Daily Times

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has taken the world by surprise and has exposed its lack of preparedness for anything of this kind and magnitude. This lack of preparedness is not limited to the nations who are less affluent or technically less developed, nor it is limited to any single dimension of our lifestyle. It is so complete and comprehensive that all nations and all sectors are crumbling under the burden, the bigger ones have bigger pains. One such sector is the formal education institutions. The conventional education institutions had never thought of how they would continue their operations had they been unable to assemble their students and teachers in the conventional classroom? Surprisingly, even this is not limited to the relatively less developed nations like ours, the most technologically developed nations also find themselves in great trouble. On March 17, 2020 The New York Times reported “The Coronavirus Exposes Education’s Digital Divide” in the context of China where the students and teachers, while exposed to online learning, had been complaining about unavailability of compatible hardware, data connectivity and coverage problems, lack of access to the appropriate software and a host of other glitches faced, particularly, by the students coming from relatively less affluent households. Less than two-weeks on, when the epidemic took its toll on the US, and the schools were shut down, Bloomberg reported on March 26, 2020 “US Schools Trying to Teach Online Highlight a Digital Divide”. The problems were similar – lack of access to reasonably fast internet, lack of access to the appropriate gadgets, lack of preparedness on the part of schools and instructors to go online and a multitude of other issues.

These days in Pakistan we are facing a similar outcry while the universities and other educational institutions struggle to continue their teaching/learning operations through online mechanisms. The critics are highlighting the low quality of instruction owing to these elements of the so-called digital divide which is, of course, a reality and does hamper the teaching as well as learning experience. The social media is flooded with complaints from the students who have suddenly been exposed to online learning and have been caught unprepared. So are many of the teachers who are not properly equipped in terms of pedagogy appropriate for remote teaching. They are not well versed with the handling of hardware and software used as a vehicle to get the message across effectively, or just do not find the environment of their homes conducive enough to work from there. Besides, many of the institutions themselves are not prepared enough to immediately shift their operations completely to an environment they have never considered before.

The digitization of businesses and operations across the sectors, including the education sector, is going to stay post-epidemic and is only going to get wider, deeper and faster, leaving the nations like ours far behind the developed nations if we chose to opt out

Here the big questions are: how should we respond to this changed world that we find ourselves entangled in, courtesy COVID-19? Should we hold our lives on a standstill, waiting to start again the business as usual, after the storm is over? Or should we fast-track our learning and adoption of new technologies to coop-up with the changed world?

One thing is for sure, the digitization of businesses and operations across the sectors, including the education sector, is going to stay post-epidemic and is only going to get wider, deeper and faster, leaving the nations like ours far behind the developed nations if we chose to opt out. Our institutions, in the education sector and others, have for too long put off the adoption of technology owing to many reasons. However, if we missed this opportunity to get on the train, we risk being left irrelevant in the new world. So, it is extremely important that we encourage adoption of technology across the businesses and institutions and instead of focusing our energies to impede the progress because of its imperfections, we should commit resources to mitigate the impediments. While there certainly is a large student body who are seriously disadvantaged while exposed to such change, there are an equally large number who can quickly adopt, and besides learning their core subjects, can acquire many auxiliary skills that are highly in demand in the contemporary world. So, instead of holding the later back, the efforts should be made to build an enabling environment for the former in order to pursue larger strategic benefits for collective success.

The online education has already taken its roots having been pushed by many leading institutions of the world like MIT, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Cornell and countless others along with many nontraditional platforms (like Coursera, Udacity, EdX, Udemy, Open Education Europa and many more) bringing together institutions as well as individual experts to offer MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses) across the world. The movement started in 2011 when some Stanford professors had started three free online courses and since then close to a thousand universities around the world have launched their own online courses while hundreds of millions of students and professionals have benefited from them. The Covid-19 has only accelerated this movement and we expect to see a massive expansion and strengthening. This expected expansion of online teaching can be attributed to many of its inherent benefits that include reduced costs, reduced mobility requirements, convenience of schedules, flexibility of choices, customization of learning according to specific needs and numerous other benefits. Our attitude, of disapproval and discard, towards online teaching by the regulators, students, teachers and families tagging it as something of lower quality is not of any benefit to any of the stakeholders. The stakeholders should, instead, come forward with a unified strategy to offer support in terms of resources, infrastructure building and capacity enhancement in order to maximize the gains. We should come together with a resolve to bridge the divide, mitigate the dissatisfaction, ensure equity, promote inclusion and enhance technology infrastructure. For us the success of online teaching can be a lot more beneficial than many of the other nations as we don’t score well on the quality of available teachers, the student teacher ratio, the institutional capacity to population ratio and cost affordability for masses. So, in conclusion, we have a lot more reasons to put our resources together to make online education a success rather than pushing a thoughtless discard.

The writer is Former Vice Chancellor, University of Education, Lahore Currently Pro-Rector, University of Lahore, Lahore