COVID-19 in India: Education disrupted and lessons learned
In India, 320 million students have been affected by COVID-19 school closures, and though the government quickly recommended shifting to “online teaching,” this ignores India’s immense digital divide—with embedded gender and class divides. The 2017-18 National Sample Survey reported only 23.8 percent of Indian households had internet access. In rural households (66 percent of the population), only 14.9 percent had access, and in urban households only 42 percent had access. And males are the primary users: 16 percent of women had access to mobile internet, compared to 36 percent of men. Young people’s access is even less: A recent news report stated only 12.5 percent of students had access to smartphones. Furthermore, most teachers are ill-equipped for online .
STUDY HALL EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION’S RESPONSE
This crisis has been a test of the Study Hall Educational Foundation’s (SHEF) skills, agility, and resilience. But because we’ve always taken a holistic approach to education, SHEF—the educational institution where I am founding president and CEO—was well-prepared to respond quickly and adaptively to the inequitable impacts of the coronavirus crisis on the vulnerable and disadvantaged.
A holistic response to whole lives
Teachers at SHEF have always looked at their students as “whole persons” and invited them to bring their whole lives into the classroom, with all the challenges. When the country first went into lockdown, teachers connected with their students by every means possible. This was a challenging task for three-quarters of our teachers whose students were on the wrong side of the digital divide, though teachers were able to connect with about half of their students’ families via mobile phones. Teachers galvanized other teachers and students, alumni, and parents to help track down their remaining students, eventually managing to connect with nearly 70 percent of our student body.
If it takes a village to raise a child, we must empower the village to teach the child.
After making contact, teachers then focused on fear management by spreading accurate information about the crisis, dispelling myths, urging caution, and diffusing panic. Then they found out what the students and families needed. Many students’ families had lost livelihoods, had no savings, and needed food. Teachers created an e-flyer with government relief measures, helplines, and locations, and personally helped provide rations and cooked food for those families without documents to access relief services.
Using digital volunteers to teach in a limited environment
Once these basic needs were taken care of, teachers then used whatever digital means were available to teach their students. Teachers galvanized an army of digital volunteers in the communities tasked with sharing the information on their devices to students without access to technology. To reach those low-tech students, teachers used voice messages, text messages, and phone calls. For high-tech students (i.e. with smartphones), teachers sent longer videos and used WhatsApp groups for discussions. To reach girls, most of whom had no access to phones, teachers even called fathers to ask how they were doing and to enlist their support for their daughters’ education. So far, the majority of fathers have responded positively, demonstrating how this crisis might be a great opportunity to develop positive relationships with fathers that improve their daughters’ education and well-being.
LESSONS LEARNED
While lamentable, the disruption to education systems worldwide offers valuable lessons and provides a unique opportunity to reimagine education, the curriculum, and pedagogy.
SHEF has demonstrated how the development of social and political consciousness by students should be a major goal of education, and that lessons of equality and core democratic values should be given as much, if not more, importance in the official curricula than math, science, and language lessons. Now is the time for governments to integrate such a curriculum into the national curricular framework.
But continuing education amid school closures has also taught us an important lesson about the role of the community in teaching our children. If it takes a village to raise a child, we must empower the village to teach the child. Improving the education system requires a decentralized, democratic community-based approach, where community ownership of education is cultivated. Important for this is the hiring of local teachers (with adequate Dalit and female representation), which increases teachers’ accountability to children’s families and their ability to empathize with students’ lives.
If COVID-19 school closures and their related challenges with distance learning have taught us anything, it is that we must liberate learning from outdated curricula and the disproportionate emphasis on information transfer.
COVID-19 Pandemic: Impact and strategies for education sector in India
The pandemic has significantly disrupted the higher education sector as well, which is a critical determinant of a country’s economic future. A large number of Indian students—second only to China—enroll in universities abroad, especially in countries worst affected by the pandemic, the US, UK, Australia and China. Many such students have now been barred from leaving these countries. If the situation persists, in the long run, a decline in the demand for international higher education is expected.
The bigger concern, however, on everybody’s mind is the effect of the disease on the employment rate. Recent graduates in India are fearing withdrawal of job offers from corporates because of the current situation. The Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy’s estimates on unemployment shot up from 8.4% in mid-March to 23% in early April and the urban unemployment rate to 30.9%.
