Revolutionising ed-tech ecosystem

Not even a single sector of life has been spared by the devastating impacts of Covid-19. Education is no exception. World Bank estimates show that around 1.7 billion students from around the whole terra firma have come under the unfortunate consequences, in some form or the other, of this malicious disease. To lessen the repercussions, the idea of e-learning had to be adopted by millions of students — along with their educators and mentors — with lightning speed.

As coronavirus continues to change its shape and outlook, so do policymakers and scientific researchers’ innovative techniques for providing education to our younger lot. In this process of incessant change, what has become the norm is the intermittent closure of learning centres. This new situation has ushered in a new era of education, where governments are continuously devising new frameworks and mechanisms and implementing them to digitalise this crucial sector to its maximum potential. To keep pace with the fast-changing landscape of e-learning around the globe, it is time to ponder new ways to meet the digital requirements of our educators and instructors as well as learners.

In Pakistan, going online for learning is not very smooth and accessible. Availing the advantage of digital platforms is not an easy task for a society whose major chunk of the population is living below the poverty line. Suffering under the shockwaves of economic crunch and barely meeting his daily needs, a man on his beam’s end cannot afford to buy digital hardware for his offspring and fulfil their dreams of education through online platforms.

Successive governments’ failure to provide uninterrupted energy supply, high-speed internet connections and expeditious mobile connectivity throughout the country, particularly in rural areas of Pakistan where more than 86% of schools are located, has limited or totally restricted the access for the learners to any e-learning solutions. Even though, owing to irresistible compulsions of technology transfer and flow of knowledge economy from around the globe under the spur of the globalisation process, Pakistan has improved its ranking in the internet affordability column on “Inclusive Internet Index”, yet overall it is still lingering at the 90^th place, ranking it in the last quartile of the index and second to last in the Asian region. To create a homogeneous digital educational ecosystem, this unwelcome situation presents a very serious challenge for policymakers who already are confronting the difficult task of creating conditions to keep back, and then subsequently reduce to zero, the contemporary swelling statistic of 25 million out-of-school children. If the steps are not taken at the right moment, pandemic’s wave after wave can build the situation even to an unmanageable point.

To mitigate these twin problems, the government, firstly, during the pandemic, initiated the Ehsaas Cash programme to limit or curb the bulge of out-of-school children by making the parents pay the school fees of their children and, to go online, buy for them the digital hardware. Secondly, to continue to provide education to learners through digital mechanisms, it launched radio-school and television-school programmes; the initiatives were in line with the internationally recognised at-home learning techniques which, in the advanced countries, during the natural or man-made calamities, have successfully provided education and kept the channel open for top-to-bottom flow of knowledge and scholarship. Ergo, ours is on a par with international approaches during disasters. But, a recent Unicef report makes it clear that during the pandemic, 75% of states have used television while 57% used radio for Covid-induced distance learning programmes. It visualises, beyond Pakistan, a grim picture of global digital fragmentation and calls for the international community’s attention towards the shared obligation of removing all barriers to the development of a technological ecosystem for education in the developing world. Many international governmental as well as non-governmental organisations are paying heed to this critical problem and are helping underdeveloped countries to pursue their digital goals in the education sector. By realigning its policies with international efforts, Pakistan may acquire financial as well as technical benefits for strengthening its indigenous process of e-learning.

In order to respond to the challenges in the digital landscape, Pakistan must learn from other countries which are making efforts to offset the impacts of pandemic on education, by adapting to the new realities of the contemporary era through innovation, research and inventions. For instance, in developing countries of Africa, where the education sector felt the shocks of the pandemic due to expensive digital devices, low-speed internet, lack of teacher’s training in the utilisation of digital platforms, unfamiliarity of students with e-learning techniques and absence of prompt actions by the bureaucracies to undo these barriers, the governments are working in collaboration with international organisations, domestic technology-driven entrepreneurs, civil society and academia to create the digital environment for education.

Hence, to cater to the demands of our e-learners, the government has not only to formulate but also implement well-informed policies both in the economic arena as well as in our digital coliseum to bridge the deep-seated structural gaps between economic and digital haves and have-nots.

If, on the one hand, e-mentees are in need of sound digital policies to remove the roadblocks on the way to digital education, on the other hand, e-educators also have the right to be trained and coached in internet-based teaching methodologies. They need to be upskilled in preparing digital curricula and associated learning materials for the students. Preparing and making them available at teachers training centres, the virtual skills development courses are the necessity of time. This may include training educators and attached academic staff in operating modern digital gadgets, software and social media networks, including digital radios, telemeters, microphones, webinars, visual dashboards, webcams, screen casting, and audio and video conferencing, to name a few. Restructuring teachers’ pedagogical skills on modern digital lines would be the best way to counter the prevailing challenges of the epidemiological situations in the education sector. Furthermore, while keeping in mind the ever-evolving nature of digital technologies, the governments must make virtual skills development courses a permanent feature of teachers’ training modules, since, despite controlling the epidemic, digitalisation of every government sector is the ultimate requirement of the modern period.

Though an unfortunate pandemic, Covid-19 has given us a golden opportunity to capitalise on it for the larger benefit of our coming generation. The virus might be over soon in near future, but the process of digitalisation of education must not stop, particularly if we have to keep pace with the rapidly changing technology theatre of the modern world. Changes at a small level contain a revolution at the back end. Currently, a novel hybrid model of learning, utilising both online and offline mechanisms simultaneously, is here to stay and, with the passage of time, will emerge as a compact inalienable whole. This change is not going to happen overnight. However, this process of shifting dynamics of e-education provides an opportunity to listen to researchers, scientists and technologists and integrate their visions with that of our academia’s requirements to materialise the incorporation of technologies into the education sector, boosting learning outputs for all and sundry. The impetus provided by the coronavirus must not be wasted at any cost and should be converted into a solid base for a comprehensive modus operandi to speed up the process of digitalisation of the education system.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 5^th, 2022.

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