With the Coronavirus pandemic hitting the world hard and making American schools and workplaces their whole systems to maintain social distancing, Arlington High School has been testing the waters of virtual learning from home this year. So far, they’ve settled upon a new platform to get the majority of virtual at-home work done on: a learning platform called Edgenuity. Edgenuity guides students through a lesson, chosen by the teacher, including of roughly three or four sections: a warm-up, instruction, and finally, an assignment or quiz. This decision on a new platform was not taken without a bit of bad feedback. Recently, students and parents have been complaining about an extreme amount of work load with Edgenuity, partially due to the majority of the lessons being in video format, and you must watch the videos in their entirety before you can progress to the assignment/quiz. These lessons would ramp up to up to hours and hours of work in one class if a student started late in the day or got behind just slightly. Another issue is lack of notices as to assignments on different platforms. In an email update sent to parents and students on the 15th, Arlington High staff confirmed that they had made changes to the virtual learning assignment loads. Here is a summary of the most important changes students should take note of that were pointed out in the email:

-ACS At A Glance Weekly will now reflect exactly what assignments are due, the exact due dates for the week and the    learning platform where the assignments are located.

–Teachers should assign no more than approximately 15 minutes of work per course on Virtual Mondays that should be completed during the regular school hours of 7:00 – 2:00 p.m.

-Homework in the evenings should take students, on average, no longer than approximately 30 minutes per course. Note that each student works at a different pace, so please plan accordingly.

-All work assigned on remote learning days should take no more than approximately 45 minutes per course – just as if a student was in class.

As you can see, virtually all problems that have been complained about have been solved (or at least said to be solved). Now, hybrid students should be able to proceed with their work and manage their work load on virtual days of the week better than before. This has been Hudson Brown for AHS Digital Journalism. Thank you for reading.