“La peste che il tribunale della sanità aveva temuto che potesse entrar con le bande alemanne nel milanese, c’era entrata davvero, come è noto; ed è noto parimente che non si fermò qui, ma invase e spopolò una buona parte d’Italia.”
“The plague that the Health Tribunal had feared might enter the Milan area with the German troops really did enter, as is well known. Just as it is well known that the plague did not stop there, but went on to invade and depopulate a good part of Italy.”
Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi, Capitolo XXXI) has been widely used these days to better understand our reaction to pandemics. Similarities with the 1630 Great Plague of Milan have been analysed by Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize in Literature, in a recent opinion published in The New York Times. Pamuk insists on humanity’s tendency to create rumours and spread false information as an unprompted response to pandemics. The most common rumours during plague outbreaks were about who had brought the disease in, and where it had come from.
La peste di Firenze del 1348 in un’incisione di Luigi Sabatelli
Do we have the ability nowadays to resist rumours, misinformation and stigma and to fight back the tendency to lock ourselves down into our fears and prejudices?
All those interested in the educational dimension of the pandemic will read with great delight the open letter written to his students by Domenico Squillace, principal of Liceo Scientifico Alessandro Volta, a secondary school in Milan. Squillace urges his students to preserve the most precious asset we possess: our social fabric, our humanity.
Pamuk doesn’t say anything else when he argues about our ability to share reliable information and build a common knowledge that “begets a sense of solidarity” between people and “encourages mutual understanding”. Pamuk sees hope for a better world to emerge after this pandemic, if we can “embrace and nourish the feelings of humility and solidarity engendered by the current moment.”
This optimistic statement echoes Martha Nussbaum’s work in her book Not for profit about global citizenship. For her, the global problems we need to solve question our capacity to come together and cooperate in ways we have not before.
When schools reopen, it will be up to them (and to us!) to develop new strategies to make students global citizens.
If we don’t succeed, then, in the words of the Milanese principal: “La peste avrà vinto davvero”: “The plague really will have won.”
Educating global citizens may well be schools’ ultimate challenge in times of COVID-19!
After a month of lock down due to the Covid-19 crisis, most schools remain closed in most countries with 1,5 billion students out of school.
Universal school closure has obviously an impact on studies and learning achievements. Most of the debate turns around the day of reopening and when and how national evaluations will be done. But school closure has a tremendous immediate effect on health and education inequalities and reveals how important is the school network for public good.
We are suddenly reminded that school is the answer to many social issues. The following bullet points should help us think about the current situation
- Schools means daily basic care
Main reason for school to remain open or reopen is to provide children and parents with basic care: food, attention while parents work. The NY Times reported that out of the 10,521 public schools in California, only one – remained open to give assistance and care to children of families who work the citrus and walnut groves. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/us/coronavirus-california-school.html. 30 million students in the US qualify for free or reduced cost school lunches; they are 1,3 M. in the UK. In France according to UNICEF, more than 3 M. children live below the poverty line.
- Homeless children suffer most from the closure
According to a UCL research group, “young children under 5 years living in temporary accommodation rarely have the ability to self-isolate and adhere to social distancing, with previous extreme inequalities and inequities in accessing health care becoming exacerbated”. For instance more than 125.000 children were homeless and in temporary accommodation increased in England in 2019.
- School closures deepen education inequalities
According to a research published by the university of Leuwen, the summer holiday in most American schools is estimated to contribute to a loss in academic achievement equivalent to one month of education for children with low socioeconomic status.
- School closures will exacerbate the epidemic of childhood obesity
A research published in the United States reminds us that children experience most unhealthy weight gain primarily when they are out of school (normally during the summer months).
© WFP/Volana Rarivoson
- Digital innovation was not ready at all in school
Teachers are struggling to find alternative ways of teaching. According to a recent survey made by Synlab with french teachers, 70% of respondents use mainly emails and phones for organizing and offering work to students.
- “Not everything is straightforward”
Videoconference doesn’t solve it all. Only 12% of teachers have set up a virtual classroom. Many teachers are sending the exercises via WhatsApp to families who have no other connection than the mobile. Dozens of municipalities in Navarra and the Basc country (Spain) are implementing systems to deliver door-to-door homework on paper to students who do not have the means to follow online teaching. Singapore has suspended the classroom use of Zoom, a videoconferencing tool with easy-to-use functions that have made it easy for trolls to hijack meetings and harass students
- Connecting with children is a key problem
According to a teacher quoted in the Spanish daily El País, Antonio Solano, director of the Bovalar de Castellón high school, “One of the ones that worries me the most is a boy I have in class, who was working well and whom we have been calling with no results. And I think: but where will he be, what will he be doing?”. In France, 17% of teachers have failed to connect with families, mainly in high schools where the rate rises to almost 40%.
