Functioning of Schools Post Covid-19 and New Education Policy 2020 | Ezyschooling

With the introduction of the New Education Policy, the whole face of the education sector has taken a complete turn for good. A lot of doubts about the curriculum have arrived in the minds of students as well as their parents along with the questions about the opening of institutions. In order to throw light on these concerns, this webinar discusses the "Functioning of Schools post-COVID and New Education Policy" with Miss Beena Nair. Beena Nair is the Associate Vice President and Academic Head of Seth M R Jaipuria Group of Schools. She is also a recipient of the 'Management Excellence Award' from the S Chand group and the 'Exceptional Woman of Excellence' award from the World Women Economic Forum. Her motto in life is, "Think, act and be positive always".

Timestamps:

(04:55-10:20) What are the highlights of NEP that you liked?

(10:20-13:15) How in your view is NEP going to change the face of Indian Education?

(13:15-18:50) What are your views on digital learning and to what extent can this be successful?

(18:53-25:33) What were the changes the schools made to make online classes accessible to all?

(25:35-31:28) What were the financial challenges faced by educational institutions during COVID-19?

(31:30-37:20) Post-COVID, how are schools planning to ensure that the space is fit for a child's overall growth?

(37:20-43:07) How are schools planning to cover the curriculum given in the academic calendar?

The Covid-19 pandemic and the social distancing that followed have affected all walks of society, also education. In order to keep education running, educational institutions have had to quickly adapt to the situation. This has resulted in an unprecedented push to online learning. Many, including commercial digital learning platform providers, have rushed to provide their support and ‘solutions’, sometimes for free. The Covid-19 pandemic has therefore also created a sellers’ market in ed-tech. This paper employs a critical lens to reflect on the possible problems arising from hasty adoption of commercial digital learning solutions whose design might not always be driven by best pedagogical practices but their business model that leverages user data for profit-making. Moreover, already before Covid-19, there has been increasing critique of how ed-tech is redefining and reducing concepts of teaching and learning. The paper also challenges the narrative that claims, ‘education is broken, and it should and can be fixed with technology’. Such technologization, often seen as neutral, is closely related to educationalization, i.e. imposing growing societal problems for education to resolve. Therefore, this is a critical moment to reflect how the current choices educational institutions are making might affect with Covid-19 education and online learning: Will they reinforce capitalist instrumental view of education or promote holistic human growth? This paper urges educational leaders to think carefully about the decisions they are currently making and if they indeed pave the way to a desirable future of education.

The Covid-19 pandemic raging around the globe has caused large-scale institutional and behavioural ‘shock effects’ in various areas of human activity including education. The impact on learners is unprecedented: on 9 April 2020, there are over 1,500,000,000 students worldwide from primary to tertiary level who cannot attend school (UNESCO 2020). Due to massive and unexpected closures, affected countries and communities have been forced to seek quick fixes in different digital learning platforms (Jandrić 2020a). These rapid moves from classroom to online teaching have set aside the more profound questions related to national educational policies and theoretical grounds and premises. Current conditions of formal educational systems can be described using Philip Strong’s (1990) model of epidemic psychology consisting of three consecutive and overlapping epidemics: those of fear, explanation, and action. Strong uses ‘epidemic’ as a metaphor representing collective psychological reactions to an epidemiological crisis.