At the height of the pandemic, for better or for worse, all learning was online learning. Due to COVID-19 shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders, schools across the country closed their doors and students and educators had to pivot to a remote learning model. In addition to the remote education provided by school districts, a number of supplemental online learning programs found unprecedented enrollment success from parents who were concerned that the school curriculum alone wasn’t enough to meet their kids’ needs.

Now that schools are back to operating in person and everything looks closer to normal than it has in over two years, the same online learning platforms and institutions that were having a banner year in 2020 are now facing disenrollment and subscription cancellations from parents who no longer feel their kids need the extra help. However, despite the fact that students can now attend school in person as they’ve always done, a number of parents are still turning to online education programs to help supplement their children’s education and mitigate the sizable learning loss gap that is being felt nationwide.

Headphones Make it Happen

In addition to their expert-created curricula and easy, convenient approach to supplemental learning, online learning platforms owe their success to headphones. While it is possible to access online education modules without headphones, students are able to absorb and retain much more from their lessons when listening through a headset. 

For starters, headphones give online learners the benefit of a distraction-free environment for improved focus. Noise-canceling headsets minimize background noise, keeping the student’s attention on the lesson at hand and not what’s going on around them. Headphones can be especially beneficial for students with ADHD, autism or other sensory processing disorders, because the noise-canceling features help keep sensory overload at bay while channeling the focus into one area: the online lesson.

Additionally, headphones help students hear clearly and understand what is being said, as well as enunciate with their own speech. With built-in microphones on some remote learning headsets, students can easily be understood by live teachers in an online tutoring session as well as by voice-recognition software for programs that involve interactive user response. The clear communication that can be achieved by headphones can go a long way toward helping students understand what they are learning.

One more advantage of headphones for an online learning platform is that other family members in the household won’t be disturbed by lessons. This is particularly advantageous for families with more than one school-age child engaging in online learning at the same time. Students in different grades can focus on their lessons without having their siblings’ online tutorials bleed over in the background, causing confusion and distraction. If parents are working from home, the use of headsets for online learning programs can also be a plus for allowing them to maintain focus on their workday tasks.