The problem didn’t start with the Covid-19. 263 million children were out-of-school worldwide in the most recent data (2014) published by UNESCO.
- The digital divide widens education inequalities
Remote learning is a fantasy for those who cannot afford internet access”. 10% of Americans — nearly 33 million people — are living without internet, according to a Pew Research study.
- Parents’ dependency creates more inequalities
Homework is now the rule but most disadvantaged children don’t do “homework”. The homework gap refers to the barriers students face at school when they don’t have access to a high-speed internet connection at home. We are reminded that inequality starts much before school starts. A research team from the University of Michigan showed that disadvantaged children start kindergarten with significantly lower cognitive skills than their more advantaged counterparts. These same disadvantaged children are then placed in low-resource schools, magnifying the initial inequality.
- Children violence remains
Lockdown due to Covid-19 has emphasized the reality of violence suffered by children. This is unfortunately not new. Globally, it is estimated that up to 1 billion children aged 2–17 years, have experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence or neglect in the past year.
- School closures didn’t occur only with the Covid-19 crisis
UNICEF reminded a year ago that more than 1.9 million children had been forced out of school in West and Central Africa due to an upsurge in attacks and threats of violence.
The teacher was the physical referent of the class, the permanent facilitator, the moderator.
She divided her time between the school where she taught, participated in meetings with her colleagues, received parents and her home where she prepared his lessons, corrected homework.
And then overnight, all schools closed. Everyone has to teach and learn distance and has to do it now! No magician imagined being able to make the school disappear overnight.
We certainly have the technical means to do so. We can give a distance learning course by videoconference to students staying at home. We can use a virtual class which reproduces the functioning of the class with a shared screen and a chat tool for the pupils.
But none of these solutions has been thought of as a replacement for physical school. In fact, nothing was as ready as we thought. Nothing has ever been thought of on a large scale so that children no longer have to go to school.
The teaching paradigm changed within hours.
The “distance class”
“Teaching is a two way thing!”This is exactly the challenge we face. In a few days we need to invent the distance class – and this is not about distance learning as we understood it.
The distance class starts with the relationship between a teacher and his class – the only guarantee of the quality of learning -. This relationship should be maintained at a distance with a quality equivalent or close to that which existed in the physical space of the classroom.
How to continue teaching “as before”? How to do it without a physical place common to the teacher and his students but with the same protagonists? How to respond to an exceptional situation with the same quality? With what skills, what training, what goals?
All these questions are raised and a mobilized, competent teaching staff must urgently invent a new concept: distance class.
What has changed?
Physical space has disappeared; Students have become invisible; Heads of schools have become invisible; Parents have become more visible; Time has lengthened: the day no longer has clear boundaries between work and leisure.
What remains as before
The teacher is the only one in charge of his class; Classroom assistance is mandatory; All children have the right to be in class; A class has a schedule; Class hours allow children to acquire knowledge and skills by following a well established curriculum
Distance class? Yes but how?
It is reassuring to hold on to what we do best.
The teacher prepares her lesson with care, following on the one hand the school curriculum and on the other hand adapting her teaching to the characteristics of the class group. The lessons are scheduled during the day depending on their difficulty and the attention required from the students; a class will alternate between “difficult” subjects and more “fun” activities to give a rhythm that suits the greatest number of students in the class.
The teacher follows the work of his students in a way as personalized as possible; the teacher questions the students, answers their questions as individually as possible, getting closer to those who need it.
How long should a distance class last?
Can we keep the 50-minute lessons or should we offer shorter durations … supplemented by home work? Those who experience extreme teleworking these days know the fatigue generated and the concentration required by repetitive videoconferences, more or less organized and with very variable durations.
The distance class cannot be a perfect copy of the physical class. The teacher and student’s ability to concentrate is not the same. They need breaths, moments of escape.
Less is more
Today with digital, you have to learn to do less, better, shorter.
The teacher must be convinced of his ability to easily create lessons for the distance class without duplicating those he had for the traditional class. Simple advice: Do as usual! Prepare your lesson before giving it on a virtual platform! This advice seems trivial. It’s not that much.
