Coronavirus lockdown has shown us new route to school: It’s tech

Crises are good: In a 2017 paper titled “The Benefits of Forced Experimentation” researchers from Cambridge and Oxford studied a strike that caused some of London’s train services to be closed for two days. Thousands of commuters were forced to change their regular route, but what the researchers discovered was that when normal services resumed, around one in 20 commuters stuck with their newly-discovered route. In other words, they found something better due to forced circumstances. They could have found it any time earlier, but didn’t.

Covid-19 is clearly doing the same in a deeper, more prolonged and more widespread way. There is no sector in which this is happening more than education. Frankly, Indian education has been a bit of a laggard in terms of adopting technology (never mind the billions being poured into EdTech company by private equities). It thus represents an opportunity to leapfrog and make systemic improvements. The dot-com bust of the early 2000s virtually created India’s offshoring industry. Can this crisis transform education? The answer is an unequivocal yes, but whether it really improves the system fundamentally depends on actions we take now and is by no means a given.

A decade’s attitudinal change in weeks? Social scientists know that the biggest barrier to change is existing attitudes and habits. Since change is always scary in a large system, key players, whether the government, schools or teachers, have not always been at the forefront of adopting new technology. But the moment we as a society accepted that social distancing and closing schools were important for the greater good, this indifference to technology was the first causality. Genuine concern for student learning, the economics of it at an institutional or individual level as well as the need to be seen as proactive drove an attitude that has changed into complete acceptance of technology during this pandemic. EdTech players, too, seized the moment and made their offerings available for free at least for a limited period, creating a perfect storm for deeper technology integration.

Teachers are (really) learners again: Most of us empathise with the public health lament that you cannot build capacity to fight a pandemic during a pandemic. And yet, that is what teachers have had to do – learn new skills of using and managing live video-conferencing, creating videos, collating educational resources –- not to forget ‘managing’ a distributed ‘class’ –- all of this while in the midst of doing it. Etiquette associated with using this medium, while having parents observe their every action, has not been easy, and thousands of teachers have risen to the challenge. For parents, home schooling is no longer a radical idea discussed once in a while. But these new skills and experiments will prove invaluable if we stay open to them, like the commuters who saw the upside in the London tube strike.

Learning is an outcome, not an activity or a place: Even though all stakeholders on the face of it have responded to the new normal enthusiastically with online classes and the like, there is a deep issue here. The crisis has forced us all to accept that learning is not merely a place (school), but it is an activity that cannot stop because school is closed. But is there a risk that we turn learning into a mere activity? Children often go through the motions of schooling – going to school every day, listening to lectures, taking notes, studying these notes, writing exams and repeating these steps. Are they truly learning or understanding? Does the system value that?

Most of the students seem to be now learning largely through videos or notes. Our education system has tended to be rote-learning based and teacher-centred. To some extent, we have moved this same system online. However, it is of paramount importance that the student moves to learning systems that are more understanding-focussed and driven by student-led learning. What this means is that learning is more self-directed. That is, students understand what they are learning and what they will be able to do when a lesson is learnt. It implies that students are more actively involved, say, by answering questions or doing activities using EdTech, which also serves as a record of their learning. There are personalised adaptive learning systems that are built around these principles and also involve more active learning.

The bottom line -- are children really learning? Finally, how do we know how well children are actually learning? Do these online methods work? During regular school, assessments tend to be more textbook and recall-based and students prepare for these tests from textbooks and notes. However, in the real world, assessments focus on unfamiliar questions and contexts and test the student’s ability to apply understanding in those situations. Tests like PISA – an international assessment that some states and school systems will be writing next year -- give more weightage to what children have understood rather than whether they can repeat definitions from the text. The technology to conduct reliable assessments online is still in its infancy. The Covid-19 crisis will increase the importance of independent, understanding-based assessments and, if we accept them, could have helped us move to real learning with understanding.

(The writer is Co-founder & Chief Learning Officer, Educational Initiatives)