This article explores the challenges online learning faces in today’s digital era and how they influence the education niche.
Look:
The rapid growth of AI is changing the learning landscape, making educators rethink their approach to teaching and assessing students’ knowledge and skills.
Now, it’s not enough to provide mentees with technical requirements for a writing task and wait for them to generate original research and in-depth arguments.
Academic experts from a dissertation writing service – a large selection of the best specialists helped us process and put all this information together. Assisting college students with academic papers, they observe the impact of online learning on writing skills firsthand.
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Teaching Digital Literacy to Online Learners
While the concept of digital literacy isn’t new, today, we rethink and redefine it because of AI and Edutech’s boost in recent years:
Digital literacy was about basic computing skills; now, it’s more about the intelligent use of the information we find online. In the technology-dependent world, students demonstrate tech savviness in a traditional or online classroom, dealing with all the apps and devices. But:
Are they the same tech-savvy when evaluating and using information technologies for education needs?
In today’s world of content shock, online threats, and post-truth, most students need to gain the skill of responsible data processing. Instructors should teach their mentees that skill, whether they practice online learning or traditional education.
Digital literacy refers to the safe and responsible use of tech and the internet. For modern students, it’s a must for educational progress and social opportunities. With the learning process actively moving online, teachers can help their mentees develop digital literacy.
How?
- Teaching students to evaluate the online information rather than contributing and taking it for granted
- Discussing online etiquette with students, helping them distinguish between offensive online behaviors and respectful communication
- Explaining the difference between traditional academic writing and digital writing in online classrooms: Students should know how to include links and references in their assignments, revise essays depending on the online course and target audience, etc.
- Discussing the principles of online privacy
- Specifying the role of AI tools in online education and teaching their responsible use for praising academic integrity
Changing Approach to Teaching Writing Skills
The boost in AI writers we’ve seen in the last few years since ChatGPT launched has raised discussions around this tech’s influence on education.
Look:
On the one hand, we’ve got the issue of academic integrity (again!). Many students use AI writing tools to generate essays and other writing assignments. (When ChatGPT burst into the space, the searches for “AI essay writing” jumped super high in Google Trends.
The Guardian reported that one-fifth of submitted college essays were AI-generated, so no wonder teachers saw AI as a threat to the education system.)
On the other hand, AI won’t go anywhere, so it’s worth embracing as a new educational tool. The trick is to know how to do that right, given the potential harm it can bring to students. We don’t speak only about the issue of academic integrity here:
AI hurts students’ writing and communication skills.
Students who write essays and other academic papers learn to consume ideas, think critically, and build arguments.
Writing tasks also teach students to observe different perspectives and draw conclusions. If young people delegate writing to AI tools, they lose the skill of critical thinking and communicating their thoughts logically and coherently.
Modern teachers revise their methodologies and change their approach to teaching writing skills to prevent that harm.
Now, writing tasks become more about a dialogue between a student and an educator. The focus is more on discussing a topic and communicating visions via storytelling and insights. (That’s what AI can’t do.)
The future of education prepares teachers to instill a love of learning and writing in students of primary and secondary schools. Thus, when in college, they’ll have enough curiosity and motivation to create rather than delegate writing assignments to third-party resources.
Avoiding Plagiarism in Today’s Online Learning Landscape
Academic integrity is a moral code students demonstrate when they follow the rules of their educational institutions. The “Don’t cheat!” attitude is among those rules, and it becomes the Achilles’ heel of most students when they study online.
Online learning can make it tempting to copy-paste others’ work, cheat during online tests, or submit the same essay to several teachers without prior approval.
And that’s where online trainers get a challenge:
Their task is to promote academic integrity among mentees and provide them with resources that help them avoid plagiarism, even accidental, in their writing.
In today’s online learning landscape, writing skills transform and get enriched with additional elements:
- Proper paraphrasing of others’ ideas
- Providing the added value (original insights) in a text
- Understanding the context behind messages and restating them with references
- Making friends with reliable plagiarism checkers and AI detectors to prevent copyright infringement and write texts that won’t sound robotic
- Extra attention to the details and the focus on expertise and a writer’s unique style and tone of voice in texts
Takeaways
Technologies are growing, and the future of education is in online learning. To make the most out of it, modern students focus on digital literacy, the advantages of AI tools for academic performance, and the proper use of online platforms to praise academic integrity.
And teachers guide their mentees on the way to safe and efficient online learning.