Each online lesson should last a maximum of 30 minutes. To the teacher, the motivating and explanatory work to be done in class: “the teacher is the guide”. To the students that want to go deeper, complementary work to be done “at home.”
Our recommendation
4 lessons per day;
4 x 30 minutes;
2 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon for example.
Between each lesson, a break to refresh, “disconnect”, review what we have just seen.
So do only during the lesson what you feel you can do in 30 minutes.
Go straight to the point. Choose.
A lesson is “a minimum” but containing the essentials: clearly stated objectives, basic points well summarized, some dynamic activities. The rest, everything else, can be the subject of an additional email or a file shared on the school’s digital workspace.
There are simple guidelines to do the preparatory work: create a simple word document, divide the sheet into 5 blocks; one 10-minute block (reserved for teaching content) and four 5-minute blocks.
- Assign activity to each block of 5 minutes to be done in class;
- Select for each activity an introductory element (image, video, text, sound file).
- Keep the word document and these items in a folder on your computer.
- When you have to create the lesson on a virtual platform, use this folder.
BLOCKS |
DURATION |
Block 1 |
5 minutes – a video |
Block 2 |
10 minutes – the core of the lesson |
Block 3 |
5 minutes – an exercise |
Block 4 |
5 minutes – a quizz |
Block 5 |
5 minutes – an assessment poll and next steps |
Interactive and synchronous teaching
We have no other choice than the distance class? So let’s also make it interactive. Let’s address the challenge of synchronous education where everyone – teacher and students – connect at the same time, as in real class.
Synchronous teaching requires tools. That’s a good news! There are plenty!
Learning does not consist in seeing your students in full screen. Imagine a teacher 50 centimeters away from each of his students, feeling their breath, blowing in their face!
Learning is first and foremost the art of distance, the art of knowing how to use pedagogical supports wisely and to animate the discussion on subjects that require a specific approach and address challenging issues!
In a visioconference, the teacher scrolls through a powerpoint presentation – prepared in advance – by moving from one slide to another according to the time allotted for the lesson. It is therefore an imported pedagogy.
The particularity of a lesson on the contrary is that it is part of a dynamic process. Students need to know more at the end than at the beginning. They all go from point a to point b. We must therefore ensure that this progression takes place.
Assessment
Both individual and collective assessment is essential. The online class cannot afford to lose students on the way, to leave out those who do not understand quickly enough.
A simple online survey with a single question allows us to move forward in a coordinated way: “Did we understand what we have just learned? Yes or no?”
Depending on the answer, the teacher will decide whether to go back on what he thought he had acquired and whether he should do it during this lesson or the next.
For online assessment, there are tools – questionnaires – of all kinds that allow you to test remotely with more or less simple questions if the lesson meets the objectives set for learning.
Some tips
- Avoid reinventing content
- Do not confuse your learners with an overambitious use of third party tools and services
- Use a regular pattern of communication to help establish a sense of community
- Maintain student attention during content delivery
- Extend the life of a lesson beyond its final assessment
- Set clear and measurable learning outcomes
- Use carefully positioned quizzes to pause your learners and prompt reflection
- Use additional platforms to support your teaching where the central plaform’s functionality falls short
- Encourage learners to engage in authentic tasks
- Direct social dynamics by highlighting selected contributions
- Develop your students as autonomous learners by asking them to continue the work at home
-Use a provocative question to wake up the class and extend a live debate after class in a discussion forum
(adapted from MOOC Design Patterns Project, Warburton and Mor, 2015)
How do you get students involved online?
For those who practice videoconferencing, you have noticed the difficulty in speaking and the difficulty in enforcing a speaking order. Priority is given to whoever speaks, it is he or she that we see on the screen.
What happen if we “leave the microphone open” for each student to raise questions aloud at any time? Kind of like letting everyone in a class speak when they want to. How many times have teachers complained about these talkative classes!
The big question that we all ask ourselves then becomes: can we participate without necessarily (speaking)? This is the gamble of the educational moment that we are going through: not to fall into the ease of speaking to say nothing but to insist on “doing and sharing it”.
Shouldn’t we in the course of the class favor “soft” interaction modes – one by one in private exchange – or deferred modes – meet again after class for a telephone exchange of a few minutes.
The important thing during the online class is for the teacher to be able to “map” his class: who follows, who does not follow, who does, who does not.