Needless to say, the pandemic has transformed the centuries-old, chalk–talk teaching model to one driven by technology. This disruption in the delivery of education is pushing policymakers to figure out how to drive engagement at scale while ensuring inclusive e-learning solutions and tackling the digital divide.
A multi-pronged strategy is necessary to manage the crisis and build a resilient Indian education system in the long term.
One, immediate measures are essential to ensure continuity of learning in government schools and universities. Open-source digital learning solutions and Learning Management Software should be adopted so teachers can conduct teaching online. The DIKSHA platform, with reach across all states in India, can be further strengthened to ensure accessibility of learning to the students.
Two, inclusive learning solutions, especially for the most vulnerable and marginalized, need to be developed. With a rapid increase of mobile internet users in India, which is expected to reach 85% households by 2024, technology is enabling ubiquitous access and personalization of education even in the remotest parts of the country. This can change the schooling system and increase the effectiveness of learning and teaching, giving students and teachers multiple options to choose from. Many aspirational districts have initiated innovative, mobile-based learning models for effective delivery of education, which can be adopted by others.
Three, strategies are required to prepare the higher education sector for the evolving demand–supply trends across the globe—particularly those related to the global mobility of students and faculty and improving the quality of and demand for higher studies in India. Further, immediate measures are required to mitigate the effects of the pandemic on job offers, internship programs, and research projects.
Four, it is also important to reconsider the current delivery and pedagogical methods in school and higher education by seamlessly integrating classroom learning with e-learning modes to build a unified learning system. The major challenge in EDTech reforms at the national level is the seamless integration of technology in the present Indian education system, which is the most diverse and largest in the world with more than 15 lakh schools and 50,000 higher education institutions. Further, it is also important to establish quality assurance mechanisms and quality benchmark for online learning developed and offered by India HEIs as well as e-learning platforms (growing rapidly). Many e-learning players offer multiple courses on the same subjects with different levels of certifications, methodology and assessment parameters. So, the quality of courses may differ across different e-learning platforms.
Five, Indian traditional knowledge is well known across the globe for its scientific innovations, values, and benefits to develop sustainable technologies and medicines. The courses on Indian traditional knowledge systems in the fields of yoga, Indian medicines, architecture, hydraulics, ethnobotany, metallurgy and agriculture should be integrated with a present-day mainstream university education to serve the larger cause of humanity.
In this time of crisis, a well-rounded and effective educational practice is what is needed for the capacity-building of young minds. It will develop skills that will drive their employability, productivity, health, and well-being in the decades to come, and ensure the overall progress of India.
Covid-19:
4 negative impacts and
4 opportunities created for
education
The world today is facing the biggest public health risk which is leading to one of the largest and the quickest reorganization of the world order. By the end of March 2020, the epidemic had spread to over 185 countries and resulted in the closure of over 90 percent of all schools, colleges and universities impacting close to 1.38 billion students.
The speed of the spread of the epidemic, the closure of higher education institutions and the transition to online teaching was so swift that it hardly gave any time to plan and to reflect on the potential risks or the potential opportunities that such a sudden change could bring.
Given such a situation it is important to look at the impact and reflect on what has transpired and what is likely to happen as we move forward in the field of global education.
4 negative impacts of Covid-19 on education
There are a number of areas of potential risks for global education. Here are 4 negative impacts of Covid-19 on education:
Universities in many countries such as Australia, UK, New Zealand, and Canada are highly dependent on the movement of students from China and India.
It is becoming more and more clear that this cross-border movement of students will take a beating at least for the next two to three years and will lead to a major financial risk for universities in these countries who are already under financial pressure.
Many parents will avoid sending students abroad for higher education due to high risk from the pandemic.
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The sudden shift to online learning without any planning -- especially in countries like India where the backbone for online learning was not ready and the curriculum was not designed for such a format -- has created the risk of most of our students becoming passive learners and they seem to be losing interest due to low levels of attention span.
Added to this is that we may be leaving a large proportion of the student population untouched due to the digital divide that is part of many developing nations including India.
We are now beginning to realize that online learning could be dull as it is creating a new set of passive learners which can pose new challenges.
Online learning is a special kind of methodology and not all teachers are good at it or at least not all of them were ready for this sudden transition from face to face learning to online learning.
