Author: LEARND.online

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To the Burnout Educators: How to maximise your efforts for the greatest impact?

If you are a burnout educator, then the following should be a good summary of you and your daily experience:

  • 24 hours are never enough: preparing lessons, designing and grading assignments, setting exams, plus the administrative work (all multiplied by the factor of the number of students and classes)… don’t even mention social life
  • Heart of gold, but a body of rust: you are always wishing to do more for your students, but the body just can’t keep up
  • Mentally and physically drained: your eyebags are just as heavy as the ones you use to lug the markings home. Gastric issues due to missed meals. Plus, the psychological weight of being accountable to hundreds of students each day (we haven’t even include the parents).

Simply put, there is just not enough YOU to go around. 

As such, how can you maximise each unit of effort to result in the greatest impact — on learners, other educators and your most neglected SELF? Read on!

1. Do not create from scratch

As educators, we are motivated by our desire to give the BEST to our students. As such, we often conceptualise an ideal approach to deliver the lesson. This causes us to believe that we MUST create slides in certain ways, choose each word that we use carefully or find that perfect diagram that illustrates certain points correctly. After multiple misfits, we give up looking to others to give us the replica of what we have in our mind and we end up creating these resources ourselves.

So, what’s the problem here? We could say that issues could be (1) no one has thought of creating this resource therefore it does not exist, or (2) someone has created such a resource but it is not made available.

In either case, there must be some available resources that can be adapted to convey what you have in mind. The end result does not have to appear sexy. As long as it conveys the meaning that you wish to, it is perfectly good enough! Remember that unless you have students who are attentive enough to complain about the misalignment of text boxes, your efforts are probably “wasted” on fulfilling your own selfish desires for perfection.

2. Share Resources

I am not sure about you but I have personally benefited tremendously from sharing resources with colleagues and friends. Not only does sharing solve the issue of having to start from scratch, but it also inspires new ideas beyond our personal paradigm. 

It is hence a no-brainer that… a wider network of educators will grow a richer pool of resources. So, search the net and join teacher communities. Create shared drives with friends to share ideas and resources (of course, while respecting intellectual rights and ownership). Since sharing is a two-way street, building a community of giving members will make this journey more sustainable and enjoyable.

3. Find your own balance

There is a lot of talk about what one should prioritise as an educator. Some would caringly remind us about the importance of self-care while others can shamelessly declare that every and anything would be “part of your job and responsibility”. 

Speaking from experience, it is interestingly difficult to digest BOTH comments. Self-care reminders fall on deaf ears as our care for students makes us go for the endless “one last push”. Critical comments fuel that same desire and make us push even harder. 

Finally, we are forced to stop is when we are physically or psychologically burnout.

Much like an overstretched spring, such moments often leave irreparable damage. 

So the bottom line is: you have to find YOUR own balance. Ask yourself truthfully if your current approach is sustainable. Echoing Points 1 and 2, do not be afraid to seek help and rely on others! As the saying goes: “Travel fast, go alone. Travel far, go together.” As we all know, education is never a sprint so find some buddies and turn this marathon into a relay!

Doing something about feeling burnout

We know how entrenched these issues are and we think that it is about time someone does something about it. We created LEARND.online in hopes to support you with these issues. As a learning resources marketplace, we hope to make teaching and learning materials more accessible to students and educators. 

We envision LEARND.online to be a site where you can:

  • Find quality resources designed by fellow educators easily and at affordable prices (decided by those who uploaded their resources)
  • Share your hard work so that other educators AND students can benefit
  • As a BONUS, earn some side income should you decide to put a price tag on your work

Win-Win-Win

With LEARND.online, you can save up on time and effort by leveraging resources from others. By sharing your work, you benefit others (and your wallet) for no additional effort! Together, you win, they win and we all win!

While you can share your complete masterpieces like those video tutorials that you prepared for Home-Based Learning during circuit breaker, you can also:

  • share simple images of your self-created acronym to remember a difficult piece of content,
  • your self-illustrated diagrams that emphasise certain critical elements that are missing/lacking in existing diagrams,
  • a brilliantly designed question that innovatively tests a concept… and the list goes on! If you are motivated enough to invest effort into the creation of these resources, they must definitely hold some incredible value.

Having talked the talk about encouraging educators to share more, we walk the walk by ensuring that there are NO fees involved in signing up or listing your products. We strive for win-win and will only take a modest cut from each successful paid transaction to keep the site going. In other words, we are self-funding this project with hopes that it can help educators and learners better enjoy the teaching and learning journey.

We look forward to having you and your peers on board. Sign up here today!