Two solutions open:
- being able to “see” the students’ screens live and intervene immediately if necessary for those of them who need it, even if it means contacting them personally by telephone, for example;
- being able to include participation in activities to be carried out in class: instead of carrying out a powerpoint, the teacher focuses on the student’s ability to bring documents, find a video, express an idea. Then the teacher has to have the means to share the student’s production with the whole class.
Another innovative possibility, group work!
Cooperative or collaborative work – group work – is all about shared tasks, accomplishing something together, solving problems using collective intelligence.
These goals are as difficult or as easy to achieve from a distance as in the classroom. There are simple applications that allow you to bring students together, assign them tasks, track their work. In short, there are tools that make us work together.
It all seems strange, singular or provocative; but in an online course, you have to create a new pact of confidence with students who no longer rely on visual or sound control.
Does this work?
We are used to blaming technology for all the problems of the classroom at a distance. The famous bugs multiply, the screen suddenly blackens, the page loses its configuration on the screen, what works on a computer does not work on a tablet, the connection is interrupted …
So what? Who said technology replaces teachers?
All problems related to technology have solutions. The distance class is first and foremost a lesson of humility both for teachers and for those who have seen themselves too quickly as digital magicians.
L’enseignant partageait son temps entre l’école où il faisait classe, participait aux réunions avec ses collègues, recevait les parents et son domicile où il préparait ses cours, corrigeait les devoirs. Et puis du jour au lendemain, il n’y a plus d’écoles ouvertes. Tout le monde doit se mettre au “télétravail”. Télétravail, quel drôle de nom pour un enseignant! Aucune des solutions digitales existantes n’a été pensé en remplacement de l’école physique. Aucun magicien n’a imaginé pouvoir faire disparaître l’école du jour au lendemain. Rien n’a jamais été pensé à grande échelle pour que les enfants n’aient plus à aller à l’école.
Il nous faut donc en quelques jours inventer la classe à distance – et non plus l’enseignement à distance.
La question est de savoir si la relation entre un enseignant et sa classe – seule garante de la qualité de l’apprentissage – peut se maintenir à distance avec une qualité équivalente ou proche de celle qui existait dans l’espace physique de la salle de classe. Toutes ces questions se posent à un corps enseignant mobilisé, compétent mais qui doit inventer dans l’urgence un nouveau concept: la classe à distance.
Ce qui demeure du temps d’avant
L’enseignant est le seul en charge de sa classe; L’assistance en classe est obligatoire; Tous les enfants ont droit à être en classe; Une classe a un emploi du temps; Les temps de la classe permettent aux enfants d’acquérir connaissances et compétences en suivant un programme.
Ce qui change
L’espace physique a disparu; Les élèves sont devenus invisibles; Les chefs d’établissement sont devenus invisibles; Les parents sont devenus visibles; Le temps s’est allongé: la journée n’a plus de frontières claires entre travail et loisirs.
Ceux qui font ces jours-ci l’expérience du télétravail à outrance savent la fatigue engendrée et la concentration exigée par des visioconférences à répétition, plus ou moins organisées et aux durées très variables. Rien de plus perturbant que de voir des dizaines de visages sur un écran, qui bougent au gré des prises de parole et sans jamais savoir quand parler, combien de temps, avec qui.
La leçon à distance ne peut être une copie parfaite de la leçon réelle. La capacité de concentration de l’enseignant et de l’élève n’est pas la même. Il leur faut des respirations, des moments d’évasion.
Aujourd’hui avec le numérique, il faut apprendre à faire moins, mieux, plus court.
La leçon
Chaque leçon en ligne doit durer 30 minutes au maximum. Au professeur, le travail d’amorçage, de défrichage à réaliser en classe: “le professeur donne l’envie”. Aux élèves l’approfondissement, le travail complémentaire fait “à la maison.”
4 leçons par jour; 4 x 30 minutes; 2 le matin et 2 l’après-midi par exemple. Entre chaque leçon, une pause pour se rafraîchir, “déconnecter”, réviser ce que l’on vient de voir.
Ne faites donc lors de la leçon que ce que vous vous sentez capables de faire en 30 minutes. Allez au plus juste. Choisissez.
Un conseil simple: Faites comme d’habitude! Préparez votre leçon avant de la donner sur une plateforme virtuelle! Ce conseil semble trivial. Il ne l’est pas autant que ça.
