Facilitating Students Learning Through Online Learning to Promote Work From Home

For now, all schools in Indonesia and in many countries around the world are doing distance learning between teachers and students because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Technology-based online learning platforms in Indonesia have responded by committing to help students, especially those living in areas impacted by this novel coronavirus outbreak, in continuing their learning process at home.

To help students continue their education, the following list comprises e-learning platforms that are accessible to the public, as compiled by kompas.com:

Zenius Education

Technology-based education platform Zenius Education is allowing students to access its 80,000 learning videos for free. The videos contain learning materials for elementary to senior high school students.

“Aside from being accessible for free, the majority of the videos require minimum internet quota,” said Rohan Monga, CEO of Zenius Education, in a statement. “Hopefully, students can continue to learn by themselves.”

Zenius Education has also allowed educators access to hundreds of thousands of exercises. Teachers can share the videos and exercises with their students and parents via various applications, including WhatsApp.

Rumah Belajar Kemendikbud

The Ministry of Education and Culture of Indonesia has developed a long-distance learning service available in its website and the application available in Google Play.

Dubbed Rumah Belajar (The Learning House), it can be accessed by both teachers and students from early-childhood (PAUD level) to senior high and vocational schools. The platform provides main features such as Sumber Belajar (Learning Sources) with learning materials in the form of images, videos, animations, simulations and games; Kelas Digital (Digital Class) which facilitates virtual classes among teachers and students; Laboratorium Maya (Virtual Laboratory) which contains interactive simulation practicum activities; and Bank Soal (Questions Bank), which provides collections of exercises for students.

G Suite Education

Initiated by Google, G Suite Education helps students and teachers who want to conduct remote classes in areas with limited internet access. Schools can use Hangouts Meet, a video conference platform available for G Suite users, and Google Classroom, a web service to facilitate teachers in creating, scoring and distributing assignments.

Google has allowed schools to use Hangouts Meet for free until July 1. Schools are able to hold video conferences with up to 100,000 participants within one domain and hold a large meeting with up to 250 participants in each class. The sessions can be recorded and kept on Google Drive to be accessed later on.

Microsoft Teams

Benny Kusuma, education lead of PT Microsoft Indonesia, said it had opened Office 365 access for education, which includes their word processor software Microsoft Word, the spreadsheet software Excel, the presentation program PowerPoint, the information gathering program OneNote and their communication platform Teams. Schools are required to provide an institution domain as a digital identity for teachers and students. Office 365 will facilitate the virtual-learning activities by video conference.

“Teachers are able to send teaching materials in a form of text or video through [Microsoft] Teams to their students,” Benny said. “Students can also discuss with their teachers within the teams.”

Ruangguru

Indonesian education technology startup Ruangguru has made its Sekolah Online Ruangguru program available for free. The application is downloadable from Google Play and App Store.

The program allows students to join live teaching sessions from Mondays to Fridays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Fifteen live teaching sessions are available to choose from on all subjects for elementary and senior high school students. Participants will be able to join live-chats during sessions and discuss the subjects with other students. The sessions are also available to be watched later on after 12 p.m. at the same day.

Students can also use other features for free, such as Bank Soal and Online Tryout.

Let’s use these platforms to make distance education for both the teachers and students more exciting but also more fulfilling and successful.

Retrieved from: www.thejakartapost.com/online-learning-platforms-for-students. 8 April 2020

Retrieved from: www.researchgate.net 8 April 2020