Virtual learning had been on the horizon before COVID-19 shutdowns, but its frequency and benefits have now made an unprecedented, long-term impact on education. As education institutions adjust and respond to the post-COVID recovery, how teachers instruct online and how students interact and collaborate speaks of vital importance.
Noon Academy is an online learning platform offering instruction to different levels of school and college students. Currently Noon is present across five geographical locations and time zones: Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, India, and Saudi Arabia.
Learning at Noon Academy isn’t just an academically rewarding experience, rather it serves as a social bridge between students, teachers and peers. Students joining the digital community at Noon become part of a growing, thriving league of learners.
This guide will extrapolate the reasons why Noon is leading the virtual education and instructional design trends in education.
What is happening to education in the COVID-19 recovery phase?
According to a report published by UNESCO, the pandemic has been the cause of major disruptions in education, particularly affecting the vulnerable students who do not have access to mobile infrastructure. COVID-19 prevented “at least a third of learners from pursuing distance learning”.
Now that most of the schools have returned to normal, still different variants are likely to show up in different areas of the world. The consequences are more than palpable and can be seen in “learning, health, well-being, and drop-out”, says the report.
Restoring education through physically opening schools, adapting to the hybrid models, or relying on virtual learning alternatives is now a priority in place by several communities and governments.
UNESCO calls out to prevent a “generational catastrophe”. Decisive, focused, and collective approach of teaching through virtual and inclusive educational programs are transforming the post-pandemic world. The world may very well be beginning to realize the high impact of the pandemic on education.
Impact of school closures on learning in Pakistan
A study of the impact of school closures in Asia-Pacific regions concludes that once the closures subsided, the education community was further faced with the task to bring back the children to school which had to face forced closures (over 87% of schools worldwide faced physical closures)
Even though the local governments and organizations in about 90 countries had remote learning strategies in place, there was a significant loss in learning in Asian countries – Pakistan being one of them.
We will continue learning and teaching virtually in future
The unprecedented school closures called for a very rapid expansion of the edtech sector, to correspond with experimental educational practices. The investments skyrocketed from $18.88 billion in 2019 to $350 billion by 2025. The growth rate is phenomenally aggressive.
The investment outlook is only one of the trajectories of virtual learning. The pedagogical developments, streamlined instructional designs, and a host of research outcomes – all suggest that learners are studying better with a combination of virtual and in-personal learning.
The big question is, what do the educationists want? Do they want to continue the virtual learning apps and methods? Take a look into our future:
“We aim to change the nature of learning — from the traditional solitary experience to an engaging and collective one”, says Perusall, one of the leading projects developed after a four-year research project at Harvard University.
Online learning platforms in Pakistan
In Pakistan, Noon Academy is leading the education trends by reaching over thousands of students. Noon is offering to help students cover complete topics under different boards by onboarding exceptional teaching faculty.
Noon Academy was founded by Mohammad al-Dhalaan and Dr. Aziz al-Saeed in Saudi Arabia in 2013 as a simple test prep website. Responding to the gap of in-person tutoring and inefficient online education, Noon quickly expanded during the COVID-19 and managed to reach 8 countries and over 12 million students.
Noon launched its online learning platform in 2020 in Pakistan and scaled their platform to teach local syllabus of all grades till intermediate, Cambridge O/A Level, and university entrance tests.
Noon Academy, of course, didn’t start out as what it is today. Through extensive vetting and experimentation, Noon has come a long way. Want to know what the co-founders say about their journey from 300 students to 12 million and grew threefolds during the pandemic? Listen to Dr. Aziz al-Saeed talking to MENAbytes in a live session right before Noon launched in Pakistan.
What does Noon Academy do differently?
