Virtual Learning During Covid-19 Health Crisis: Importance of Social Cues
By: Narine Emdjian
Tags: University, Students, Online, Covid 19, Learning

Covid19| Online Learning | Virtual Learning | Startups | Women founders

The Health crisis due to Covid -19 has disrupted higher education in many ways. With the massive closure of schools globally, over 1.2 billion children have been out of the classroom.

Schools, universities, and colleges had to turn to virtual learning as quickly as possible. Although remote learning wasn’t something new to educators and students, it has been a real challenge for many.

While students have to deal with technical issues, to stay motivated and keep up with the assignments online, many educators have to adopt new technologies that they have never experienced, figure out the right online learning platform to hold their classes and create a new curriculum that can be as effective as face-to-face learning.

According to the Rand corporation’s survey, 56 % of teachers said that they had covered only half, or less than half, of the curriculum content that they would have gotten to by this time last year.

But one of the biggest challenges has been building effective interaction between students and educators during online classes.

But one of the biggest challenges has been and continues to be building an effective interaction between students and educators during online classes.

“Virtual interactions are not going to be the same, because we’re missing some of the social cues where you can see where your audience is when somebody is about to say something. And missing the social cues was making all the difference, and somehow the interaction felt more disconnected. I felt like I couldn’t really connect with my students and it was hard to do teamwork,” tells Narine Mnaukyan, Founder of InSpace Proximity, a new virtual learning platform in a podcast interview with HyeTech Minds.

From Disruption To A Successful Venture

It was late in August when Narine as many educators had to adopt its new reality of virtual learning. She was among many educators who have been struggling with the challenges to build a solid interaction with students during virtual learning.

Before the pandemic, she was perfectly teaching a machine learning course at Champlain College. Everything was going great — vibrant conversations in the classroom, one and one discussions with students, and most importantly hands-on experience was in place.

But the pandemic has changed this dynamic, making Narine move to virtual instruction. After a couple of weeks of teaching, it was clearly missing the social cues that were making all the difference, and somehow the interaction felt more disconnected with students.

At the top of her mind how to exist professionally in the virtual space and keep social interaction with students, Narine has started to think about how to bring technology solutions into action that can help to overcome this challenge of missing social cues.

Not many probably do it, but Narine quitted her high-paid job and decided to create a new advanced virtual learning platform that can offer better interaction between students and educators.

She built a women-led team of 7 to 10 engineers and started working on the launching of this new virtual learning platform InSpace Proximity to solve the challenge of social interaction in the virtual space.

After coding very quickly in a month, her team created a minimum working product right before school started in September. To experiment with this new tool. she offered one of her colleagues at the Champlain College to try out it.

You would be surprised but that was it. InSpace went viral.

Today, over 53 colleges and educational institutions use InSpace to hold their online classes. And the Company is currently in talks with one of the top online platforms for the partnership.

How InSpace Works

InSpace is an education platform built by educators for educators. It is designed for all types of educational institutions from colleges and universities to K12 schools.

To overcome some of the challenges that come with Zoom and other online learning platforms, where one person talks and many listen to it and no engagement at the same time, InSpace integrates interactive solutions into its video chatting system.

Through a specially designed video circle, participants can move around and pick the space they want to be in at that moment. The magic happens when those video circles are getting closer to each other, users can hear each other, and they can engage with each other. This way having a direct conversation in the same space.

At the same time, users can see each other and engage together as they move away. The sounds go down and the video goes away so they can go find other conversations.

Here are the 5 top advantages you want to know about InSpace:

InSpace eliminates the wall between students and educators. With InSpace educators are getting the ability to see their students in real-time. The teacher can go around and check in on students in real-time and see what they’re doing with their projects. And if a student has a question, it would go directly to his/her educator. This helps educators to have a one-and-one conversation with a student while still seeing everybody else in a classroom.

No more hiding behind the mutes and turned off cameras. It’s not a secret that many students take the advantage of Zoom features to mute and turn off their cameras. And that is one of the biggest challenges for higher education right now. Sometimes teachers are teaching to a lot of black squares and students are not as engaged. Through integrating video circles that can be moved around, zoom in and zoom out, educators have the ability to be present in their students’ breaking room, moderate conversation, and even have one-and-one discussion with a student while following the rest of the class in the real-time.

Hands-on experience. The biggest problem for many educators has been and continues to be how to provide hands-on experience to students while teaching virtually. History teaching online can be easier, than computer science or engineering, where the hands-on experience is the critical element of the curriculum. Zoom and Microsoft Team are all great platforms and they do the same job at what they’re doing. But what they do not offer is effective hands-on experience and teamwork to keep students engaging. Many educators had to change their entire content and change how they run their classes because those tools were not supporting it.

Teamwork makes excellent work. It is critical to recognize that the 21st-century economy requires more soft skills, such as collaboration, better communication, and teamwork. However, it’s becoming difficult to improve students’ softs skills in a virtual space. InSpace eliminates some of the barriers of social isolation during virtual learning and offers new technology solutions to teamwork and/or group works. Within Inspace, with one click students have the ability to relocate in breakrooms. And as a student enters the room in that space, they only can hear people inside that room, and they can easily just get out. And then they can navigate between different rooms, and all of that is ready in front of a teacher who can see when the students are talking inside. The best part is that a teacher can not hear students, but the students can come outside of the breaking room and ask a teacher questions.

Control over toxic conversations. Along with data privacy concerns, many parents are alarm by the increasing opportunities for cyberbullying during online classes. 72 percent of parents shared they’re worried about an increase in cyberbullying and 67 percent are worried about their child accessing inappropriate content according to new research by OnePoll. InSpace offers the so-called Toxicity Filter, which is using a machine-learning algorithm to classify when someone writes a toxic comment or something that’s not inclusive. And then it just gives them a warning.

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