Now let us explore what separates remote work and remote education. 

The biggest factor that differentiates remote work and remote education is the effect and impact each has on employees and students and the end beneficiaries respectively. 

Remote work offers many benefits to workers and makes lives generally easier for everyone assuming remote or hybrid work have been risk managed well.  

Freedom, flexibility, cost savings and time balance are all direct manifestations of remote work that have already been and continue to be talked about. Compared to these, the downsides are very few. 

But does remote education give students more benefits than limitations? A slightly nuanced approach needs to be taken to answer this question. 

We, the Social 

When children, teenagers and adolescents begin school and college, they are discovering the world and its ways at the same time.  

Remote education often inhibits this self-discovery that is an essential part of a person’s life because a lot of what feeds into that discovery today is not part of remote education 

A study aimed to understand the link between social isolation and the overall development of children and teenagers found that social deprivation jeopardized cognitive development and increased cortisol levels. In addition, it found a strong association between social isolation and mental health issues like anxiety and depression in children and teenagers.  

Another research found that adolescence is a time of intense psychological and social transformation where peer influence and social structures are essential to help people build a strong self-identity.  

Also, high-level cognitive processes are developed that assist adolescents in navigating social networks, facing rejections, handling approvals and generally refining themselves. 

When children, teenagers and adolescents go to school and have in-person 360-degree interactions with their peers, friends and teachers, they learn social skills they take with them throughout adulthood.  

Remote education, in a lot of ways, limits the real-life situations and life experiences that can potentially shape them. 

For this reason, parents who themselves love working remotely are apprehensive about the idea of their children being remotely educated (let us keep aside the thoughts of harrowed parents needing a break for a moment).  

For instance, Preety who is 34 years of age, and resides in Lucknow, really likes remote work because it gave her the role of a marketing manager at a firm in Germany. She likes the flexibility attached to it and the idea that she has more time on her hand now. The time that she gives to her child, spouse and set of friends in the city.  

During the pandemic, her son Ravi’s school, Millennium Public School had online classes throughout. The school had to cancel physical exams as well. 

While all of this was a necessity, Preety began noticing changes in Ravi’s behaviour. Her otherwise lively and talkative son now wanted to keep to himself. He would attend his online classes every day but simply for the sake of it. His teachers brought his lack of active participation in class to Preety’s notice. She tried to encourage her son to interact more but he just didn’t. Ravi was more interested in being in his room and playing video games after classes. Preety worried about Ravi’s social skills and the effect remote education had on his personality.  

Schools Are More Than Just Textbooks! 

School environments and education take a holistic approach to defining a person’s personality and social behaviours. 

Apart from curriculums and academics, educational institutions introduce a variety of situations to children’s lives that help them understand social norms and develop morals, ethics and values. 

Playing together and taking part in competitions help students understand what fair play is. And what it is not. How different kids stand up or wilt from situations.  

Popularity contests give a glimpse into the life and how life works independently of the morality otherwise portrayed.  

Deciding whether to get along or stand up for oneself is a life-changing conflict that schools can often expose a child to. Summer camps make children independent and teach them how to live without the comfort of home and family. 

To put that into perspective, let us look at an example.  

Jaanvi, a 13-year-old, was being remotely educated during the pandemic. Attending online classes was very comfortable for her and she grew accustomed to being alone. When schools reopened, Jaanvi found herself being socially anxious because, in the past two years, she had hardly any social contact. Finding herself in a social setting again, she felt underconfident. Before the pandemic, she always took the initiative for school activities and programs but now was unsure about her abilities. 

The Key Difference 

The fundamental difference between remote work and remote education is that the former is adopted by fully-formed adults and the latter is for developing children and youngsters. The lack of social interaction and setting, in this case, is far more harmful to children who are still in the primary ages of personality development.  

Erik Erikson, a famous psychologist and psychoanalyst are well-known for his theory and study on the psychological development of human beings. Out of his eight stages of personality development, he clearly mentioned that during the preschool stage (ages three to five), a child’s development centres around initiative while the early school years (that last till the age of eleven) focus on the development of industriousness. The adolescence stage (that lasts till the age of eighteen) is marked by the development and awareness of identity and role confusion.  

In all these stages, the healthy and positive involvement of caregivers, peers, friends and teachers assists developing children to take initiative to learn and do things, forming a sense of accomplishment and competence, and comfortably understanding their identity and responsibilities. 

