Glittering lights, hot chocolate, Santa parades, and love wrapped in the form of gifts – these are the things that come to mind when talking about the holidays. The jolly times, however, lead to a discontinuity in learning. The holiday season results in a decline of 1.5% in learning behavior, 1.3% in engagement, and 2% in academic self-confidence among students. This is the time when educational publishers must leverage advanced edtech platforms to ensure skill and knowledge retention without killing the holiday spirit.
Learning Continuity: Key to Minimizing Holiday Learning Loss
Students can lose up to two months of academic progress during the holidays. This results in the need for educators to spend time on post-holiday repair work, which, in turn, leads to higher stress in learning environments in January. While teachers lose control, parents struggle to ensure learning continuity. The challenge is maintaining educational continuity during the busy holiday planning of parents and the fun mode children are in. This takes a toll on the educational well-being of K-12 learners and higher-education students.
Self-paced learning-based edtech platforms can help minimize learning loss during the holidays. However, the responsibility of ensuring that learning remains engaging and motivating rests on the shoulders of educational publishers.
It is critical to understand that the time and effort spent on learning will be less. Moreover, many students may travel. Ensuring anytime, anywhere accessibility and seamless experiences across devices is paramount. Advanced eReaders with downloadable eBooks make this possible. An eReader equipped with hotlinks to access supplementary materials, and features, such as highlighting and annotations, can keep students engaged.
From Holiday Loss to Merry Learning
You got that right. Educational publishers must ensure that the holiday spirit is upheld even during the ‘learning’ hours. Certain features that online learning platforms must offer for this include:
Holiday Authoring
Digital publishing for the holidays includes authoring and distributing content that resonates with the holiday cheer and keeps learning joyful. Using holiday-themed skins in eBooks and activities, such as holiday-themed projects, can keep students engaged and motivated. For instance, you can switch your gamification badges to thematic mementos and leaderboard titles to reindeer names. Digital content authoring tools with recommendations to make learning materials in the holiday spirit can be a powerful addition to your edtech platform.
Gifting Personalization
While classroom education goes on a break, let autonomous personalized learning hold the fort. Research has long proven that personalized content improves learning achievement and engagement. Since this is a time of reinforcement, it does not mean forcing kids to focus on their weaknesses alone.
Assigning generic projects does not help either. Balancing their curiosity and needs is essential. EdTech platforms need to enable personalization to help students practice skills and apply the knowledge that pushes them forward on their learning journeys. Employing competency-based instruction techniques can also help sharpen their skills.
Smart Companions
Group activities are difficult to conduct during the holidays. However, AI learning assistants can offer interactive learning opportunities. They can answer students’ queries to prevent learning discontinuity and provide necessary feedback to keep them on track. MagicBox™’s KEA even helps students search for relevant topics and suggests learning materials to improve their learning assimilation.
Students’ learning behaviors may also change during the holidays. Leveraging real-time analytics to tailor instruction, activities, and learning paths for the holidays can help align education experiences with student preferences.
Vetting Students and Parents for the Holidays
Educators must prepare for the holiday season in advance. Start by educating parents about the necessity to create a learning-friendly environment and dedicating space and time to their children’s continued education during this time. Also, educate parents about creating flexible schedules and planning outings ahead of time to not hinder their holiday fun.
Teachers should be careful about holiday learning assignments that seem like a to-do list. Instead, focus on building excitement and disseminating the message that students will get their personalized holiday assignments. Also, if your edtech platform has added new tools, setting time aside to ensure that students know how to use them before the holidays begin will help. The AI learning assistant will, of course, be available to help students if they get stuck somewhere.
Learning Continuity: For and Beyond the Holidays
Time away from school should not mean a loss of academic progress, derailing students from their year-end learning goals. Educational publishers must upgrade their digital learning resources for the holidays to ensure that skill and knowledge levels and student confidence do not decline. Edtech platforms equipped with engaging learning resources, interactive reinforcement lessons, and personalized supplementary materials are significant in ensuring this. Partnering with a digital education expert known for their tools to support learning continuity can ensure student engagement on your edtech platform. Learn more from the experts at MagicBox™.
