This article written by Cathy Link and Farrah Lalani was posted on the World Economic Forum. This article depicts how COVID-19 has transformed and altered the way we educate our students. The authors illustrate how the education sector responded to this unprecedented crisis. Specific examples of how different government and schools coped with the situation are given. The benefits and challenges are thoroughly discussed and they seem quite hopeful about the future of online teaching. You will also find a video that showcases the daily routine of a chinese student learning online during the pandemic.
I personally disapprove the way educators were forced to migrate their courses online. I strongly believe that most educators out there are ill-prepared and are not getting enough support from their schools. Teaching online is a different beast in itself and just uploading a PowerPoint presentation does not constitue a successful migration to online teaching. I’m not teaching anymore so I can’t comment on how COVID-19 has changed the way I teach. Nonetheles, I would like to hear your perspectives on this transition and whether you feel that your school was supportive and helpful.
The article can be found at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/coronavirus-education-global-covid19-online-digital-learning/
Hi guys,
Thanks for commenting on this article. I think you all made valid points. I really enjoyed the article that Jamie recommended and it was fascinating to see how the author, even though he’s a teacher himself, struggled to keep his kids studying and active during this crisis. Now can you imagine how other parents are dealing with their children at home? I strongly believe that parents will have a new form of appreciation for teachers after this crisis. Tyler mentioned the effects on students. In my review, I mentioned that I wanted to know how teachers felt about the migration to online courses. But it is also true that it was additionally a transition both for students and their parents. Parents had to be actively involved in their children’s education by assisting them with navigating different platforms. I’m sure it wasn’t easy as many of them were working from home. So having to juggle work and attend to their children’s needs wasn’t a walk in the park. Carla is right about this botched transition being better than no schooling at all. Still, I’m flabbergasted by the lack of preparedness of schools and universities. I realize that this is an unprecedented situation but the utter lack of organisation at the beginning of the crisis made me realize that schools and universities didn’t have any type of emergency plan to deal with a sudden closure. Moreover, training the teachers before throwing them in the deep end would have given them time to think how to best use technology to educate their students and prepare a proper instruction pack for both students and parents.
I totally agree with it. The first week for me was chaos. Preparing material videos and even digital games for students. It seems that it was too much to do. But I have made it. I think that this should have been done but we schools and educators have been procrastinating about it. With the pandemic knocking on our doors, we all of a sudden pushed everything online. Although schools and universities shut down, classes are still held online. I think that it was not an option for school and universities to just stop, then what would the students be doing? Most of my students complain that we are giving them too much work, they say they would rather much prefer to go to school.
After almost 3 month of staying at home, most of us are already used to this state of “working, learning and teaching” at home. Once we go back to normal, will it still be like before? By then instructors and students would have adapted to their “new style” of attending school or university. I believe that once we go back to normal, institutions will invest more in online learning platforms.
Hi Pascaline, I was actually also thinking about e-learning readiness and our assessment of various institutions in Higher Education in ETEC520. This pandemic has surely exposed the lack of readiness faced by most institutions no matter how prepared they thought (or even prepared we thought) they were for integrating technology and e-learning in their academic endeavors.
Great discussion point here. I think schools and governments were trying to make the best of the situation that they could. Of course, it hasn’t been a perfect transition. Far from it… Educators were for the most part thrown in the deep-end and students are on the other end of the line if you’re lucky (since there are some assumptions that had to be made regarding access to a computer and internet). They are the recipients of sometimes chaotically assembled materials that wasn’t always thought through as to how students would engage with the material. All of this in the midst of a global crisis that brings its own uncertainties and anxieties. Having said all this, I think everyone has just tried to make the best of what they could in the situation. What would have been the alternative? To shut down schools for six months to a year? The data just 10 weeks ago when most countries went into a hard lock down hardly gave enough insight to suggest how long schools would have to remain closed. Schools and governments would have received negative feedback had they chosen not to re-open schools or make use of online learning. One could argue that maybe educators just needed some more time for training in using online platforms and software to facilitate a better online learning experience? That might be true and hindsight as they say is always 20/20 but for me at least I have realized that mistakes have been made and will continue to be made as we manage to move through this crisis. Hopefully the positives outweigh the negatives and that which our students can engage with currently academically is at least better than receiving no schooling at all.
Hi Jamie, I completely agree about the “beast” of online teaching. For one teaching primary students is an entirely different “beast.” I cant imagine how the students are feeling and the parents who have now become the teacher substitute in a way. The parents need to be there to help the younger ones get settled, pay attention, turn equipment on and stay on task. Video teaching does not give the same sense that this is my classroom to the younger ones.
Hey Pascaline,
I really appreciated the statement “Teaching online is a different beast in itself and just uploading a PowerPoint presentation does not constitue a successful migration to online teaching”. I am also no longer teaching, but have been very interested speaking to friends who still are. They have reported the work load being much bigger than usual, and the expectation for them to implement and use a variety of platforms they were never trained in a little unfair.
Whilst it is certain that education has changed, for digital/distance education to be effective there need to be good designs and strategies implemented to foster good learning in this new format. This extends to the students as well! I am staying with my uncle and his 11 year old son is needing to navigate using google teams whilst home alone during the day, and is also honestly just not coping with it. He does his homework in his book, but then needs to send it to his teacher, and hasn’t been taught how to do the transition.
This is an article from Italy that I really appreciated about the realities of learning from home, with a good balance between challenges and opportunities that come from this new development.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/apr/24/italy-home-schooling-coronavirus-lockdown-what-weve-learned
“Schools in northern Italy were the first in Europe to close. Since then, teachers, parents and kids across the country have all had to adapt to a new existence – and the results have surprised everyone. By Tobias Jones”