Thus, most of the teachers are just conducting lectures on video platforms such as Zoom which may not be real online learning in the absence of a dedicated online platform specifically designed for the purpose.
There is a risk that in such a situation, learning outcomes may not be achieved and it may be only resulting in engaging the students.
Universities and colleges worldwide are facing a major risk in the area of student recruitment and retention.
The risk of losing students is so high that they will need to re-look at their admission practices, admission criteria and the overall recruitment process itself which will include, new methods of outreach and application process itself.
4 positive changes in education due to Covid-19
Any change that is so disruptive is also likely to bring with it some new opportunities that will transform the higher education system worldwide and especially in a country like India which is planning to bring about a planned reform in this sector.
Some of the key areas of opportunity are the following:
Universities and colleges will shift to a model of blended learning where both face to face delivery along with an online model will become a norm. This will require all teachers to become more technology savvy and go through some training to bring themselves to the level that would be required.
New ways of delivery and assessments of learning outcomes will have to be adopted which opens immense opportunities for a major transformation in the area of curriculum development and pedagogy.
A great opportunity will open up for those companies that have been developing and strengthening learning management systems for use by universities and colleges.
This has the potential to grow at a very fast pace but will have to be priced appropriately for use by all institutions.
There is a great opportunity for universities and colleges to start improving the quality of the learning material that is used in the teaching and learning process.
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Since blended learning will be the new format of learning there will be a push to find new ways to design and deliver quality content especially due to the fact that the use of learning management systems will bring about more openness and transparency in academics.
The teaching community to a large extent has been very insulated and more so in a country like India. There is a new opportunity where collaborative teaching and learning can take on new forms and can even be monetized.
Faculty members/ teachers can deliver online courses to even students from competing institutions. Collaborations can also happen among faculty/teachers across the nation to benefit from each other.
Finally, it is expected that there will be a massive rise in teleconferencing opportunities which can also have a negative impact on the travel.
A large number of academic meetings, seminars and conferences will move online and there is a possibility that some new form of an online conferencing platform will emerge as a business model.
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After all this, there is one certainty that we can envisage and that is going to change how higher education will operate globally and in India.
India is not just going through a reform in the higher education sector, but now it will go through a major transformation in general.
The Ardee School NFC uses Microsoft Teams to ensure learning never gets interrupted
“Our mission has been to ensure that learning will never be interrupted, no matter what,” says Rashima V Varma, the head of The Ardee School in New Friends Colony (NFC).
The school, which has been in operation for three years, had started with remote learning via Teams even before the schools were shut due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In the beginning, we invested in a video conferencing solution but soon realized we needed to offer a lot more to our students than video conferencing. Keeping that in mind, we got an Office 365 subscription for the entire school at the beginning of the school session in 2019 as it provided many tools for teaching and learning,” she adds.
The foresight proved beneficial in November 2019, when the Delhi government directed schools to close secondary classes as the city grappled with unprecedented levels of air pollution. The Ardee School moved its classes to Microsoft Teams to ensure that its students do not fall behind.
“We had already mapped every student and teacher to their Office 365 accounts. Moving them to Teams according to classes and subjects was very intuitive from the Office 365 administration panel. That enabled us to move very quickly,” adds Amit Gupta, head of IT at The Ardee School, NFC.
The early experience enabled the school to swiftly deploy Teams for the entire school in the current COVID-19 situation.
“We are considering how we can reconfigure learning for secondary students. Teams also gives us the opportunity to include students who are home-schooled for various reasons. I think it’s a paradigm shift in teaching and learning.”
– Rashima V Varma, head of The Ardee School, NFC
Deploying Teams in schools was the easy part. But it meant a mindset shift for teachers, students, and their parents. Schools had to relook how their teachers planned and conducted their classes.
“When you are teaching in a classroom, you can look at your students and get a sense of whether they are engaged or not. In online classes, teachers cannot control the environment—students can log off from the class. Teachers needed to completely reimagine their classes. They have to build in a lot of interactive elements to ensure that the students are engaged in the teaching learning process,” explains Varma.
“Students do not have the same attention span online as they would in a 20-minute class. We are introducing new activities by using other tools on top of Teams like Microsoft Forms and document sharing, to get students to participate in the lesson and to collaborate. The teachers have used the virtual whiteboard in Teams as a handy tool,” adds Shaistha P, the academic facilitator for Grade 6 to Grade 12.
