Overcoming Resource Limitations
in Education
Examining resource limitation types, impacts, and solutions.
Any job is impossible when you lack the materials, tools, and team required. So then how can educators teach effectively when they have constantly limited resources? In this article, we’ll examine resource limitations, the impact on students, and how you can overcome them to improve educational experiences.
Types of Resource Limitations
Materials
Even basic supplies (paper, pencils, books, etc.) are hard to keep on hand and are prone to damage or disappearing. Some educators restock out of pocket, request students supply their own, or look for community fundraising to help supply the basic materials classrooms need.
Tools
With limited budgets and discretionary spending, it can be hard to replace old tools and experiment with new ones. Inflexible tools can also cause problems. For example, you can get a great set of right-handed scissors, but an increase in left-handed students will render them useless.
Team, Ratio, & Personal Development
One-on-one time with an educator can be a game-changer for a student. However, with educators being in such high demand, class sizes can become too large to provide one-on-one instruction. When stretched thin, it can be hard to relax or pursue personal development.
Updating Resources & Requirements
Whether your personal experience with common core was good or bad, it showed how difficult it can be to update resources and requirements. While educators are great at adapting, these changes can put a strain on the limited time they have – especially when working with non-educators.
Time, Attendance, & Planning Constraints
Learning takes time. The precious 180 days of instruction per year are often lost to absences, weather, and events. When 10 days missed can decrease pass rates by 5%, educators need time to plan and prepare. However, even that time is often interrupted.
Parent, Guardian, & Community Member Support
Without support from parents, guardians, and community members, it can be hard to keep students motivated and learning the skills and fundamentals they need to succeed. Part of the issue may be limited time, understanding, or agreement on what is most important.
Information & Assessment
Tests and homework may cause stress, but they can alert you when a student is falling behind. That said, by the time it comes to your attention, students may have already reinforced incorrect information. Re-learning this information is harder than an early intervention.
Environment Accommodations & Management
Each of your students are different, but their learning environment is the same (though remote learning tends to blend environments). From accommodations to environment management, conflicting needs can create impossible problems and one-size-fits-enough compromises.
Social, Emotional, & Motivational Energy
People have varying and limited amounts of social, emotional, and motivational energy. When a student runs out of energy, they can no longer learn effectively. Taking short breaks and changing teaching strategies can help, but is not always possible when time is limited.
Content Flexibility & Tailoring
Multimodal education can help cover concepts across diverse student needs, but the content itself may not be as flexible. For example, a student with dyslexia may need larger text with deliberate fonts, and a student who learns quickly may need more details to stay engaged.
The Impact on Students?
A student’s mind may be on an upcoming competition, life-changing social event, or a grim home circumstance. Developing a deep understanding of concepts for long-term success feels too abstract compared to what is happening this week. It is hard to provide students the help they need for long-term success when limited resources are met with a short-term focus. Unfortunately, short and long-term impacts will be felt by the students.
Increased Distractions
Minds are prone to wander. It is beyond student control when they don’t have the resources they need to stay engaged, motivated, and properly accommodated. Regardless of a student’s strengths or weaknesses, these distractions can cause students to miss important concepts.
Exhaustion, Frustration, & Overwhelm
Emotional energy runs out quickly when lacking proper tools and stressed by time. Some students are vocal when overwhelmed, but others quietly look for alternatives to learning hard concepts. Either way, frustrated, exhausted, and overwhelmed students can grow to dislike education.
Falling Behind
Missing a day or misunderstanding a concept may seem minor, but falling behind compounds. Extra work is needed to identify what was missed and catch up, without missing the new concepts and any ties between them. When time, tools, and support is limited, it can be hard to recover.
Low Test Scores
Limited resources are tied to lower test scores. Regardless of ability, compromises have to be made when classes are overpacked and time is spent improvising within limitations instead of saved with well-designed tools. Good scores may not fully reflect mastery, but they are important.
Rushing Through Content
Plans get interrupted. When time is already limited, choices are made between concept breadth and depth. Teaching-for-tests can feel like the only solution, even if it means students don’t understand some concepts. Missed lessons are lost or will steal time from future educators.
One-Size-Fits-Enough Education
Large classes are filled with compromise, where the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one. For example, in classrooms where students learn at speeds 1 through 5, most educators would teach for speed 3. The students on either end may become bored or lost.
Feeling Unsupported
Feeling unsupported makes any situation worse. Students are often hesitant to seek help when it isn’t actively given. When students feel they have to bear the burden of their confusion by themselves, it can be detrimental to their confidence and learning progress.
Decreased Opportunity
Limited resources compound into larger issues that require even more resources. When you don’t have enough educators, students fall behind and require more of an educator’s time to catch up again. When this isn’t possible, it limits student outcomes and growth opportunities.
Accessing Unlimited Resources & Transforming Education
Immersive technology finally allows for truly unlimited resources. Virtual Reality Classrooms provide infinite access to learning materials, tools, and almost anything you can imagine. You can visualize abstract concepts, have real-time metrics to identify and help students, and save a significant amount of time and money in the process. Virtual content is easy to update and distribute for the whole class, while classroom automations can reduce stress and allow educators to focus on facilitating a more effective learning experience.
The boundaries between well-funded and poorly-funded education will finally be broken when all students and educators have access to high quality resources and tools.
It may sound too good to be true, but we’ve developed an affordable platform to help educators transform education. With LearnSesh, you can already:
- Access unlimited resources
- Create & save 3D visualizations for hard concepts
- Completely control classrooms and content
- Quicky transition between spaces and concepts
- Keep tools up-to-date
- Remove distractions
- Save time & energy
- Work ‘in-person’ with communities everywhere
We’re also working to:
- Alert educators before students fall behind
- Provide per-student AI-assisted accommodations
- Improve communication & support with parents/guardians
- Develop learning modules for difficult/time-consuming concepts
- And much more…
We’re transforming education with an immersive, extended-reality technology that solves the big problems faced by education.
Conclusion
Resource limitations can have a severe impact on a student’s learning and opportunities. While there are many kinds of resource limitations, Virtual Reality Classrooms can provide immediate solutions for some of the most common and severe limitations. Even as an intervention-only solution, they keep students engaged and can provide otherwise impossible accommodations to help students catch up and keep up. By allowing you to preserve and expand upon your current tools, materials, and curriculum, Virtual Reality Classrooms are helping educators transform education.
