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| THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON EDUCATION | | |
Er. Loveneesh Talwar
The COVID-19 crisis has jolted the global economy with a pervasive impact on almost all sectors. It has triggered the announcement of a lockdown by several nations in an attempt to arrest the transmission risk of the disease. According to a UNESCO report, the pandemic will adversely impact over 290 million students across 22 countries due to the closure of schools in the wake of the lockdown. Extended school closures will not only weaken the fundamentals of students, but it will also lead to loss of human capital as well as economic opportunities in the long -run. According to the World Bank, its impact will be profound in countries where education is grappling with low learning outcomes and a high dropout rate. Several educational institutions had no choice but to embrace e-learning to sustain the momentum.
Over the past few years, e-learning has witnessed an uptick due to ubiquitous Internet connectivity, the proliferation of smartphones and significant advances in technology. The ongoing crisis should be perceived as an opportunity in disguise for online education. The e-learning overcomes geographical barriers and ensures equitable access to education. It also facilitates convenient, quick, on -the- go and 24x7 access. Numerous ed-tech firms have leveraged this opportunity to offer lessons in an interesting and interactive way to students. E-learning seems a viable solution at the moment to fill the void created due to the absence of classroom learning.
Fortunately, the Indian government has taken cognizance of the untapped potential of e-learning. The one-nation-one platform facility through the PM E-Vidya platform and a dedicated channel for students from Class 1 to Class 12 will liberalize distance and online learning regulatory framework. Moreover, emphasis on community radio, podcasts, and customized content for differently-abled will enable more inclusivity into access to education.
However, certain challenges need to be addressed to bring online education into the mainstream in India. Firstly, uninterrupted access to the Internet is yet to become a reality in Tier 3 and remote cities in India. Secondly, the absence of a comprehensive policy regulation leads to ambiguity over the operational framework. Also, online education needs to take cognizance of different learning pace of students and develop customized solutions for them. Moreover, the concerns of increased screen time, anxiety and stress triggered due to the continuous use of electronic devices also need to be addressed.
Although online education cannot replace classroom education due to the personalized nature of attention and face to face interactions, it can be an effective supplement to the brick-and-mortar model of education. There is a need to revamp the current pedagogy to seamlessly integrate online learning into mainstream education. Equally significant is the need to devise a quality benchmark for education providers.
This will encourage the weaning away fly -by- the -night players in the field. So far, e-learning has proved a boon for urban areas. It should be further expanded to serve the rural and underserved hinterlands as well as differently-abled sections of society. New-age technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Virtual Reality among others can be instrumental in bridging the crucial gaps.
The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has presented an opportunity to rethink the deep-rooted classroom mode of education and underscored the significance of online learning. It has been a great leveller as it has enabled various stakeholders to collaborate and assess the gaps and shortcomings in the conventional model. The COVID-19 pandemic may be just the ‘tipping point’ for reform of the Indian education system.
Human Rights Watch reported that more than 1.5 billion students are out of school already. Widespread job and income loss along with economic insecurity among families are likely to also increase child labor, sexual exploitation, teen pregnancies among other woes.While the entire world is currently in lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses have adapted (with varying levels of success) to work-from-home (WFH) policies. But what’s the situation in the education sector? More than 91 percent of the world’s students are out of school, due to school closures in at least 188 countries.
The education sector is facing unprecedented challenges and needs to adapt and find solutions to keep children motivated and in their route to learning. How will the education sector and educators deal to overcome these challenges? How will children continue to learn, even as school, by necessity, becomes a digital space?
School-going children are, naturally, the worst affected education sector stakeholders. For pupils, the lockdown doesn’t just mean reduced cashflow or a professional setback: it represents an interruption to their learning journey. And in the case of dropouts, it was the final straw for at-risk children who struggled to get an education at the best of times.
The lockdown has aggravated deep-set class and social differences, especially between private and public school systems. The Indian government spends 4.6 percent of its GDP on education. This is lower than in sub-Saharan countries like Kenya, Togo, and Zimbabwe.
