Life Disrupted (2/3): Education
This essay is part of a series that reflects on how COVID-19 has been disrupting life as usual on big and small scales.
- In part 1 we have looked at what is the impact of social distancing and home isolation on mental health.
- Part 2 explores the impact on education worldwide and the opportunities for blended learning in the future.
- Part 3 looks at the impact of this crisis on the global economy, the way the concept of growth might change and the implication on how we work.
If only a few weeks ago, it would be unimaginable that all education could be delivered online, today there is no question: everyone has to do it or at least look for alternatives to traditional classrooms. This triggered us to think: What could be the implications of this global situation on the future of education? Could this be the beginning of global education reform?
But first, let’s look at the current challenges across geographies when it comes to education during COVID-19. I asked a few people from different continents what is the situation in their country and what are the struggles that they are facing as educators, parents, and students in this new environment.
The mental health pressure on educators and faculties is huge
Currently, educators and institutions are using online classrooms as a contingency, not as a primary means for education. This creates immense challenges for the teacher who now has to plan, design and deliver his/her classes online while making sure that all 20–30 children can stay focused and engaged.
We are still in the stage of identifying problems in this new form of learning, so there are no guidelines on how to approach feasible and viable solutions.
Since blended learning has been practiced by very few institutions, taking the whole curriculum and facilitation online puts big mental pressure on teachers.
Nishad, a teacher from Bangladesh shared with us that after all this crisis is over, teachers will need a lot of mental health counseling. Sitting at home, not going anywhere, having so much screen time and having the camera on during several sessions in a row is causing nausea, headaches, and very high discomfort.
The online space is not ready to provide a good education
It is fairly easy to deliver knowledge or transfer information online. In fact, you don’t even need teachers to do that since everything is openly available on the internet. But knowing things does not equal being educated; it does not develop you as a holistic human being. How do you teach students to think for themselves?
The online space is still not ready to develop soft skills such as critical and independent thinking, creativity and collaboration, especially when both students and teachers are not used to seeing the online space as a learning space. For most students their screen time is their entertainment time, so breaking that habit is a big challenge.
Older kids are more impacted by this situation than young ones because they really miss their peers. The online school cannot create the same environment where kids can build their emotional intelligence to interact with other peers, make friends and have fun.
Some teachers have been using this situation to their advantage and adapting very effectively. In the US for instance, some teachers are encouraging students to engage in more open-ended projects at home. Creating digital games and other digital projects has given students more freedom or say in the types of projects that they engage in. However, the approach teachers take highly depends on the flexibility of the curriculum as well as the expectations from the schools and governments.
In Vietnam and Bangladesh for example, students, especially in grades 9 and 12, are stressing out because they have to pass very hard exams in a few months.
And this brings us to the next point: assessment and examination. What can we take away from the current challenges in organizing assessments and exams online?
We need to rethink assessments
Student assessments and examinations were a problem even before Coronavirus erupted. But only now can we really feel the urgency of rethinking the traditional assessment systems all over the world and transitioning to a more holistic approach.
A good way for schools to tackle assessments online is either to look at successful international models or rethink examinations altogether.
In the Caribbean for example, the exam framework is based on continuous assessment throughout the high school years. This means that the completion of various assignments counts up to the final grade. So there is definitely some space to rethink how we assess students and what we actually want to assess: their ability to memorize things or their capability to develop lifelong learning skills.
In the online environment, the challenge is to both maintain assessments’ authenticity and ensure that students are actually learning and not just Googling the right answers. One contingency solution is to shift from formative to summative assessments and pay attention to students’ activity and engagement during the online class.
But as we mentioned before, managing an online classroom is very difficult, because the teacher loses a lot of control over what is happening. Students could just turn off their cameras, open a new tab and scroll on Facebook, or there could just be difficulties in internet connectivity. When there are so many distractions online and the temptation to look for the right answers, true learning is not happening because students stop thinking for themselves.
This crisis caught education systems unprepared to transfer learning online. But does it create an opportunity to reform the education system altogether?
An opportunity to implement an education reform worldwide
The situation that we’re in could be a catalyst for educational transformation. The least that could happen is that distance or virtual learning will definitely be seen differently.
Probably it will not be able to compete with in-person learning, but it definitely opens up the opportunity of running physical and online classrooms side by side.
Changing the bar for educators altogether
Since the online space lowers the access for who can deliver knowledge to an audience, we were wondering if this could actually lower the bar for who can be an educator in an online classroom. Will the concept of a school disappear altogether in the online space? What are the implications for the teacher profession and for education certifications?
This situation has already brought teachers together regardless of which school they teach in. In Vietnam for instance, teachers came together on Facebook to share tips and help each other cope with using digital tools for online classrooms.
This could be a stepping stone towards teacher networks and communities replacing schools as usual. The idea of delivering classes on Youtube is not new. There are informal educators out there having their own education channels for years, but it never quite took off. In this crisis we see the situation turn: the teachers who have been online for years are at an advantage since most schools and formal educators were not prepared to operate online.
