Question 4

Introduction

The purpose of this essay is to analyze the impact of COVID-19 on the education in the last
24 months by applying notions of platform and interfaces. COVID-19 has transformed
education into a large-scale experiment throughout the globe. Many long-standing techniques
in education have had to be abandoned in favor of innovative new ones. When these
modifications were made, it was during a time of social upheaval that they had to be made.
Returning to pre-pandemic methods of operating would be a grave error when we come to
school this autumn. State standardized testing may not be a good place to start again, but
other things we've started or increased, like remote learning, may be a better place to keep
going (Sahu, 2020).

Discussion

Analysis about how education has changed over the last 24 months due to pandemic

Every facet of education was upended by the coronavirus epidemic at once. Many other
factors were at play, including the shift from classrooms to computers. For example, it tested
fundamental assumptions about education, attendance, testing money, the impact of
information technology and the personal interactions that keep it all together. We have seen
in the last two years what can be accomplished when education and the broader community
work hand in hand. Parents, daycare providers, teachers, academics, school officials,
business, celebrities, civil officials, and the government all came together to support our kids’
education during the early epidemic of the coronavirus in the United Kingdom. In addition,
the epidemic revealed regions in need of further funding. Students who needed school
devices and after-hours homework groups were unable to use them because of lockdown, and
the digital gap in the United States has been exposed in stark relief in terms of connectivity,
equipment, and content (Chaturvedi et al, 2021). While recognizing and celebrating school
administrators and multi-academy trust competence and autonomy in assisting their schools'
communities, any potential government actions must also recognize and promote the
innovative and creative edtech industry in the UK. Lockdown has shown that there is no one-
size-fits-all approach to schooling. We believe that every student deserved the individualized
assistance they require to enable them return to school and make the most of the inspiring
learning possibilities made possible by our dedicated educators and school leaders. Future
generations of students and their families will benefit from a post-pandemic edtech strategy
that includes the input of policymakers, educators, parents, and students.
According to the notions of “platform” and “interfaces”, there should be a better ability and
strategy for the modularization of the education system. There should be defined platforms
that are configured according to the needs of the students. Education technology experts and
supporters have tried numerous times without much success to get teachers to utilize
technology in classroom more. Students and instructors were exposed to a new learning
method or in the very least through open and distance learning, although one that had to be
cobbled together through experimentation (Kamil et al, 2020). Second, the mode in which
learning takes place has been substantially enlarged through remote learning. Students who
had authorization from parents and instructors to use internet technology were free to explore
educational materials at their own pace. Less guidance from their teachers and greater
freedom were shown as a result. Their education may extend well beyond the confines of the
classroom. As a final point, remote learning has widened the scope of what constitutes
learning time. However, the advent of distance education has changed all of that. We no
longer have to restrict learning to specific hours since we no longer have to go to school in
person and because we have access to educational resources at any time of day or night. To
put it another way, education and life are entwined (Iyer et al, 2020).

Ways Covid will change the future of education

For the past twenty-four months, the majority of us have been forced to live with shuttered
schools and some form of lockdown. Nobody could have expected that a virus would cause
the most significant disruption to education in the twenty-first century, despite all of the
rethinking that had taken place (Tadesse and Muluye, 2020). As education officials
throughout the world wrestle with issues like as online instruction and safe school
resumption, they will no doubt be considering the long-term implications of the epidemic for
the education system. We look at six ways that COVID-19 is likely to have an impact on the
future of education.
 Figure: Six ways COVID-19 Will Shape the Future of Education