Deepika Bhatia, the ICT mentor for students from Grade 9 to Grade 12, viewed it as an opportunity to collaborate with her students the way she could not earlier.
A student from The Ardee School attending a class over Teams. The school had transitioned to remote classes over Teams in November when they had to stop classes due to pollution in Delhi.
“In my classroom, I would demonstrate how to do a task and we could go back and forth. But that process gets elongated in an offline environment. On Teams, I share the document I am working on with the class so they can work along with me and ask questions in the chat window simultaneously,” she says.
Parents too are echoing the sentiment.
“Our children are facing frequent disruptions to their education, but by moving to Teams the school is ensuring they do not lose their momentum. One of the biggest benefits is that in these times of uncertainty, the children continue to follow their routine. They know they have to be ready by 8 AM and attend all classes like they would have done in school,” says Sayma Ansari, whose son studies in Grade 5 at the school.
Other parents, like Bhavna G Bali, whose daughter studies in Grade 6, are also noticing a change in how children are collaborating with each other.
“Our children are using tools to collaborate that I didn’t even know existed. I see my daughter and her classmates work on the same document on Teams where one person is typing on the document and others are giving their inputs. This enables them to work on projects irrespective of their location. Earlier they would create groups for projects depending on where students lived, Teams has helped break those barriers,” she says.
“I see my daughter chatting with her classmates on Teams in the evening where they discuss their assignments and other projects. This is far better than other messaging apps because they continue to be in the school environment,” she adds.
The school is taking virtual interactions and collaboration beyond the students as well. Apart from moving its classes to Teams, it conducts parent-teacher meetings on Teams. It is also considering recording classroom sessions so that absent students can revisit the class and teachers can also do self-assessment after the class is over.
“We are considering how we can reconfigure learning for secondary students. Teams also gives us the opportunity to include students who are home-schooled for various reasons. I think it’s a paradigm shift in teaching and learning,” says Varma.
Impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) on Education
As the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) spread across the globe and in India, alarm bells are sounding in the education sector. At the beginning of February 2020, only schools in China and a few other affected countries we closed down due to the transmission. However, by mid-March 2020, nearly 75 countries have implemented or announced school closures. This includes both nation-wide closures as well as local closures (in case of limited or regional transmission). (Source: Wikipedia)
The close down of educational institutes is estimated to affect roughly 600 million learners across the world (only school going students). However, school closures are an essential step in halting or limiting community-level and local transmission.
Further, a number of students have plans to pursue their higher education in universities abroad. What are these students supposed to do? How are universities and schools across the globe impacted by the novel Coronavirus?
What are educational institutes are doing to keep students safe from contracting COVID-19?
Institutes across the globe are simply instructed to limit the exposure of susceptible student population. This includes measure such as-
ExamResults has published a list of rescheduled or postponed board exams across India. This can help you remain updated on the latest announcements or changes related to board exam schedules across the country.
What do school closures mean for the community?
The impact on education is likely to cause losses in terms of dropout rates and learning outcomes, especially in regions with low shock-resilience. Children have fewer opportunities of learning from home. Further, closure of schools is likely to lead to parents missing work, in order to stay at home and take care of the children. This also affects productivity, incurs loss in wages, consequently affecting the community and the economy as a whole.
A large number of health-care professionals are women. Their work may be disrupted by the presence of their children at home due to school closures, causing unintended strain on health-care related systems.
What are the possible alternatives for interrupted education during COVID-19?
- Exploring the possibility of digital learning, high and low technology solutions etc on the basis of power supply, digital skills of teachers and students, and internet connectivity
- Inclusion in distance learning programs, especially for students coming from low-income groups or presence of disability, etc.
- Providing support for digitalization to teachers as well as students
Digital learning platforms
Several online learning platforms are offering their services to a wider audience. Toppr made its services free for use for some time, especially for class 10th and class 12th students in India. At the same time, global platforms such as Coursera and edX gave free access to their courses online. FutureLearn launched a feature through which university students and staff get unlimited access to their courses. Such instances will prove to be useful to both students and teachers, uplifting the education industry in some way.
Let us hope the pandemic gets eliminated soon. Until then, keep safe.
DEDICATED TO ALL TEACHERS WHO TEACH STUDENTS IN COVID 19
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 09.08.2020
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