Celebrating diversity and incorporating various aspects from other cultures contributes to a strong educational foundation for students and at the same time, provides on-the-job opportunities for professional development for instructors.

Despite the challenges that were brought on by the pandemic, the current conditions pave the way for some exciting opportunities for teachers to reach out to their colleagues in other nations without the worries of travel bans and expenses. Plus, the distance learning environment can work to the advantage of students who would participate in learning activities with peers from around the globe.

The Tools for Building a Bridge

Learning to communicate and collaborate as a team player is vital to academic success. In addition to meeting this goal, teachers are also tasked with preparing their students for jobs that might involve some degree of remote collaboration.

On the one hand, school shut-downs pose quite an obstacle to achieving this endeavor; however, when utilizing online learning apps, like Pedagogue, teachers can get past these barriers and open the door to more collaboration with colleagues and students from different cultures. Thus, this distance learning environment would further enhance the educational experience by involving the possibility of team teaching and collaborative online international learning.

Real-World Opportunities to Acquire and Apply Skills

Aside from the collaboration aspect, distance learning will also enable students to gain access to authentic opportunities to acquire and apply other skills that will benefit them in the future such as:

• Acquiring a foreign language in an immersion situation
• Analyzing and reporting research findings to a large group
• Utilizing technology to present information  

With this technological advantage, teachers can also further engage students in the distance learning environment, while having more flexibility in their classroom. And because one important feature of this flexibility would include collaborating on a global scale, one can imagine how far an educational opportunity would take the students if they could work with another class in another part of the world.

The Prospects of Professional Development

In addition to the benefits for students, educators can also gain practical, hands-on experience in making distance learning work more effectively for their students.

One way to start this process is to set up a profile on Pedagogue to take advantage of the detailed tutorials for setting up a virtual classroom and to gain valuable insight from the platform’s community of instructors. Once that pathway is established, the teacher can then network with another classroom overseas to set up a telecollaboration experience for the students.

All in all, distance and digital learning has turned a pandemic into an occasion for trying new ideas and taking risks in order to foster global collaboration. With virtual classrooms on the rise, teachers have the chance to branch out, to create their own lessons in a virtual classroom, such as Pedagogue, and to set up a global virtual collaboration with another classroom. The mutual sharing of lessons and cultural perspectives would benefit students for many years to come.