Source: Center for Global Development

Despite significant increases in school enrolment over the previous two decades, 268
million children are now out of school when the epidemic began in the early 1990s. When
schools reopened, millions more students may not be able to return. Special attention
should be paid to children whose families have experienced economic hardship, as well as
adolescent girls who are at heightened risk of miscarriage or early marriage (Tadesse and
Muluye, 2020). In a report issued earlier this month by Save the Children, the organisation
looked at existing out-of-school rates, which were split down by economic category, as
well as learning results. According to their findings, more than 9 million children are at
danger of leaving school, with Niger, Mali, and Chad leading the list of nations where
children are most susceptible to opting out. More than seven million children are
anticipated not to return to school, according to the World Bank, after examining current
out-of-school rates by income quintile in conjunction with macroeconomic estimates of
economic recession in 2020. According to estimates, more than half of all refugee girls
will not travel to their homes when schools reopen. Governments must begin preparing
now for the implementation of policies that will reach the children who are most at risk of
school dropouts (Tadesse and Muluye, 2020). A toolkit for policymakers that summarises
the available conclusion aimed at decreasing dropout after a crisis is being developed, with
two sets of suggestions:
1) Combine community involvement with large-scale official communications campaigns
to parents, and look to increase participation choices to facilitate all children, including
those at greatest risk for falling out;
2) Provide economic or in-kind assistance, such as feeding programme, to help families o
regain their footing after a crisis.

Within a few days of schools closing, government-sponsored alternative learning programs

were created in a number of African nations, including Liberia and Sierra Leone, among
others. Other countries took far longer to declare their plans—Ghana did not publish its
program until June 15. Some nations have extended their standard curriculum to incorporate
numerous languages or accessible features for students with impairments, which represents
significant advancement (Upoalkapior and Upoalkapior, 2020). Children in numerous
nations, on the other hand, were denied access to any form of schooling for months at a time.
Prior to the epidemic, we were already suffering a relevant training, which is likely to
become even worse as a result of the protracted school closures that are expected to occur.
Learning loss, on the other hand, will not have the same effect on all pupils. A conceptual of
learning degradation during summer holidays reveals that there is a significant difference in
outcomes depending on socioeconomic level. According to several studies conducted in a
variety of situations, including a CGD survey in Senegal, demographic differences exist in
access to distant education, parental feedback and assistance at home, and time spent
researching while schools are closed (Upoalkapior and Upoalkapior, 2020).

Methods of education being reimagined

Of course, remote learning is nothing new. For instructors and students alike, though,
COVID-19 made it a standard practice across all levels. Because of school systems' response
to the epidemic, millions of kids now have access to the internet and digital gadgets that they
did not have at home before the outbreak. It is true that some teachers and students
(particularly those who were most vulnerable) had a poor experience with open and distance
learning. Students and parents alike lost out on a full school years’ worth of socialization
since many parents were forced to stop their jobs so they could stay home to care for their
children (an experience no one wants to repeat in the future) (Chandasiri, 2020). Inequities in
technological access and educational quality remained as well. As a side benefit, remote
learning may have had a favorable impact on how schools are run. First and foremost, the
epidemic sparked a technologically-enabled global learning opportunity unlike any other.
Schools lacked expertise, training, and resources, and educators had little time to deliberate,
prepare, and fundamentally upend the way teaching was given, thus the architecture may not
have been flawless. However, it sparked a wave of action among educators.

Learning is a way of life. For the fourth time, the concept of "learning location" has been
broadened significantly by the advent of distance education. Knowledge-building is no longer
confined to the classroom or the school. Students may study at home from a variety of
sources and specialists, even if they are alone. They are also able to communicate with their
classmates remotely. If effectively integrated with face-to-face learning, these a few items
might radically alter education (Abidah et al, 2020). There was some justifiable opposition to
the use of remote learning, which was implemented as an emergency response, but we should
continue look for ways to enhance it and make it a part of our teaching toolbox in the future.
It is possible to use virtual learning as a complement to and enhance traditional training.