Il faut retrouver le cours dans sa simplicité d’avant. Un cours “a minima” mais comportant l’essentiel: les objectifs clairement énoncés, les points fondamentaux bien résumés, quelques activités dynamiques. Le reste, tout le reste, peut faire l’objet d’un mail complémentaire ou d’un fichier partagé sur l’espace numérique de travail.
Pour ce faire ouvrez un simple document word, divisez la feuille en 5 blocs; un bloc de 10 minutes (réservé au contenu de l’enseignement) et 4 blocs de 5 minutes. Attribuer à chaque bloc de 5 minutes une activité à faire en classe et sélectionner pour chaque activité un élément introductif (image, vidéo, texte, fichier son).
| Bloc 1 – Ouverture | 5’ rappel des objectifs |
| Bloc 2 – Enseignement | 10’ le cœur de la séance |
| Bloc 3 – Activité | 5’ Un exercice en réaction au bloc précédent (écriture, exercice de maths) |
| Bloc 4 – Activité | 5’ Une vidéo, un extrait sonore pour exercer sa créativité et sa capacité de réflexion |
| Bloc 5 – Quiz | 5’ Un questionnaire simple pour que chacun auto-évalue ses acquis |
Gardez le document word et ces éléments dans un fichier sur votre ordinateur. Quand vous aurez à créer la leçon sur une plateforme virtuelle, utilisez ce fichier. Ne vous rajoutez pas de contraintes en allant sélectionner sur des bases de données infinies des contenus que vous découvrez.
Comment utiliser la visioconférence ?
L’apprentissage ne consiste pas à voir en plein écran ses élèves. Imaginez un enseignant se trouvant à 50 centimètres de distance de chacun de ses élèves, respirant leur haleine, leur soufflant en pleine figure.
L’apprentissage c’est d’abord l’art de la distance, l’art de savoir utiliser à bon escient des supports pédagogiques et animer la discussion sur des sujets que l’on découvre, des points précis, des points qui font problème!
La particularité d’une leçon c’est qu’elle est donc inscrite dans une dynamique d’apprentissage. Il faut en savoir plus à la fin qu’au début. Nous allons d’un point a vers un point b. Il faut donc s’assurer que cette progression a bien lieu.
Deux éléments sont fondamentaux pour garantir la progression dans le temps court d’une leçon en ligne.
Tout d’abord, comme nous l’avons vu, la leçon elle-même doit aller à l’essentiel, filtrer le superflu, avancer par bonds en laissant de côté les détails que chacun pourra approfondir hors ligne en consultant son manuel.
Ensuite l’évaluation tant individuelle que collective est essentielle. La classe en ligne ne peut pas se permettre de perdre des élèves en route, de laisser de côté ceux qui ne comprennent pas assez vite.
© Shutterstock
Comment faire participer les élèves en ligne?
Les fonctions de visio (et audio) conférence permettent bien à l’enseignant de parler et donner la parole. Mais la parole n’est utile que pour faciliter l’interaction au sein de la classe. C’est tout le pari du moment éducatif que nous traversons: ne pas tomber dans la facilité du parler pour ne rien dire mais insister sur “le faire et le partager”.
Imaginons “laisser le micro ouvert” pour chaque élève et laisser chacun réagir, s’interroger à voix haute à tout bout de champ. Le premier risque est que cette participation sans contrôle deviennent vite source de nuisances sonores. Combien de fois les enseignants ne se sont-ils plaints de ces classes bavardes! Le deuxième risque est de se voir déborder par les questions dans le temps réduit de la classe, rallongeant sans fin le cours. Le troisième risque est de voir se creuser encore les inégalités entre ceux capables de réagir instantanément et les autres.
Comment donc créer de la participation réelle, respectueuse et aussi silencieuse que possible?
Deux solutions s’ouvrent:
- pouvoir inclure la participation dans les activités à réaliser en classe: au lieu de dérouler un powerpoint, l’enseignant mise sur la capacité de l’élève à apporter des documents, trouver une vidéo, exprimer une idée. Il faut alors que l’enseignant dispose du moyen de partager la production de l’élève avec toute la classe.
- pouvoir “voir” les écrans des élèves en direct et intervenir tout de suite en cas de besoin pour ceux d’entre eux qui en ont besoin, quitte à les contacter ensuite personnellement par téléphone par exemple;
Dans la classe à distance, une fonction d’écrans partagés permettrait à l’enseignant de voir les écrans de tous les élèves (lui ou elle seule les verrait), d’interagir avec chaque élève depuis leur écran en toute discrétion, en toute “intimité”.