The skills that are required to succeed in an online learning environment are completely different. Until now, most educators, especially the older generation, have trained their digital skills through official government training programs. These, however, are not stand-alone frameworks for designing and delivering learning experiences online.
The educators who are doing well in this crisis are either those who have been incorporating blended learning in their classes before or those who have enough tech knowledge to navigate the digital space and teach themselves on how to adapt their classes. At the same time, what we see in the online space is that formal teachers now have to compete with tech platforms and informal educators.
Just because someone is a certified teacher does not mean that he/she is well equipped to help kids learn. There are some amazing educators out there that are not licensed by the government, but who are doing a great job at being creative in their pedagogy approach.
So the skills needed to be a good teacher in the 21st century and operating in a blended learning environment are very different from traditional education models.
Probably in the near future we will be seeing many more suppliers of online education services and this could potentially push the quality of online education up. When there are so many educators online, students together with parents will want to be ensured that the quality of that learning is good and acknowledged.
This brings us to the next point: certifications. For decades, diplomas, certificates, and prestigious school names have been a symbol of quality, status, and level of education. Observing the current online trends and seeing the different skills needed for pedagogy online, we will probably see the emergence of new ways of curating and certifying resources. For instance, we might see new certification models that prove one can be an online teacher.
From the student perspective, online certifications could have a positive impact on marginalized groups. If we can come up with new education and certification models, maybe a high school or university diploma will no longer be restricted to somebody who has been sitting in a classroom for 5 years.
Overall, what this crisis has given us within education, is an opportunity to conduct a mass experiment with less criticism. It is an opportunity to rethink how we used to structure learning in the past and what we could do better in the future.
Online education comes with many challenges for students and teachers and it presents an opportunity to maybe create a new form of pedagogy, but what about the many places on this planet who do not have access to tech and the internet in the first place?
As history proves again, when a global crisis hits, the most vulnerable communities will suffer the most.
Online education may deepen the inequality gap
In this era that we’re in, we focus so much on doing things online, but there are still so many people that don’t have internet access. Take Africa for instance: a continent with 54 countries, but with a very low mobile internet penetration: in West Africa specifically, mobile internet has a 26% penetration rate (GSMA Report, 2019). Digitizing education in these parts of the world is very hard.
But this is not a problem for Africa alone, but for every country with high inequality rates between rich and poor, between urban and rural areas.
In Bangladesh for instance, probably fewer than 1% of schools are going online. The schools that follow an international curriculum have this capacity, private schools for high-income students have the resources, and some teachers who have laptops with an internet connection can transfer the learning online. Most of the schools, however, shut down.
In Vietnam, pupils and university students are not at school for 2 months already. This is a big problem for families living in poor rural areas. One way the Vietnamese government is dealing with this is by putting in a lot of effort in making classes available through television channels, especially with material for students in grades 9 and 12 who have important exams to pass at the end of the school year. So now Vietnam has official government classes on TV; students know that at specific times there is a specific subject being taught so they can continue their studies. An online community of teachers has also mobilized on Facebook groups to help each other master e-learning, but also host live streams to answer students’ questions about the material shown on TV.
In Rwanda on the other hand, not even 10% of the population owns a television. So education on TV is not an option. Nonetheless, the Ministry of Education is being innovative by soliciting different organizations to convert the national curriculum into relevant, related radio programs and find ways to make the content interactive. Even if people don’t have access to electricity, they still own a battery-based radio. These are just two examples of how innovation does not necessarily mean fancy online platforms, but rather a meaningful impactful solution suitable for the given context.
So it is really interesting to look into technologies that most people have access to and think of how we could deliver a learning experience through that means.
No matter which new models of teaching we come up with, we need to build them with the question of access in mind. We need to make sure that whatever education reformation we pursue, we make it inclusive by design.
Staying hopeful regarding the future of education
Whether online education will become a revolution or not will depend entirely on which countries have the resources and capacity to take this forward, and which don’t. But this has definitely given us an experimental landscape to see what works and what doesn’t. It also gives us the opportunity to think outside country borders and look for ways to collaborate and support each other.
Everybody acknowledges that we are facing an international issue, so there is hope that this will further enhance cross-border, cross-sector collaboration, global solidarity and it will pave the way for impactful inclusive change and real progress as humanity. We have our differences, our different priorities, but we have a rare chance here to really rethink and experiment with new frameworks and schools of thought.
This essay was possible with the contribution and reflections of Sadia Afrin, Sarah Gloria Harkin, Nishad Adnan, Donnalee Donaldson, Abdulai Kemoh Conteh, Phuong Vu, and Alexandra Irina Pînzariu. Thank you guys for a very insightful online discussion and for sharing your thoughts on the future of education.
If you liked this essay, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me, I would love to engage in further discussion on the topic and learn about your experiences in this crisis.
If you are interested in social innovation, education, and economics, check out the new project that I am co-founding with Sadia Afrin, WETHNK.
WETHNK is a social innovation organization aimed to build the next generation of leaders who are fundamentally different in terms of how they think and act.