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LEARND.online endeavours to leverage technology to make learning resources more accessible and sustainable. As an online learning resource marketplace, we aim to empower educators and learners to share amazing self-created learning resources with those in need. You can find cheatsheets, notes, practices, study guides, mindmaps, lesson plans, free test papers and more! Sign up is entirely free! Visit us today and thank you for your support.

LEARND.online — Online Learning Resource Marketplace

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Making Learning Resources More Accessible to All

We have written a post on how we contribute to a more sustainable approach to the use of learning resources (link here). In this follow-up post, we will like to share how LEARND.online contributes to making learning resources more accessible. 

A quick introduction about ourselves, we are a team of (ex)educators who are passionate about education, technology and problem-solving. Our experiences as educators taught us the inequity in education, and the challenges that learners from different walks of life face. While students in Singapore benefit from the heavily subsidised education, we know how much a difference additional academic support (e.g., tuition) can make. To some, such support is even viewed as a need for students to be “on par” with their peers (who are receiving similar support). This is no surprise that the tuition industry here in Singapore is estimated to amount to S$1.4 billion based on the last Household Expenditure Survey in 2017 and 2018, which according to a CNA report, is reportedly growing due to the pandemic!

If we think about it, it is difficult to argue against the fact that having more attention, resources and guidance will translate into better performance. This is analogous to engaging private coaches for the grooming of professional athletes. Yet, the fact remains that… such services are not accessible to all households.

We want to do something for these people.

Focusing on Learning Resources

One key aspect that supportive families feel helpless about is in the area of the “know-how”. Effective learning is about making meaning out of the content and also developing the right skills and attitudes through deliberate practice. Tuitions justify their high fees through the provision of both human support as well as the technical knowledge to effectively develop the learners. As such, we thought to ourselves, what if we can focus on improving the accessibility to the technical knowledge of learning through the form of learning resources by making them available at a fraction of the cost (of tuition services)?

We had initially thought of creating these learning resources ourselves. After considering our limited specialisation in our respective subjects and the scalability of the effort, we realised that the impact and outreach that we can provide would be vastly limited (considering that we are working on this as a side hustle). Adopting a collaborative mindset, we decided to develop a marketplace platform that enables the sharing of learning resources by all who share our mission and vision — making learning resources more accessible and sustainable. 

Empowering Educators and Learning Resource Creators

As educators, we create numerous learning resources every year. These include study notes/guides, bite-size classroom activities, homework practices, topical tests and even videos to support online learning. These resources take a huge amount of time, effort and heart to create, and the motivation that makes this happen is our belief that these resources will aid our learners in their learning. 

A Wider Audience = Greater Impact

What if, the positive impact of these resources can extend beyond the learners in our individual classrooms? Imagine helping a keen learner from a challenging background resolve some of his/her learning needs. Won’t that be will be such an impactful moment?

Motivated by the vision of enabling such moments, we put in months of hard work to develop a marketplace where digital learning resources can be shared and accessed by all. On LEARND.online, creators can have the option to share or sell the content at a price they deem fair. This way, we hope to attract professionals to share their wealth of knowledge with the masses.

One-time Effort & Passive Income

Furthermore, the amount of maintenance required for our creators is low. Unlike the case of physical products, once uploaded, the “product” will never run out of stock. This means that each product requires only a one-time effort to be uploaded and will remain available until it is taken down. This would be a necessity since we know educators do not have much time or energy to spare. Hopefully, the passive income will create additional motivation for creators to invest more effort into developing high-quality learning resources

Empowering ALL Creators

Not all passionate creators are certified educators. We believe that great learning resources can be contributed by anyone who invests effort and heart into the subject matter. In fact, we believe that even students can contribute high-quality learning resources that can benefit their fellow learners. This can come in beautifully handwritten notes, concept maps, etc. We would want to encourage learners to also step forth to share their great work with their peers. Furthermore, the creators also benefit as this forces them to ensure that their content is accurate and of high quality!

Our Commitment and Striving for Win-Win-Win

Our desire is that gather as many high-quality learning resources and make them accessible to as many learners as possible. To put our money where our mouth is, we do not charge any fees for the creation of account or the hosting of products. We self-fund our operations and will only earn through each successful transaction. In other words, we aim for a Win-Win-Win situation where creators earn from sales of his/her contribution, the learner gain from the quality resource and we collect a portion of the transaction to keep this business running. 

We are hoping for your support in our mission to make learning resources more accessible and sustainable. If interested, you can do so by doing any of the following:

  • Share and tell others about our mission at LEARND.online!
  • Join us as a creator and share your learning resources on LEARND.online via this link.
  • Share with us your feedback/contacts to help us become better via this link.
  • If you would like to donate to our cause, you may do so via this link.