To conclude, a lot of significant teachings and growth-inducing experiences get diluted in a remote setup of education. It may help to not discard the conventional schooling method altogether and instead adopt a hybrid model that takes into consideration everything – the need for flexibility, increased opportunity and healthy development of children. 

The post The Revolution of Remote Work and Remote Education – The Differences  appeared first on Jackstien Practices, India.

Today we seek to explore what binds remote work and remote education. 

Remote work is simply a model of work where employees and teams are majorly distributed, and they do not commute to a central place of work, like an office premises, every day. People can work out of their homes, co-working spaces or anywhere in the world.  

Remote education and learning, similarly, lean away from the traditional centralised classroom premises setup and teaching and learning primarily happen through technological tools and infrastructure. 

Practically

The key parallel of remote education and remote work is how both enable extraordinary worldwide collaboration. Simply put, one could work at any firm and learn from any school in the world.  But maybe this is more the similarity of outcome rather than of fundamentals.

At a simple practical level, remote work and remote learning are built on the same foundation of robust digital tools and require people to be tech-savvy. 

Cost savings is another important factor that is present in both remote education and remote work. Global Workplace Analytics, a research firm, found that if employees worked remotely even three days of the week, then companies could save up to $11,000 for each employee. For workers, the costs of commuting to the office every day are heavily slashed. For students opting for remote education, housing and travel costs are eliminated. 

Flexibility is something that remote work and remote education both bring with them. The ability to choose your hours and seamlessly integrate work and learning with life is a paramount advantage of these models. 

At the same time, since work and learning are just a few steps away from the computer at home, remote work and education may have blurred personal boundaries for people who value them. Detaching from emails, messages, results and agendas at the end of, say, a shift, session or class requires effort that just ‘exiting the premises’ did not. 

Fundamentally 

Let’s look at the fundamentals though.

Demand and supply always find a way to balance each other out and this stands true in the case of remote work and education as well. 

For a long time, there was a demand for access to special and higher education that did not require students to move out of their hometowns and cities. It came from the absence of means that students in smaller towns and cities struggled with.  

Devansh, 21, wasn’t able to pursue a course in Graphic Designing like his ‘rich cousin from Mumbai’ because his hometown Sultanpur didn’t have the opportunity. He began self-learning through YouTube but knew he needed a formal education in the subject to be eligible to work further. With the rise of edtech in India, Devansh saw how online courses became more streamlined, affordable and credible. He registered on one of the burgeoning online academies and even specialized in forms of Design he did not know existed until other students started discussing them.   

But Sultanpur is a small town. For students in Tier-II cities as well, getting a special course or higher degree from overseas meant moving out, paying for rent and lodging abroad and in general spending a lot of money. Remote education has helped thousands of them to attend, say, MBA classes online from international universities of their choice. Within the country and internationally.

The need for quality, higher education that isn’t too costly was directly met by remote education. 

Similarly, companies were spending large amounts of time, money and effort into finding people with special skills, training them and then assigning them projects. Most often, if the limited local talent pool did not yield any substantial results, firms would take on helping existing employees learn skills and perform extra tasks for additional remuneration. It was a lengthy process, and there was a demand for special skills that quickly harmonized with the tasks at hand. 

For instance, a SaaS firm in Gurgaon wanted to onboard a part-time developer for a six-month period, but qualified candidates for the job wanted to a full-time, permanent position. When the firm brought all operations online, and remote work began in full swing, it was easily able to find multiple qualified people for the same job. They eventually hired not only Vashisht from Nashik but also Rishabh, 24 from Singapore who was looking for a brief developer internship in his domain to assist and learn. 

The demand for special skills was supplied by remote work, which opened global talent pools for firms and companies to utilize and hire from. 

Economics, in the end, always attempts to balance demand and supply.

Remote work, at its core, is simple economics.

In the next blog, lets take a look at what separates remote work and remote education. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A senior banker from the complex global markets space, Mr. Nishant Shah has worked for more than two decades across Citibank, Standard Chartered and JPMorgan Chase before taking over as our Managing Partner. Passionate with word and pen about finance, technology, macroeconomics and future trends, he is a Chartered Accountant by education and the winner of various prestigious awards during his career, including the ‘India Awards for Excellence’.

The post Remote Work and Remote Education – The Common Factor  appeared first on Jackstien Practices, India.