Autre possibilité innovante, le travail de groupe!
Le travail coopératif ou collaboratif – le travail en groupe – est d’abord affaire de tâches partagées, d’accomplir quelque chose ensemble, de résoudre des problèmes en faisant appel à l’intelligence collective.
Ces objectifs sont aussi difficiles ou aussi faciles à atteindre à distance que dans la salle de classes. Il existe des applications simples qui permettent de réunir les élèves, de leur assigner des tâches, de suivre leur travail. Bref, il existe des outils qui nous font travailler ensemble.
Une leçon d’humilité
On a coutume de mettre sur le compte de la technologie, tous les problèmes de la classe à distance. Les fameux bugs se multiplient, l’écran se noircit brutalement, la page perd sa configuration sur l’écran, ce qui marche sur un ordinateur ne marche pas sur une tablette, la connexion s’interrompt…
Et alors? Qui a dit que la technologie se substituait à l’enseignant ?
Tous les problèmes liés à la technologie ont des solutions. La classe à distance est d’abord une belle leçon d’humilité tant pour les enseignants que pour ceux qui se sont vus trop vite comme les magiciens du numérique.
The health crisis is taking on an unprecedented scale, partly based on the progression of the epidemic, partly fueled by the virus of fear and death anxiety.
The economic crisis stems from containment, negative consumer expectations, shutdown of production chains, speculative movements in oil and other raw materials.
The financial crisis is fed by these crises; markets collapse in chains, gold becomes (again) the safe haven.
Nothing seems to be able to stop THE crisis!
But what if there was a more serious and more lasting one? The education crisis.
In 2019, according to the UN, nearly 260 million children did not go to school. Conflict areas are particularly affected: around 50% of out-of-school children of primary school age live in these areas.
Four days ago, Unesco listed 13 countries forced to close all their schools, affecting more than 290 million students. The arithmetic is simple: 260+290= 550 million children are out of school due to war or coronavirus and the number will increase. The right of children and young to education no matter who they are, regardless of race, gender or disability is a fundamental right of children (article 28 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child).
The question posed by NGOs, often in vain, becomes – finally – topical: What to do to guarantee their right to education?
It is easy to imagine that the problem does not arise in the same way in Italy, in the UK or Syria or Iraq. On the one hand, organized, developed countries, on the other, countries devastated by wars. And yet in both cases, children on both sides are deprived of school. Some are “confined”, “locked up at home”, others are left to themselves, most often in the street. Inequality before school also exists for children without school. Better to be born French than Afghan.
How can we guarantee the educational continuity for all children? This question is at the heart of the statements of ministers of education in developed countries. This question is most often absent in countries at war and NGOs do their best to replace the failing political power.
What is said today in developed countries affected by the Coronavirus? All those in charge insist on the continuity of the educational activity.
The answer can of course only be digital! This is in any case the guarantee that is hastily given to parents and children. Digital workspaces, digital textbooks, remote conference tools will replace the “traditional” class.
Schools quickly inform parents of the solutions implemented. Here is an example from a french “lycée”;
- Regarding the absence during class, the teachers will use the e-mail and the school learning management system so that the child can continue to work at home.
- Concerning the absence to a school test, the teachers will be able to offer the child a written or oral question when he or she returns.
- Concerning the written exams: the teachers will be able, after the test will have taken place in the school, to send by e-mail the subject to the student.
These solutions seem rather poor. A week ago, we were talking of adaptive technologies, of deep learning, of artificial intelligence and we are back to emails!
But other questions arise: How do we really ensure the continuity of education when schools are closed, teachers poorly trained in the use of digital technology with poor internet infrastructure? What about personalized attention, interaction between students, social mix, educational innovation? Everywhere of course, the closure is presented as temporary. It will certainly be so even if the provisional is already part of a random temporality.
Paradoxically, here are the richest countries on the planet confronted with the questions that the poorest have been raising for decades. How to do without school? How to guarantee equality in school when the school is closed? How to reduce the digital divide, this invisible gap inscribed in the heart of the territories and which irreparably separates connected families from others? Back in 2017, a UN report found that 52% of the world’s population still has no access to the internet. There are so many figures to describe differently the inequality in front of the school which persists and worsens in the Coronavirus crisis!
The Coronavirus crisis is revealing in rich countries what NGOs are experiencing on a daily basis in the countries where they operate: the need to innovate.
