This is a shorter version of the original blog posted in Tharindu’s MOOCs Blog under the same title eLearning in Challenging Times: Homeschooling UK.
Homeschooled your children during the COVID-19 lockdown? We would love to hear from you.
Homeschooling UK Survey is now open (anonymous 10-15mins)
In March when the UK government closed schools and imposed lockdown restrictions, to stem the spread of COVID-19, we all were hurled into a situation that we have never been in before. While adjusting to the life with new measures like social distancing; no pasta, rice, flour or toilet rolls on supermarket shelves; and setting up our “home offices” (wherever there was a space on a table top) – some of us who have young families, had to learn to “homeschool” our children while also doing our fulltime jobs.
As a mother to primary school twins, I can tell you how amazing, frustrating, infuriating and many other adjectives can be added to describe this experience. We started taking in a day at a time first. But soon we reduce that to an hour at a time as we realised even a day is too long time when doing juggling homeschooling with a full-time job.
The researcher inside me wanted to gather the experience of eLearning in challenging times and I was not alone there. I soon found collaborators in Japan, New Zealand, Egypt and Sri Lanka who wanted to do similar work and possibly draw comparisons. We wanted to do both homeschooing experience as well as the experience of higher education students – however, with the pressing needs of “Transform” project at work (where we transformed all our Autumn 2020 offering) I was only able to progress on the homeschooling study.
So far, we have launched two surveys:
The survey is designed as an anonymous survey and to take no more than 10-15 mins of time. We hope to gather homeschooling experiences from parents and caregivers of young people.
If you have homeschooled a young person during the school closure period due to COVID-19 pandemic and you are a resident of UK (or Sri Lanka) please can you participate in our survey please?
I am a Learning Technology Researcher and the Chair of the Online Learning Research Centre at the University College of Estate Management. My principle research interests lie in the area of social implications of information and communication technologies, especially eLearning.