Online P.E - What About It?

Since March 2020, more than half of students in the world have begun to have school virtually. It was a drastic change for most school subjects as the class structure mostly involved communication between students’ participation and teachers through speech and whiteboard(s), which can be depicted well into online meetings. However, certain subjects that require more hands-on experiences, such as laboratory sessions (biology, chemistry) or PE, needed a different approach. In the case of PE, at Springfield PB3, teachers gather the students’ scores from them exercising privately and on their own schedule.

Traditionally, students have their scores taken by how active they are participating in the teachers’ weekly assigned exercises. However, during online PE, the students choose their own schedules and workouts to do for assignments due the next week. The only evidence that needs to be submitted are the amount of steps taken or the calories burned throughout the exercise.

As strict evidence is not demanded by the PE teachers to prove that the students participate in their assignments, there comes the possibility of students being able to fabricate their own data and submissions. With the fabricated data, students can submit exercise metrics that they haven't actually achieved and thus attain a grade that they may otherwise not have earned from doing the exercises properly. Ethical considerations aside, this may prove to be unfair for those students that do in fact conduct their exercises properly and truthfully as they still would earn the same grades as students who fabricate their results.

A suggested alternative to this method is to have the students do the assigned exercises live in the online meeting session or recorded through a camera. However, that method has received backlash. “Gue pernah disuruh bikin video kayak gini, sumpah, malu banget gue,” remarked an Indonesian student from out of Springfield, mentioning the exercising-on-camera method on the comment section of a video posted online expressing how embarrassing it was for her to record an exercise video.

Though it may be flawed, the method used by Springfield's PE teachers allows students to approach PE in a way that they may have not experienced before. As students assemble their own timetable and are able to choose which exercises they are interested in, they are able to craft a set of activities to suit their own needs and bodies. Therefore, students that may otherwise not participate in PE during traditional school periods may be motivated to start doing exercises as it is tailored to their own preferences. Working out is needed for the human system, “Exercising regularly, every day if possible, is the single most important thing you can do for your health” according to Harvard Medical School.

The online version of PE is something that still needs exploration and evaluation in order to reach its full effectiveness. However, as it is not an academic subject, further research on the matter has not been conducted much, as well as the fact that the current situation is not a permanent one. In its current state, students and teachers have to accept their school's implementation of online PE, however unrefined it may be.