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LEARND.online endeavours to leverage technology to make learning resources more accessible and sustainable. As an online learning resource marketplace, we aim to empower educators and even learners to share amazing self-created learning resources with those in need. You can find cheatsheets, notes, practices, study guides, mindmaps, lesson plans, free test papers and more anytime, anywhere, without the need to purchase prints (which damages our environment). Sign up is entirely free! Visit us today and thank you for your support.LEARND.online — Online Learning Resource Marketplace

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A More Sustainable Approach to using Learning Resources

In recent times, the word “sustainability” holds two meanings: (1) from a resource point of view, if the mentioned approach can withstand a long term deployment and (2) from an environmental standpoint, if the matter of discussion can help to contribute to maintaining the habitability of our planet. With the rising concerns over climate change (thanks to the various awareness campaigns), we now better appreciate the importance of taking actions NOW in order to safeguard our (not-so-far) future. In this post, we shall share our view on the more sustainable approach to the use of learning resources through LEARND.online.

Why Learning Resources?

To be honest, the key impetus to select the education field is not due to environmental concerns but rather our passion for education. Nevertheless, from our experience, we know that a large amount of printed learning materials goes to waste each year.

A quick look into the list of waste produced and recycled in our small island-nation Singapore alone, we see that paper/cardboard waste is the top waste generated in 2020 among the 14 categories of waste listed (see image below). With a total mass of 1,144,000 tonnes, the amount of paper waste generated is equivalent to the mass of about 100,000 double-decker buses! What makes the matter more concerning is that we have only achieved a recycling rate of 38%, making it the 2nd highest disposed waste after plastic.

As ex-teachers, we are very familiar with the amount of paper waste generated from unfinished ten-year series, old textbooks and unfinished/uncollected worksheets. Each year-end, we use trolleys to ferry stacks of papers and you will notice numerous recycling bins filled to the brim with these wastes. Truth-to-be-told, the photocopying room in each school is almost always busy (and we have to outsource this printing service to external vendors which will allocate one headcount for this position of photocopying worksheets for teachers). We never felt good about the wastefulness, but considering the circumstances, it seemed pretty inevitable for the needs of our students…

Until COVID-19 challenged us to rethink our approaches.

What has Changed?

With COVID-19 and home-based learning, we are forced to deal with a situation where learning resources have to go digital. Teachers and students are made to scale the steep learning curve in teaching and learning online. “Hardcopy” notes and worksheets have to be uploaded and downloaded in “softcopy”. Since there was no way to feasibly send physical worksheets and collect them, everyone has to adapt to the digital way of completing, submitting, grading and returning assignments through the net. Furthermore, we have also pushed to ensure that each student possesses a learning device (usually a Chromebook) with sufficient processing capabilities to handle these tasks.

The More Sustainable Approach

It is crucial for learners to get used to writing answers and attempting questions on pen and paper. In fact, studies have suggested that writing aids stronger cognitive engagement as compared to typing. Yet, with the improvement of on-screen writing technology as well as the exploration of digital examination, the relevance of pen-and-paper practise is put into question.

While technology continues to improve and the education fraternity test and explore the feasibility of a fully digital approach, the more sustainable approach will be to make digital copies of learning resources available and should the learner prefer, they can be printed on-demand. With this arrangement, we can not only minimise the absolute number of paper used but also ensure that should the resources be printed, it is on purpose and should therefore be put to good use.

As such, we have developed LEARND.online to encourage an increased uptake of digital learning resources. We hope that through a virtual marketplace, we can provide an alternative to traditional brick and mortar bookstores. Like a specialised mall filled with stores that provide learning materials, LEARND.online strives to empower more education content creators to set up stores with a simple few clicks while enabling shoppers to either window shop for interesting learning resources from the featured page or zoom in to what you need through the search tab. If you are an educator (or even a student who creates beautiful handwritten notes), why not share digitise and your learning resources with a wider audience (and earn some passive income)? If you are a student/parent, what’s better than buying a hardcopy book is that… should you/your child like to redo a specific practice, just simply redownload/reprint the assignment!

A preview of LEARND.online’s landing page

We view sustainability as a responsibility that we have to uptake both at the corporate and the individual level. We are working on it. Are you ready to play your part?

Support a more sustainable approach to the use of learning resources and visit us today at https://learnd.online!

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LEARND.online endeavours to leverage technology to make learning resources more accessible and sustainable. As an online learning resource marketplace, we aim to empower educators and even learners to share amazing self-created learning resources with those in need. You can find cheatsheets, notes, practices, study guides, mindmaps, lesson plans, free test papers and more anytime, anywhere, without the need to purchase prints (which damages our environment). Sign up is entirely free! Visit us today and thank you for your support.

LEARND.online — Online Learning Resource Marketplace