This implies that access to food, much less access to education is a key driving force behind school enrolment. These students almost certainly do not have access to remote and digital learning facilities at home. What this means is that, for millions of Indian students, the lockdown has brought all education to a complete halt. Because access to midday meals is the primary reason so many Indian students attend school, if the lockdown continues for much longer, there is a chance that India’s dropout rate-which is already among the world’s highest-might increase further.
On the other hand, a minority of students attending urban private schools are seeing their education continue through standard digital platforms.
Children below the age of 8 years need parent support just to do the basics, even then their learning experience is below par. With schools already online for a few weeks now, there is enough data to suggest online school can help children of all age groups but is not an alternative to the brick and motor schools.
Teachers across the country are scrambling to find ways to continue teaching their pupils in a situation where physical contact is no longer possible. Again, class and social divides play a big role in determining how successful teachers are in teaching schoolchildren during the pandemic.
Teachers at the country’s premier private schools are tech-savvy: most have access to the internet at home, as well as the other digital infrastructure required to craft and share course material. This, unfortunately, is not the case when it comes to the vast majority of teachers in the country. Nearly one in five primary school teaching positions is vacant today. Even in better times, many schools in rural India were run by just a single teacher.
According to the World Bank, only half of India’s teachers are actually teaching on any given day because of sky-high teacher absence rates. When a large number of teachers don’t even teach when schools are open, it’s hard to imagine a better outcome when schools are under lockdown.
We have already seen the world without classrooms but if more and more teachers incapable of teaching in these circumstances, visualizing a world without teachers is disastrous.
According to CRY, poverty and availability are major reasons behind school dropouts in India. Poverty- the first reason attributed-is to a family problem. Children who go to school are unable to help their parents out on the farm or at the shop.
This makes many parents reluctant supporters of schooling in the best of times. It’s not clear right now how parents of schoolchildren, especially in rural areas, are reacting to the lockdown. Many of them are now unemployed and quickly running out of limited savings or already in debt. The lockdown presents problems even to wealthier parents in urban spaces: they have to help children set up e-learning stations at home, monitor them round the clock, and deal with stress and tantrums.
In the case with children in primary and pre-primary, where both parents are working from home, it’s difficult for parents to juggle between their own work, household work, and children’s online education.
School owners are going to see a major cash flow crunch because of the lockdown. Many schools, especially day-care operate with a monthly fee structure. If the lockdown continues, these payments will dry up. However, expenses, including rent, salaries, and other costs, may stay the same. Many education institutions are run as a not-for-profit or generate minimal profits. This means that, by and large, they lack the cash reserves to deal with an extended shutdown.
Smaller schools around the country might shut down permanently. School owners will be forced to downsize and renegotiate rentals since this looks like a washout year. Petitions and PILs against schools under these circumstances keep adding to their woes. While the Indian government has done a commendable job enforcing the lockdown, worryingly little has been said to date about the government’s education sector strategy. So far, all we’ve heard from official channels is a directive preventing schools from hiking fees during the lockdown.
The government is taking time to deliberate on a strategy. Having a clearer idea of what it plans to do could help educators and school owners around the country.
The COVID-19 epidemic is hitting everyone hard. But schools, which have always been placed for real-life, physical interaction, have been among the hardest hit. As hundreds of millions of students around the world struggle to study at home, it remains to be seen how educators and the sector on a whole will deal with the new learn-at-home reality.
In India, technology solutions to the challenge seem limited at present to the premier, urban-centric institutions. But if the lockdown and the education downturn continue, there’s a real, pressing need for innovators to come up with technologies that can help Indians learn remotely, especially in the most remote and vulnerable parts of the country. Not much has changed in this sector for almost 2 centuries maybe this was just the wake-up call that was needed. This is not time to wait and let the tide pass, but to rise and re-engineer the education sector to benefit all the stakeholders. |
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