When bringing up the topic of online learning during lockdown many people have different reactions but usually it’s either ‘God I wish we were back at home’ or ‘1 more minute of online school and I'm going to go crazy’. While it's clear that online learning isn't for everyone, I think it's something we shouldn't ignore completely, and I believe that it has many benefits and potential in our ever-growing technological world.
Firstly, let's go over some benefits of online learning. One of the main 2 things that I and others have loved about online school is the lack of travel and thus increase in sleep. As a student who must get a train to school (and sometimes a bus to the train station), I was able to get up a whole hour later in the morning and even more sometimes depending on my timetable. This really benefited me as I felt more awake and alert when going to my lessons as well as just being happier in general. Another great side effect of not getting the train was that there was a massive cut down on expenses. Obviously, as I wasn't getting the train, no money was spent on train fares, and even with a student discount they added up overtime so not having to get the train saved a lot of time and money.
Now with most things, there are some downsides. A lot of complaints with online learning were that people felt a lot less productive as they were either in the comfort of their own home and so did not want to work, or their home environment was not well suited for online learning and so they couldn't concentrate. In addition, people missed their friends and that social interaction that you get from going to school and that affected their mental health a lot.
These complaints are entirely valid and not much can be done to help such circumstances and so it seems that online learning just can't really take off. However, I think that there should be a choice to do online learning as so the people want to go to school can go whereas the others can choose to stay at home. This hopefully could also improve productivity and make people's lives easier as people have the freedom to learn how they want to.
To conclude, I believe that online learning has been a good experiment for schools as now while some hate it, others see it as a potential future for education with many benefits.