In 2015, it helped schools and academies solve their content problems; however, soon the Noon team discovered a few main concerns:
- A lack of interaction between students and teachers
- Students want to ask questions 1:1 with the teachers
- Student want to ask quick questions under 20 seconds
- 81% of students wanted to study with their peers
- Individual classes are rated to be less engaging
- Low content quality was being produced and taught elsewhere on digital platforms
- A lack of setup to offer simultaneous classes of several thousand students
Noon Academy has focused on these concerns with enthusiasm and has solved the problem of boredom while studying, however it has never been a straightforward equation in education, mainly because virtual education is still evolving.
“If there is one thing that I learned in Noon academy then it would be that innovation in EdTech is neither quick nor easy. Integrating technology into education is about fundamentally changing the way students learn”, writes Dr. Aziz al-Saeed, co-founder of Noon.
Let’s take a look at what Noon has changed to become the best online learning platform in Pakistan.
Noon strives to take away students’ boredom
Accessibility to fast internet, devices, and trained teachers can be possible concerns of online tutoring. But what about those who have all of this and still would not want to study? Dr. Aziz writes that “the biggest issue in studying isn’t accessibility or comprehension, rather it’s boredom”.
A 2017 report by McKinsey and Company describes a ‘sweet-spot’ or blend of teaching styles which are likely to work best and suggests that “The best results come when technology is placed in the hands of teachers”.
Why do we need different ways of teaching? Because we see maximum student response when the teachers adjust their difficulty and engagement levels, so the students can actively participate and steer clear of “boredom”.
The same sweet-spot is known as the “zone of proximal development”, an idea put forth by an acclaimed Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky. This is the right kind of challenge that does not discourage or disengage a learner.
Cambridge University’s Center for Evaluation and Monitoring writes that finding the point where students are engaged for output is “simply the craft of teaching, learning and assessment”.
Is it true that all of us, reading this at the moment, can recall a teacher who really made us feel engaged with the content that we didn’t know how time went by so quickly? Maybe because that teacher let us speak, the content was presented so well, or because we played a game to hone our concepts?
In short, Noon Academy has put to practice what the research findings and educational psychologists put emphasis on.
The role of peer learning in instructional design
“Peer learning is an educational practice in which students interact with other students to attain educational goals”. (Cognitive perspectives on peer learning, O’Donnell, A. M.)
Peer learning is essentially a concept of cognitive psychology, that’s the science of how we learn. It establishes that students are not merely empty vessels to be filled, rather they have an active relationship with knowledge that prompts them to question and analyze.
Noon Academy has built its platform to align itself with the pedagogy of peer learning. It is beneficial because this is simply how we want to learn. As Dr. Aziz al-Saeed mentioned in his live session with MENAbytes, 81% of the students wanted to study in a class because this is how students feel more engaged.
Gamification in virtual learning platforms
Gamification is a research-vetted method in which students compete with other students to answer the questions. It comes under the assumption that the same competition like feeling that players of video games experience can also be experienced by students playing educational games.
The competition is similar to a car-racing video game where two racers are racing to the finish line; however, gamification in education involves motivation design, learning outcomes, and principles of education.
Gaming as a motivational tool first caught the attention of educationists in the 1980s. From there, it has slowly developed and evolved into a field of study and research and by 2002, gamified thinking had become a mainstream, established educational practice.
There are certain key features that educational games have:
- Instant feedback
- Mark for review
- Fun environment
- Social connection
- Scaffolding (difficulty level may be variable based on the responses in AI capable games)
- Progress indicators (badges, player levels)
- Mastery (level ups)
Understanding Noon Academy’s vision of taking out boredom from the learning equation, gaming becomes instantly relatable. With Noon games, students get to practice their regular syllabus with the above mentioned features.
Noon is at the forefront of virtual education in Pakistan
Keeping in view the unique approach taken forward by Noon Academy, we can see that Noon is at the forefront of innovation in virtual education in Pakistan. Whether you want to study Matric, FA/F.Sc, Cambridge O/A Levels, or university entrance tests, Noon knows how to keep you engaged, so you can achieve your best.
You can sign up for Noon today and get started in less than five minutes.