Once seen as the poor cousin to mainstream education, online schooling was approached with apprehension by students and teachers in a pre-pandemic world. With limited resources and a lack of real-world experience, online schooling was destined to remain in the shadow of bricks-and-mortar institutions.
Fast forward to 2023, and the online schooling industry has been doing a lot of growing up. With the COVID-19 pandemic forcing Australian schools to shift towards online learning, the number of enrolled homeschooled students has doubled across the nation, as many students choose to continue their studies at home.
With the increasing demand for flexible online learning environments, Australia has already seen an unprecedented increase in virtual schools. Ellen Brown, Founder and Director of Euka believes this is only the beginning.
Promising to ‘break out of the system’ with individualised and flexible education, Euka is looking to rebrand homeschooling as the future of learning with a curriculum designed for students to “learn what they want, at their own pace.”
Euka is now Australia’s largest online education provider for K-12 students. Ms Brown told EducationDaily that “the exponential growth of Euka over the past three years is the result of homeschooling naturally becoming more mainstream, not the other way around”.
“We’re seeing a lot of families deliberately choose homeschooling, rather than ‘accidentally’ falling into it because their child isn’t ‘fitting in’ at a mainstream school,” she says.
When asked why the industry had evolved since the COVID-19 pandemic, Brown pointed to the rise in remote workers being responsible for the increase in homeschooling admissions.
“An often overlooked factor in the rise of homeschooling since the pandemic is the fact many parents are now working from home, which opens up, for the first time, the opportunity to educate their children at home,” says Brown.
“Parents are also finding their children’s academic level is different from what they’d previously thought – both above and below. But homeschooling is allowing them to get a much better gauge of where they’re at.”
More parents work from home
In what looks to be the new working norm, Australian workers reportedly spend 27 per cent of their working hours from home, with 29 per cent of Australians working remotely full-time.
“I think a key evolution of ‘virtual education’ from the pandemic is parents feeling empowered to teach their children at home – the forced shutdown of schools showed them that they are capable, and in fact, really enjoy educating their own kids.” says Ms Brown.
With a self-driven approach to education, Euka students are encouraged to follow their passion and “march to the beat of their own drum” as parents and students are given the freedom to choose the content that shapes their education.
“Age or grade is simply not a handbrake on learning anymore,” says Ms Brown. “Virtual education allows students to learn at their own pace – if they’ve got a particular interest in science or history, then they can move through that as fast and as far ahead as they like.”
The pursuit of passions
Perhaps the biggest benefit, though, according to Ms Brown, is that students get to spend more time on their passions – be it music, sport or any other extracurricular activity they’re interested in.
“We even have a young boy who works in a part-time role in his dad’s businesses around Euka, and is legitimately making a $30,000 salary as a 16-year old.”
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Euka has expanded its services beyond the scope of the mainstream school curriculum, and now offers more than 120 online electives and micro-credentials.
And Euka isn’t planning on slowing down. As demands for a flexible online education continue to rise, Ms Brown says the organisation is constantly searching for innovative ways to engage students online.
“Flexibility is a huge selling point for homeschooling and we’ve heard of some really clever twists on the concept, from families banding together to hire a tutor so their kids can learn in a more social setting to sporting groups offering Euka at their club,” she says. “We’ve also had to get innovative, with Euka students now getting together to do cooking and Lego club and we’ve even set up a Minecraft club on a dedicated Euka server.”
With the advancement of education technology and the continuing popularity of online schooling, mainstream education may be forced to evolve, or fear being left behind.
