and pass exams. Simply understand the questions and answers and take help from experienced teachers to get good marks in exams. There is no concept of conceptual and innovative study in traditional learning.
3. Technology can be used if required: Most of the time in traditional classroom learning, technology can only be used if required for example computer lab for practical and multimedia for presentation.
4. Timetables of lectures: In a traditional classroom, there is a set plan for lectures, where students and teachers must be present at the same location and time.
5. Fixed activities and location: In traditional classroom learning, fixed class activities performed throughout the learning process.
6. No innovation: Lack of innovation, freedom, motivation, acquire new skills and flex timing in traditional learning style.

Some strategies of converting traditional classroom to virtual classroom are discussed here

1. Recruiting and hiring: When school management is recruiting and hiring educators then management should keep in mind that online instructors differ from the traditional instructor. School management must create and implement different criteria for recruiting and hiring personnel to determine which candidate will be the best suit for the job.
2. Flexible teaching method: Every student is different from others, their learning needs and requirements are unique so the teacher needs to access their virtual environment and analyze if a change is required.
3. Unlearn old method of teaching: An instructor needs to unlearn the old teaching methods to adopt a new innovative style of teaching and training is the best way to update the skills of the instructor.                   

Charactertics of online instructors

Some of the charactertics must be present in the instructors are

• Inspiring: Online instructor must inspire students and engaging them as an individual and group and motivating them for achievements.
• Patient: New students on online platforms are very confused. Teacher should be helping students by navigating any technical problem, keep them focused, easy, and under stable course content and the teacher must have an ideal level of a patient.
• Accessible: Teacher of online class must be accessible by email, video conferencing and online chats.
• Certified: Along with the certification of degrees, online instructor must have advanced skills in online teaching from accredited universities.
• Technologically skilled: Online instructor must confident and efficient to conduct the online class successfully. Along with the technical skills, online instructor comfortable working with the school management system
• Motivated to help students succeed: Great teacher always want to see their students superior performance. The only highly motivated online instructor can motivate and get output from students.
• Traditional classroom assessment converted into the online learning environment: Now helping online instructor to enhance online assessment is very important day by day. According to the recent researches, technology added value in the efficiency of assessment.

Online assessment tools

• Formative and summative: The purpose of formative is to access student learning and provision of feedback to students and staff. The purpose of the summative assessment tool is to comparing student learning with standards and benchmark
• Socrative: Socrative is used to help the teacher and student to create quizzes, questions and refection questions with the help of laptops, tablets, and smartphones.
• Google forms: On Google creates a Google classroom, add the link and set the due date of assignment submission. All students can see the assignment through their own Google classroom.
• Mentimeter: It is the presentation software; more than 25 million people are using it for interactive presentation. Mentimeter plays an important role for makes events, lectures and workshops memorable and innovative.
• Drag and drop activities: This type of activity is used when the learner wants to apply real-time knowledge. For example, compare two objects or images, place the items in their correct places. You can use both test and images in drag activity. It helps learner to make the learning process easy to understand.
• Game type activities: Convert the numbers of questions into games. For example ask the learner to answer a certain question in a specified time, whole the process conduct through an amazing game. Game type activities helps the learner to gain knowledge without losing interest.
• Forum posts: Through forum posts, online discussion platform provided to learners, asking learners to participate online forum posts to enhance knowledge and self-evaluation. This assessment method is used when learner want to enhance knowledge about the topic.

Final thought: In online assessment, care and rigor are necessary because it is one of the crucial parts of online learning. Have good news for you; you don’t need to build programming for assessment all the time. Tools of online assessment choose the way that you like, there is no hard and strict rules for selection.