KUALA LUMPUR: Even though students have returned to physical classrooms, many teachers continue to craft personalised and unique online distance learning (ODL) experiences to deliver engaging lesson plans for greater classroom attention and participation.
This is to help the concentration of students who often grasp their syllabus better with physical classes after discovering that they are easily fatigued and uninterested when looking at the screen for too long via ODL.
Sekolah Kebangsaan Pendidikan Khas Selangor special education teacher Nur Ilda makes her classes fun by making her own teaching videos on Youtube through Ielda Learning Video Sign Language (iLVSL).
"The pandemic and lockdown in the past actually made us teachers more committed than usual.
"We took up video making and editing skills in order for the learning material to be more interesting and easy for students to understand," she said.
Learning by imitation is one teaching method Ilda recommends to help low functioning students in her online classes.
It is an initiative she took because of the lack of online teaching materials for students with impaired hearing.
"Only half of my special needs students would join the online classes because their parents' still have a distrust in the conventional ODL teaching methods," said Ilda.
She added many parents could not guide their children at home as they were not sign language proficient, which encouraged her to set up iLVSL.
"I hope that teaching videos like iLVSL can be used by other teachers to help students with impaired hearing learn at home with minimal guidance from parents," she said.
Bentley Music Academy music teacher Grace Choo said it is imperative for her ODL classes to be more entertaining.
"I will make physical cards and show them and ask the parents to print them out.
"Other than that, I will try to incorporate more games or activities during my online lessons," said Choo.
According to her, such methods help students engage in activities that are more interactive rather than just catching up on theories.
Among the challenges she faced while teaching via ODL is handling the attention span of her students.
One would think that learning music online is easier as it is a form of entertainment, "but it is still a lesson my students have to learn".
"They become very cheeky at trying to get away from the online lesson because for them to sit down in front of the computers or a device for a long time is physically tiring, of course they want to take a break," she said.