{"id":1744,"date":"2020-09-29T08:06:23","date_gmt":"2020-09-29T08:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.ucem.ac.uk\/onlineeducation\/?p=1744"},"modified":"2020-10-01T06:51:37","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T06:51:37","slug":"elearning-in-challenging-times-homeschooling-uk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.ucem.ac.uk\/onlineeducation\/posts\/1744","title":{"rendered":"eLearning in Challenging Times: Homeschooling UK"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a shorter version of the original blog posted in Tharindu’s MOOCs Blog<\/a> under the same title eLearning in Challenging Times: Homeschooling UK<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Homeschooled your children during the COVID-19 lockdown? We would love to hear from you.<\/h3>\n

Homeschooling UK Survey<\/a>\u00a0is now open (anonymous 10-15mins)<\/p>\n

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 \u201chome offices\u201d (wherever there was a space on a table top)\u00a0 \u2013 some of us who have young families, had to learn to \u201chomeschool\u201d our children while also doing our fulltime jobs.<\/p>\n

\"Stormy<\/a>
Image by: EliasSch Pixabay<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

So far, we have launched two surveys:<\/p>\n