Children learning with Outschool. Outschool
Over the past month, my 4-year-old son began attending school in a completely new way: Downloading worksheets, following along with instructional videos, and submitting homework via click. His pre-K class used to start at 8 in the morning and end at 2 in the afternoon. Now it's condensed into a frenetic half-hour video chat.
The first 10 minutes of the class seem like a teetotaler take on the Budweiser Whassup commercial where everyone sings hello to each other in a way that's even more disorienting than that 60-second spot. The next 20 minutes are filled with well-meaning and occasionally agonizing attempts to teach about topics like animals and water. Some students follow along, others disappear, only to return when their mothers coax them back into the frame.
While the 2020 spring semester has been groundbreaking for digital education in America, anyone who’s new to online coursework will quickly realize what’s gone missing: Student socialization.
In her 2018 vlog, “Think about this before joining online school,” high school student Faith Elizabeth says she loves attending the virtual Insight School of Washington, but complains that “the biggest struggle of online school is having a social life.”
“You either lose contact with your friends or you lose friends and you don’t get to hang out with them as much as you planned on doing,” she laments. In order to boost her social schedule, she tried to take an in-person photography class, but ran into a snag when her education platform didn't allow her to be double enrolled at a local high school.
Even though Elizabeth probably wouldn’t be able to attend an in-person class these days, her concern raises issues: A lot of what students learn in school isn’t academics. Younger pupils pick up appropriate classroom behavior and how to play well with others. Older students study with peers and navigate the group dynamics that come with yearbook groups, theater troupes, and basketball teams. All of it preps fledgling minds for the real world: On-the-job training, office politics, networking, friendships, and romance.
How does 21st-century technology replace the stomach-convulsing and resolve-strengthening mental gymnastics a sophomore bounces through while preparing for the science fair or school play? Can a tenderfoot scholar sit still long enough to address a web camera as if he or she is talking to the teacher?
Much of the research about distance learning focuses on college-level courses, and typically on the capabilities of the teachers and tech rather than socialization and interactivity. For example, in the 2018 study “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Distance Learning in Higher Education,” Vimbi Petrus Mahlangu concludes many professors are just delivering traditional lectures online rather than capitalizing on the advantages of the connectivity.
Outschool and chill
Outschool, an instructional marketplace for children ages 3 to 18, had 80,000 students enrolled before March. Ever since the thousands of K-12 school closures over the past weeks, the platform, which offers individual classes in everything from crafts to algebra and yoga, has added 40,000 new students and more than 1,000 teachers.
“The scale and speed of the [interest] really surprised us,” says Outschool co-founder Amir Nathoo, who’s hoping to add thousands more instructors in the next few weeks.
Asked about student socialization, Nathoo quickly points out the difference between his platform and a self-guided learning resource such as Khan Academy, which offers chaptered video lessons for students to digest at their own pace with limited instructor feedback, if any.
“Already in the Outschool platform, it’s a social form of online learning because these classes meet live and have a video chat,” explains Nathoo. “It’s not just getting a worksheet or emailing or chatting back and forth -- it’s actually interacting.” The company graduated from the Y Combinator accelerator in 2016 and has garnered over $10 million in funding, including $1.4 million from the venture capital wing of Sesame Workshop.
Early research by the Outschool team suggests smaller class sizes would improve the experience and student interaction. While it’s technically possible for their courses to host 18 students, administrators recommend nine pupils, and many classes have only five or six learners.
Outschool’s platform uses Zoom video conferencing as a plug-in. If you’ve never used Zoom, the speaker usually appears in the main box of the interface while other participants appear horizontally across the top of the screen in a filmstrip layout or tiled grid.
My son took “Making Friends,” which is more of an “Outschool and Chill” hangout session than a class. Given his truncated public school classes, it seemed like a good opportunity for him to chat with other kids his age.
