The year 2000 wasn’t that long ago, but isn’t it amazing just how much life has changed in the last 20 years? Smoking is banned pretty much globally in restaurants and bars, gay marriage has become a norm and being green has never been easier in a worldwide effort to curb Global Warming…
Like many others, I still remember when the New York Twin Towers stood high and reached the sky until that dreadful day in 2001 and the war on terror that followed. I also recall the tsunami which hit Thailand in 2004 and many more natural disasters over the years. I recollect the Wall Street collapse in 2009 and the international recession that followed… the list goes on.
But nothing compares to the current COVID19 pandemic in terms of the impact on everyday life on a global scale.
Last week while I held video-conference sessions with colleagues; conducted family and friend Visio catch up calls at the weekend; helped my kids do their homework on helpful applications linking them to their teachers, and updated my social networks… I thought to myself, what if this had happened in 2005?
YouTube was born in 2005 and Facebook was only a year old. There were no Apps, they emerged in 2008. Skype added video to its calling solution, 3 years after it launched! But if you wanted to video chat you needed high-end often unaffordable equipment. Apple launched the iPhone in 2007 and before that, Smartphones were not our main gateway to access the internet…
Nowadays we all have high speed connection internet, the cloud and a multitude of communication tools (Facetime, Hangout, Zoom, WhatsApp to name but a few) making it possible for millions of people to work effectively from home across the globe… This pandemic has forced the teleworking phenomenon predicted a couple decades ago upon us, but only because we have the means to do it. The lockdown is damaging the economy – but it could have been far worse…
In recent years, there has been much worry about what the rise in technology is doing to our lives. Working for an online language training company, I’ve often heard that language training over the phone and Visio conferencing tools is not a substitute for face-to-face contact… On the contrary, distance learning is the perfect substitute as not only is it adaptable, flexible and efficient, it has never been easier to access.
While you are stuck at home, remember that 1to1PROGRESS provides you with a quality online education platform and language trainers to help you improve all aspects of your linguistic skills during this time, just as they have always done and will continue to do.
Who knows, you might surface from this predicament with a new appreciation for distance language learning.
Melanie Hall – Educational Manager
30.03.2020