Covid-19 Putting Underprivileged Students’ Education on the line

written date: Feb 1, 2022

It has been 676 days since our first unexpected school lockdown in March 2020. This dreadful episode of lockdowns lent me an opportunity to witness shelves as barren as those depicted in zombie apocalypse shows and coughing was a present-day “steer clear” sign.

Undoubtedly, Covid-19 has wreaked havoc on school systems and affected millions of students worldwide. In response to school closure, temporary alternatives have been adopted such as TV lesson broadcasts, take-home study packages and digital classrooms through ZOOM or Microsoft Teams—we were forced into a situation in which teachers went from warning students to stay silent in class to desperately pleading for responses as cameras and microphones were always turned off online.

Consequently, this pandemic crisis has exacerbated pre-existing educational inconsistencies and inequities; underprivileged communities are at a greater threat of accessing education, especially in developing countries such as mine.

In my humble opinion, distance education in developing countries has only been focused primarily on cities, leaving students in the countryside behind owing to inadequate resources and negligence. Therefore, to ensure the accessibility of education to students in developing countries, I would like to propose three aspects that policymakers and educators should consider: the internet connectivity; teacher digital skills training; an active system of feedback from teachers and students.

Even though I reside in the city where internet and technology are sufficiently within reach, distance learning was still particularly difficult to adjust to: internet connection and electricity are unstable leading to many sections of the lecture to be cut off. Therefore, the government should redistribute funds towards developing a reliable internet service in the countryside, or promote in finding investment to construct the connectivity infrastructure necessary to deliver digital learning solutions.

Education in developing countries follows the traditional teaching: students' main resource is their teachers who only teach utilizing the method of lesson recitation from textbooks. In contrast, with digital learning being the sole solution to Covid-19, schools must provide training and support for the use of devices and softwares in the virtual classroom in order to aid them with the transition from traditional pedagogy to digital pedagogy. This helps ensure the quality of teaching as teachers can handle simple technical issues and allows them to implement useful digital tools to expand learning opportunities for students.

Developing an active feedback system as simple as online surveys or opinion polls on forums, where the students and teacher’s concerns can be raised instead of hearing from individuals that aren’t directly involved, will help open up opportunities to find the exact loopholes to the current solution. Eventually, in order for policymakers to come up with a better solution to the remote learning situation, they should be aware of issues that the students and teachers are actually facing.

As the virus continues to spread like wildfire and lockdowns keep recurring, remote learning will become the new normal to many students around the world. If digital learning issues aren’t being properly addressed, the future of the underprivileged students will be compromised.

Did covid-19 negatively impacted your education?

• yes
• no
• to a certain extent, yes