My youngest child is currently doing online / distance learning, as so many children are at the moment. I have had two other children pass through the same grade, at two different schools.

I currently feel like in many of the courses my youngest child is being funneled vastly more content than their siblings were delivered in the same subject/grade. This content is not well formatted for consumption, nor is it well parceled up to indicate when to pause. My child probably could handle the volume of content if it was well delivered, but is drowning in the executive function requirements of the delivery.

Often the content is pretty good, the assignments are pretty poor, and the feedback abysmal. I am just trying to figure whether it really is vastly more content than their older siblings were supposed to parse each week or not. I was obviously never THERE in class, so how to know?

Their school's courses require them to attend 1 lesson per week per subject for face to face interaction, and do the actual of the course via a website (consuming materials, submitting work). I have taken to copy and pasting a weeks worth of a subject into a single google doc for my child so it's more manageable to navigate, refer back to, etc. Usually I still have to link back to pages for some of the embedded content, but it is still easier than wading through the website, especially when you want to refer back to something later.

The week of English instruction I just compiled is 3300 words (teaching materials, work instructions, etc).There are multiple complex diagrams of complex ideas embedded in that 3300 word text, a bunch of interesting and relevant images, a bunch of completely useless place filling images and 110 mins of video (no single video longer than 18 mins). How long would we expect a yr8 child to take to read/watch this much instructional content, think about it?

Does that seem like a lot of non fiction, instructional reading (and watching) regarding a text and literary analysis ideas for a yr8 to consume basically undirected or supported by a teacher? Particularly given the inconsistent and poor formatting, so it doesn't "flow" nicely?


Last edited by MumOfThree; 03/28/21 10:15 PM.