Our First Month of Online Math Instruction

The City of Calgary stopped non-essential services from operating on March 27, 2020 to help reduce the covid-19 infections from spreading. This necessary step forced us to turn on our online math instruction platform a little sooner than we had planned. Fortunately, our team was already in the process of getting up to speed so the learning curve wasn’t as rushed as it could have been. On March 29, 2020, all of our students binders were digitized. Sundays had been slow the previous two weeks given many families had chosen to begin self-isolating. We had kept our doors open with plenty of physical distancing between students along with plenty of disinfecting up until the AHS order. Staying open was a choice we made in response to the needs of our families. We were told about challenging situations at home where learning would be far from ideal and wanted to serve the community how they needed us to. It was a sad day when we had to tell all families we were moving to online math instruction only as we knew it would be very hard on some but we standy by supporting our healthcare system to stay intact. If we can all focus our efforts there, the return to in-centre will come sooner.

In hindsight, the timing was perfect. Some families were already asking about the possibility of online math tutoring. We shared that we were going to launch Mathnasium@home soon but the fact that it turned out to be immediately made many families happy. Most of our students migrated to online math learning right after our doors closed for in-centre sessions. What came after that has been interesting. We needed to create material that would best support our families for this new online math system so FAQs and a scheduler were developed. We wanted our families and ourselves to be set up for success for online math instruction. For the most part, it has all worked well. Parents are even using the tools we’ve provided to share homework in advance so we can support online math homework help. 

To date, there are still some technology hang ups but any organization that onboards thousands of users within a day should expect that. Is it perfect for our families? Not yet; but I’m thankful and I believe fair in saying that the 80/20 rule applies. I believe that 80% of the time, our instruction is fluid and our platform is simply our new norm. The other 20% well...let’s just say it’s a work in progress. “Refresh” is a common term we use because we do it often with our online math instruction. Some families are also more prepared to embrace the technology than others and of course, there can always be improvements in our documentation. Regardless, some days are awesome and others could be better but everyday we are happy we are still helping our students learn and have fun with math. 

Contact us 825-509-2143 or [email protected] for online math help and we’ll get your student up and running right away.