Online learning is becoming more and more prevalent as the country is in the middle of the Omicron peak - but how can New Zealand make sure this unconventional way of schooling doesn't disrupt children's learning?
Switzerland-based international education expert Conrad Hughes told AM we need to dial back on school assessments to overcome this "major challenge".
"Don't expect students to be on the exact same factory line model that we've designed in schools since the 19th century with something like COVID going on," he said.
Dr Hughes says the first step is to reduce the length of classes. At the International School of Geneva, they scaled back 45-minute classes to 30 minutes.
He says a lot of classroom time is "waffle" and spent talking.
"Students spend about… 15,000 hours of their lives in a classroom and if you lose any of that time you're not really going to make it up," Dr Hughes says. "The thing is it's about quality, not quantity."
He says to make the most of education, we need to size things down.
Dr Hughes says people get exhausted staring at a screen all-day and children can't be expected to do homework after spending the day in front of a computer.
He said getting children away from a screen is necessary and in Geneva teachers curated students moving around and practised mindfulness to try to counter some of the problems faced with online learning.
His tip is to always start online lessons with everyone's camera on so they can see everyone and celebrate being together.
Dr Hughes says teachers and parents need to go easy on students because when you try to shift exactly what you do in a normal classroom to online it doesn't work.
"If you have got the flexibility in your school system to modify the curriculum and modify assessments... Then you need to do that."
Watch the video above to see the full interview
