“A staggering 91% (5bn) of global students have been affected due to COVID-19 pandemic and this is going to accelerate and reshape education forever”
– Nandan Keerthi, Classe365 cofounder
It has been a whirlwind past few weeks for the educational institutions across the world due to the coronavirus outbreak. While some schools and universities acted quicly and shifted their classes to online in an efficient manner, several institutions are still struggling to implement distance education. This unprecedented time has also acted as a reality-check for the education sector and has made many introspect if the way they function is and will still be relevant. But all this could mean only one thing: the way we perceive education is going to change. Forever.
So, in this blog, let’s see the 3 major ways the COVID-19 pandemic could reshape the education forever
1. Homeschooling to witness a significant growth
Until the outbreak of coronavirus, only a minority of children across the world pursued homeschooling. In fact, according to a recent article in the World Economic Forum, before the outbreak, only 1.7 million children in the US were being homeschooled out of a national school population of 56.6 million. But this scenario has already started to change as a large of schools, globally, have started providing virtual lectures for students. Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which has been closely following this trend, has provided positive feedback for online classes and officials say that this is an opportunity to rethink the way education is provided. Even other experts in the education sector have suggested that homeschooling could see an exponential growth and garner high demand among the parents.
2. M-learning market to thrive in the coming years
While the importance of e-learning is being vastly spoken about, experts opine that M-learning (mobile learning) could turn out to be the next big thing in online education. It has been predicted that the number of schools and universities that develop apps for students to study, conduct brainstorming sessions, access course materials, receive updates and more will grow significantly in the near future. According to Forbes, modern learning platforms are increasingly focusing on customizing their content for M-learning.
3. The role of teachers is set to transform
The global online learning market is projected to be worth $325 billion by 2025 and the role of teachers in a virtual learning environment has naturally comes under scrutiny and questioning. Of course, the role of teachers would still be instrumental, but it is set to transform completely. The teachers can no longer afford to just be subject experts — in a way, they would be required to become more of facilitators. And almost every teacher in an educational institution would be given intensive training on how to use the technology and make virtual classrooms as engaging and interactive as possible. The way they set assessment tasks for the students would also see an evident change as they would have a lot more room to experiment and test the performance of students with the help of digital tools.