Impact of this change on learning experience and well-being

As a result of COVID-19's unanticipated and unexpected transformation of online teaching

and learning, many, if not all, elements of university students' lives are likely to have been
affected, if not all, of them. This study, which will add to the analysis of this shift, focuses on
the influence of the epidemic on academic well-being, which has been determined to be just
as crucial to students' long-term performance as their academic accomplishment (Schleicher,
2020). Student well-being has been shown to be associated with their participation and
performance in academic, co-curricular, and recreational activities, as well as with
intrinsically motivated, satisfaction, meaning creation, and psychological well-being in
general. College students' well-being had been deteriorating in the years preceding the
outbreak of the flu pandemic. Among students graduating from colleges in the United States,
for example, just one in every ten students scored highly in all aspects of well-being.
University students had worse well-being than the normal community in the United
Kingdom, and their well-being was found to be declining for several years. This bad
condition of well-being among students has surely been exacerbated by the epidemic, which
has brought misery, frustration, embarrassment, fear, loss, and a variety of other negative
feelings and experiences to the student’s community (Marinoni et al, 2020).

Interruptions in academic processes as a result of the Covid-19 epidemic have raised student
anxiety, particularly among students who do not have sufficient social support (Abidah et al,
2020). Stress has also been shown to reduce medical students' passion for learning and
practicing medicine after they graduate from medical school (Burgess and Sieverstsen, 2020).
These individuals have also felt physically lonely, worried, and depressed as a result of their
decreased social opportunities during the pandemic. Prior research has identified various
coping strategies, such as students seeking for knowledge about the epidemic and for
meaning and purpose, who report greater forms of psychological well-being (Di Pietro et al,
2020).

The Future of Education

It would be a mistake for schools to completely abandon remote learning since it may assist
in removing the boundaries that limit students' opportunities. Remote learning, on the other
hand, does not inevitably result in superior learning. It only offers schools with the
opportunity to evaluate how they might deliver educational opportunities (Theoret and Ming,
2020). When it comes to developing their own learning, students are rarely regarded to be an
active and conscious participant. Over the course of the last several decades, government-led
changes have tinkered with nearly all of the basic components of education. They altered the
curriculum. They made adjustments to their evaluations. They played with the teachers and
the teaching process. They demanded accountability from school administrators. They
conducted experiments with different class sizes.

However, they never considered incorporating students in the process of constructing their
own learning. Students have merely been the beneficiaries of reforms and adjustments, rather
than being the owners and controllers of their own learning and education experiences
(Theoret and Ming, 2020). The outcomes have not been encouraging. Among the desired
consequences of the reforms have been greatness and equality—excellence defined as greater
levels of success by all students, and equity as the closing of achievement inequalities
between various groups of students—and the changes have accomplished both. However,
after decades of changes, we have failed to attain any of these objectives. Take, for example,
the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is a limited-scope
examination that yet reveals important information. In the most fundamental indices of
educational quality, such as the evaluation of arithmetic and reading, the findings of the 2019
survey reveal that there has been no substantial progress since the 1990s. Over the past half
century, the inequality gap between pupils from wealthier and poorer socioeconomic
backgrounds has remained stubbornly unbridged (Theoret and Ming, 2020). A great deal has
happened in the meanwhile.
Conclusion

Today's world is vastly different from the one that existed in the 1990s, when the regional
and global evaluations TIMSS and PISA — both of which, in my opinion, are incredibly
contentious — were developed to take global measures of students' acting skills and national
curriculum policies were focused on closing achievement gaps in the United States. The
internet was only beginning to gain traction at the time, but now, the world would cease to
exist (at least in its current shape) if it were not for it. New industries have sprung up as a
result of cutting-edge technology that have buried old ones. In an unpredictable future, no
score on a regional or international examination can accurately forecast a child's potential to
thrive in the present. Students can no longer be passive beneficiaries of a pre-planned
education; rather, they must take an active role in their own education by becoming active
proprietors of their learning (Jena, 2020). We (students) are not subjected to individualized
learning. We are in charge of this task. With technology breakthroughs, traditional barriers
may be broken down, and learners may be eligible to partake in a new realm of learning that
was previously impossible. Both scholars and politicians must imagine a new future in which
distant learning can be seamlessly integrated with regular classroom education if this is to
become a reality. It is the new "normal" of education to exist in a world in which education
knows no geographical limits and individuals are the owners of their own learning
experiences.
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