Do our children learn enough in Sky Class? A case study: online learning in Chinese primary schools in the COVID era March to May 2020

All human being’s ways of living, working and studying were significantly impacted by the Covid-19 in 2020. In China, the Ministry of Education reacted fast in ensuring that primary school students could learn online at home by promoting the Sky Class program from February 2020. Educators, parents, and students all faced the challenges of adapting to new online teaching and learning environments. In this small-scale case study, Sky Class’s content and the participants’ experiences, will be presented. Four primary school teachers and five primary school students and their parents participated in three-rounds of interviews sharing their perspectives and experiences of online learning. The study showed that the students gained more parental support and that they benefited from using multimedia functions, like replay, in their Sky Classes. However, the majority of participants reported that the students learnt less. By mapping the learning activities and themes from Sky Class against Cope and Kalantzis’ e-learning ecologies, our study found that only ubiquitous learning and multimodal meaning were achieved. We suggest the reason may be that high cognitive learning was not achieved due to less teachers’ supervision, lack of interaction, delayed feedback, shorter learning times and communication. In conclusion, innovative pedagogies, which can foster different types of learning from the e-learning ecologies may overcome the negative aspects reported about Sky Class. Further research is required for implementing online technology as a catalyst for educational change.