I will be sharing my unique perspective based on my professional and personal experience as an online educator. Keeping student safety as a priority when moving to visible virtual learning is my priority.
In a brick and mortar school building,administrators go to great lengths to ensure their schools are secure and students are safe. Teachers and volunteers undergo background checks and every guest must check in and out at the office. Parents can trust that every adult who has access to their child during the day has been cleared of any alarming behaviors or convictions.
When a student attends an online class where the teacher either requests or requires his students to turn on their webcam to join, without first solving for student safety, all involved are unknowingly vulnerable to potential risks.
Risk #1. Typically, when students join a video classroom space such as Zoom, they can see all the other students on the screen as well. Without advance planning, the school has no control over individual student home environments.—students are no longer equal. As a school administrator, in conducting necessary home visits, I realized that asking students to create their own safe space to join a video call was an unrealistic expectation..
Risk #2. Similarly, the home environment can be a wild card where anything can and might will happen. Inside the privacy of their homes, people can choose to be dressed anyway they choose. They are not subject to a school dress code, for example. Being visible to a webcam creates the possibility for some extraordinary scenarios. Accidental viewings range from humorous to distracting to potentially damaging. Accidents can and will happen if safety is not planned for.
Risk #3.We have no control over who has access to view students in a visible virtual learning setting. If we are going through great lengths to protect students in brick and mortar schools, why then are we opening the digital doors wide to any and all? When a student is visible on the screen, anyone within viewing distance in the student's home environment is also able to see what the students sees-their classmates. In trying to create a comfortable environment, a teacher may instruct students they have a choice to keep their cameras off. This effectively "blinds" the teacher to who may be participating-undetected. We protect students from individuals that may have harmful intentions in our brick and mortar settings and we can do that for visible virtual learning environment also.
As an online school administrator,the greatest desire of online teachers was to have the missing visible element to their instructional sessions, all while responsibly planning for student safety. but we knew we couldn’t responsibly do that without first solving for safety. Successfully implementing the visible element to the virtual instruction required a willingness for parents to turn on the webcams-trusting we had put the security and safety measures in place.
Visible online learning is absolutely the best possible way to go! Research has shown that facial expressions of students are significantly correlated to their emotions, which can help teachers recognize their comprehension. Responsibly making student safety our number one priority is easy!
Seven of the ten years I have spent in administration of an online school was spent dedicated to solving this issue. I have the tools, skill set and knowledge to move us all forward into safe visible online learning. I’d love to draw on my unique and specific experience to help you move quickly, safely, and successfully into the arena of visible virtual learning! Click on the link in my profile for more information and for my contact information.