Remote Teaching: A Secure Solution for Education

COVID-19 has challenged every educational institution to rethink its capabilities and find the best mixture of in-person and remote learning experiences to help create a safer environment for students, educators, and administrators when they return to school. Educational spaces built before COVID-19 were not designed with disease mitigation in mind. Now educational organizations must make choices to adapt existing spaces with current technologies to meet the new safety challenges presented by the pandemic.

Create digital learning spaces

Remote teaching Learning environments need to be reinvented as science-based evidence and emerging technologies offer new solutions. Before, learning spaces were designed largely for the efficient transfer of knowledge in a cost-effective way. Now, schooling has changed, and educational organizations need more flexibility as well as the ability to adapt quickly to possible health-related, climatic, and economic disruptions.

The main concern now is social density. Schools are being forced to think creatively about how to reduce social density on their campuses. By transitioning to distance education, a significant amount of space is opened up in locations such as common areas, classrooms, conference rooms, and administrative offices.

With virtualization technologies, such as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and remote desktops, educational organizations can scale both computer and networking capabilities without expensive hardware.

Remote Teaching Challenges

Keeping Students Engaged

You, as a teacher, can use a few tricks to make your remote teaching interesting. To keep students engaged, do the same as you do in a real class. Keep questioning while teaching. Whatever topic you are teaching, engage them in responding by calling their names in particular. Students will keep themselves connected as you can ask them anything. Some teachers make mistakes by making the topic lengthier. Be sure not to lecture around much. Keep the topic crisp, clear, and to the point. Draw diagrams in a meaningful way that makes students want to engage in the lesson.

Attention

Students are sitting in front of you during the online class, but their parents might also be watching you in the background. When they suddenly appear on screen, some teachers hesitate. No way out to avoid hesitation. Just have good command over your subject. Believe in whatever you are teaching, teach correct and nicely. Don’t show hesitation or immature behavior.

Writing or Drawing

Give your students access to the virtual board you are teaching and ask them to use their mouse and keyboard to collaborate. Whatever you or any other collaborative contributor write on a shared board is visible on everyone’s screen in real-time. A teacher can see on screen anything attempted by any student. Thus the teacher can highlight the error and make corrections.

Devotion/Motivation

Last but not least, students cannot devote much screen time. They get tired and hence need a break. Don’t take continuous periods. Allow them intervals after one or two periods. Doing this Makes students feel relaxed. They don’t get bored. Thus you also get time to refresh. Also, to earn their devotion to online learning without boredom, make them engage with each other, with you, and of course, with their learning material.

Remote access can improve education

Before health concerns drove many schools to shift to remote learning, some have already given remote access to faculty members and students. This helped prepare these schools for the present reality and gave them first-hand experience in how remote access can help improve education.

Connect with Any Device

With remote access, teachers and students can access their computers in school using any device. Once connected, they can utilize the full range of software available on the school computers and are able to do things they would otherwise find difficult if they are using their own devices. For example, they can use video and graphics editing software that can be prohibitively priced if individually acquired.

Comfortable Learning

Moreover, both faculty and students can utilize technologies such as screen sharing from the comforts of home. Interaction between teachers and students is improved in the process. Teachers are better able to get their points across to students. In turn, students are better able to grasp concepts.

IT staff benefit from remote access as well. In case of issues encountered by faculty and students, IT administrators can take over the devices, and perform the required troubleshooting procedures, allowing faster problem resolution.

With work and resources digitized, students will always have access to everything they need, which means they won’t have to lug heavy backpacks around quite as much. Having everything available on online platforms will help keep them organized.

Learning At Your Own Pace

According to Arizona State University, approximately 15 million Americans suffer from a social anxiety disorder, or SAD. A lot of these cases start around the time a child is 13. “Education is not ‘one size fits all.’ There are alternatives to traditional school whether a child is struggling academically, physically, or mentally,” they write. “For students who experience social anxiety, an online school may be a viable option.” By chatting through text and video, students may be able to feel more confident in their interactions and perform better in their studies.

With distance learning, children can stay home when sick without missing out on too many lessons. Not only is this a more comfortable way to learn when they’re under the weather, but it also shows the teacher that you value the well-being of the entire class.

Though the world continues to make strides, there are unfortunately still places that aren’t accessible to everyone. Those with restricted mobility can suffer the most from this. Adding remote learning to your education system opens up new doors for those who need that kind of assistance. Allowing students to learn where they are comfortable also reduces missed lessons and contributes to better learning.

Offering students the chance to learn at their own pace comes with many advantages. There are no restrictions set forth by classmates either, and they don’t have to worry about feeling like a know-it-all in front of others. Because remote learning is self-paced, students can review the material as often as needed and advance past already known subjects.

How Parallels RAS helps with Remote Teaching

Parallels® Remote Application Server (RAS) is an all-in-one VDI solution that enables students, faculty, and IT to remotely access applications and services from any device, including PC, Mac, Chromebook, iPad, iPhone, Android tablet and phone, Linux or HTML5 browser. This comprehensive software comes with all of the features packed into one easy-to-use tool that’s simple to deploy and manage.

With Parallels RAS, it’s possible to create flexible hybrid in-person/remote education plans that can be rolled back when coronavirus spikes or new waves emerge.

Parallels RAS is a remote working solution for education that:

Centralizes management and control of access to digital educational systems.
Provides a hybrid deployment of applications and desktops, enabling remote access from any device.
Easily creates remote labs with simplified access.

Moreover, Parallels RAS helps optimize:

Mobility: Enables access to tools away from the physical office or classroom.
Accessibility: Access applications on any platform and HTML5 web browser.
Virtual Desktops: Allow students/staff to work on their Windows desktops from any device, anytime.
Productivity: Empower students and staff to get their work done efficiently despite unexpected events.

It’s straightforward for IT administrators to control and monitor thousands of virtual machines (VMs) from a single central console. Virtualization also encourages a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) culture, allowing students and staff to bring their devices and access all educational resources while limiting the need to touch or interact with shared devices.

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