Teachers’ Voices on the Impact of COVID-19 on School Education: Are Ed-Tech Companies the Panacea?
From Contemporary Education Dialogue
Since the coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020 started to disrupt people’s normal lifestyle, the virtual world has come to the rescue. Across the globe, shopping, entertainment, work, and education moved online. The spread of COVID-19 has had profound effects on education globally. As schools and universities closed, many turned to technology to try to continue the teaching and learning process.
Among many institutions, schools have also shifted their base to virtual platforms to conduct classes online. Teachers have to switch between prepared videos and PowerPoint lessons and hosting live teaching via Google Classroom, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and others. Consequently, catering to the needs of all stages of education from pre-primary to university level, online education has emerged as an alternative to ordinary/regular face-to-face classes. Various stakeholders such as government and private organisations have been trying their best to assist each other by sprucing up their existing online platforms, web applications, apps, etc., and providing training to teachers to use these apps and platforms.
Efforts are being made both by the government and non-government organisations including Ed-Tech companies to support the school system to make a smooth transition to the virtual world. Up-skilling and motivating teachers, organising counselling sessions for stakeholders such as teachers, parents, and students are just some of the measures taken by the Indian administration in the past few months. Making a continuous effort to provide customised teaching–learning material suitable for online classes has been another way of facilitating the schooling of children.
This research involving the collection of data from teachers based in Delhi and NCR via an online survey reflects the existence of the access gap; teachers were facing Internet and network issues while responding to the administered questionnaire and teachers without a smartphone or laptop would have been excluded without the research team’s ability to access them.
In this survey, 72% of the teachers reported that their schools already had the supporting infrastructure for facilitating online classes. However, the break-up of responses between government and private schools reveals that only 17% of the representative government schools had such facilities. This indicates that government school teachers have not been fully equipped digitally in comparison to their counterparts in private schools.
Despite (virtually all) schools conducting online classes and having some supporting infrastructure, only 54% of the total 288 teachers have been trained to deal with the unprecedented situation, like COVID-19 and the resulting lockdown.
More important than the new dynamics between teachers, parents, and management is online pedagogy. Teaching online requires a particular form of pedagogy that teachers have not been trained in.
Newspaper articles abound with praise for Ed-Tech companies, discussing the ‘new normal’ and how students might not need to return to their classrooms. This is highly problematic, not least for poorer students who do not have access to technology. It is well known that not everyone has access to stable electricity, Internet connections, or to a separate room to study, carving out inequalities concerning accessing education and remaining engaged with the syllabus right there.
Teachers in India have started to use WhatsApp to set students’ work, as phones are more widespread than laptops or computers. Those taught online via Zoom will have a different experience than those who have to rely on their phone, and what happens to those who do not have access to a smartphone, or whose parents cannot help them when they do not understand the instructions. Moving education online presents new dangers as a one-way stream of information, with little option to respond or ask questions.
The article has attempted to investigate the ground realities teachers are facing while taking online classes. It has brought to the fore the multi-layered and multidimensional issues encompassing the infrastructural impediments; the digital divide in terms of access, usage, and skill gaps of both government and private school teachers; and the role of Ed-Tech companies that are trying to replace the teachers rather than assisting them in their work. The reliance on technology is seemingly going to become a new norm in the future.
Article details:
Teachers’ Voices on the Impact of COVID-19 on School Education: Are Ed-Tech Companies Really the Panacea?
Samta Jain, Marie Lall, Anviti Singh
First Published December 15, 2020 Research Article
DOI: 10.1177/0973184920976433
From Contemporary Education Dialogue