Think of the NGO “Libraries without Borders” which brings its Ideas Box to refugee camps to allow children to read and write when schools have disappeared from their daily lives.
What is the ideas box that developed countries in turn need?
©Shutterstock Ververidis Vasilis
What if the Coronavirus crisis was an opportunity to rethink the role of digital in and out of school, to help teachers strengthen the social bond at the heart of their practice and commitment? Digital technology does not create innovation, it supports it by giving teachers, families and students shared responsibility for learning.
We thought that digital was a “plus”, “the icing on the cake”, a luxury item for learners of school age; in any case not an essential aspect of our pedagogies. Nothing was to replace physical presence. This myth is collapsing.
We can, we must know how to educate from a distance. Not by email or through Digital Workspaces, but by giving the educator a central place at the heart of digital solutions.
Nothing can replace the teacher – there are 69 million teachers missing by 2030 to ensure primary and secondary education for every child in the world – and digital innovation must do nothing but strengthen its very “presence” when he is physically absent.
Problem: teachers mostly restrict the use of digital solutions to their private communications and social life outside of school. Many immediately put digital out of their daily teaching lives. As for children, the abuse of digital leads to the same conclusions as those observed for young “dropouts”: aggression, anxiety, loneliness. According to a recent study published in JAMA Psychiatry and by a researcher from the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health. (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/2749480): « teens who spend more than three hours a day on social media are more likely to report high levels of behaviors that may be indicators of mental health problems compared to adolescents who do not use social media at all. »
What should educational continuity look like when there is no school?
Tomorrow when the Coronavirus crisis is over, educational practices will have evolved. We will know that we can do without school as we knew it. We will also know how to do it better with school. We will finally know why countries which have no schools are in dire need of our help.
A real reason to hope? Innovation is on our doorstep and innovators are ready.
My daughter Inés is a biology researcher at Imperial College.
Our weekly breakfast this morning in London was dedicated to…coronavirus. I asked her how we could get out of this collective hysteria. How we could rationally interpret what is happening from a scientific point of view.
On the one hand, there is a public health problem with a new virus that is highly transmissible by traditional means. We know how to predict and map epidemics. We know how to calculate morbidity. We don’t yet know how to stop this virus, which needs to be studied urgently.
Tens of thousands of vulnerable people, invisible victims of life, are dying worldwide. We seem powerless. But science needs time. A vaccine only develops after testing periods.
On the other hand, coronavirus may be much more harmful than what we are currently seeing. Beyond the lethal respiratory risk of a very dangerous and unknown disease, much more dangerous viruses may quickly jointly develop with our withdrawal from the social sphere.
The first virus is that of racism: Let’s avoid all contact with Chinese, Koreans, Iranians, Italians. As the number of infected patients grows, the virus of racism becomes global: let’s reject each other!
The second virus is fear: Mistrust and rejection of “the other” settle in the hearts of our families. Where were you yesterday? Who did you see? Due to social distancing and protection measures, we don’t kiss anymore, we don’t greet each other anymore. Will we ever again?
The third virus is that of denunciation: So-and-so coughed; so-and-so had a fever and said nothing; so-and-so have been seen walking outside . No matter the reason, you are (we are all) under scrutiny.
The fourth virus is that of withdrawal and abandon: I’m not risking helping others. We raid the supermarkets. Protective masks are being sold on the black market. We close the borders. Sad memory.
The fifth virus is that of the apocalypse: We are back in the days of the Black Death, the Spanish flu (which had nothing to do with Spain). We’re all going to die….it’s written in the Bible!
The sixth virus is that of conspiracy: The Chinese have spread coronavirus to better plunder the world’s wealth.
The seventh virus is that of greed: greed of stock markets and companies which, in a mix of speculative wave and legal fears, “take a position” or “take positions”; greed of the media and influencers who seek an audience at all costs.
The eighth virus is that of despair, of hopelessness, whereas barely an hour ago artificial intelligence promised us the wonders of transhumanism!
The ninth virus is that of ignorance, rumour and misinformation, which travels at the speed of light in a global world and sweeps away everything in its path, starting with intelligence.
The tenth and last (?) virus is inhumanity, which, in a few weeks, threatens to overthrow the most developed world humankind has ever known.
Are we facing a public health challenge or a social and educational catastrophe? Choose the virus you like best…or RESIST (and read/reread The Plague!).
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