It’s time to reimagine the classroom of the future
Brookhouse School in Nairobi. The school’s management has persisted in its push for virtual learning.
What you need to know:
- In South Korea, for instance, students are responding to roll calls from their teachers online.
In China, which was hit first by the coronavirus, the government instructed thousands of full-time students to resume studies online.
The digital world is increasingly penetrating the education and skills domain.
The world faces a “generational catastrophe” with the closure of schools amid the coronavirus pandemic, said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres this month as he launched a UN “Save our Future” campaign.
The UN says 160 countries had closed schools by mid-July, affecting more than a billion students, while 40 million children have missed pre-school. This is in addition to more than 250 million children already being out of school before the pandemic and only a quarter of secondary school students in developing countries having basic skills.
As Guterres said, it is “a generational opportunity to reimagine education” and leap forward to systems that deliver quality education. The digital world is increasingly penetrating the education and skills domain with technology being used to deliver education, knowledge and skills in innovative ways.
According to the World Economic Forum, the Covid-19 pandemic has caused a big rise in the adoption of virtual learning. In South Korea, for instance, students are responding to roll calls from their teachers online.
Resume studies online
In China, which was hit first by the coronavirus, the government instructed thousands of full-time students to resume studies online — resulting in the largest “online movement” ever in education with 900,000 students attending classes via the Tencent Online School in Wuhan.
Amid steps to safeguard the school as a physical space, the traditional classroom organisation must give way to a variety of ways of “doing school”. It is time the definition of the right to education was expanded to address the importance of connectivity and access to knowledge and information.
A fortnight ago, Sunday Nation readers must have read with admiration the story of a girl who has once again triumphed under the British curriculum, scoring straight As in this year’s International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE).
Goldalyn Kakuya is not new to many Kenyans, having made headlines when she topped the 2017 KCPE examination. At Brookhouse School, together with her schoolmates, Goldalyn managed to study, sit exams, be assessed and get results without stepping into a physical classroom since the beginning of March.
Virtual learning
The school’s management persisted in its push for virtual learning, saying learning need not to stop just because learners and teachers could not congregate in a brick and mortar classroom.
Though unreliable infrastructure and lack of face-to-face interaction and direct monitoring be a challenge, virtual learning provides for increased game-based learning and adoption of adaptive learning.
This pandemic has utterly disrupted the education system. However, from rethinking the time to the space of learning, this is, indeed, a good time to reimagine the classroom of the future. At the end of it all, everyone stands to benefit.
