Most OSD Parents Satisfied with Virtual Classes

A recent survey sent out to the parents of Oxford students attending school virtually showed most of those who completed the survey have been satisfied with the online instruction.

However, Assistant Superintendent Bradley Roberson noted Monday during the Oxford School District Board of Trustee meeting, there is room for improvement.

There are 1,420 students enrolled in virtual learning for the first nine weeks of school. The district received 380 responses from parents.

The survey focused on three major themes – communication from teachers, extra support for students and more interaction with teachers regarding content.

“Our current design of online instruction was based on those three themes,” Roberson said.

Students in grades pre-K through eighth grade doing online learning have teachers who only teach online, where high school students have different teachers for each subject and classes are a hybrid of students online and in-class students.

The survey asked parents to rate various aspects of online instruction on a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being extremely dissatisfied and 5 being extremely satisfied.

The three highest-scoring areas were the Testing Center, which received a 4.24 rating, teacher communication with a 3.9 rating and live-teaching sessions with a 3.93.

The four areas that produced the lowest satisfaction ratings were technology communications, amount of time spent on assignments, instructional videos and the amount of work assigned to students.

“With the technology communications, the survey did not have a ‘not applicable’ answer,” he said. “The percentage for neutral (3) was really high and I think that’s because most didn’t have a technology issue.”

Roberson said the average score for time spent on assignments was 3.52 and was brought down by answers from parents with middle school students who have seven classes each day. Oxford Middle School parents rated the amount of work at 3.38 satisfaction.

“Seven classes of Carnegie Units, that’s a lot,” he said.

The overall satisfaction rating was 3.78.

“I would have liked to have seen the overall score higher than 4, but I wasn’t completely discouraged,” he said. “I think we did some good things but we have some things we need to improve as we work forward.

The average number of parents who were dissatisfied was 10.7 percent.

Bramlett Elementary had the highest overall satisfaction score at 4.16. Della Davidson was second with a 4.10 score and Central Elementary had a 4.0 score.

Oxford Intermediate had an overall satisfaction rate of 3.69; Oxford Middle had a 3.53 rating and OHS had a 3.58 rating.

Some parents commented that they had some issues with their children focusing and lack of socialization. Positive remarks included flexibility in scheduling and lots of praise for teachers.

“Teachers being accommodating came up over and over,” Roberson said. “They have really stepped up and have been rockstars during this.”