COVID-19 shows up glaring need for disruptive innovation in our education sector
A classroom: Desolate and deserted, post COVID
Over 4.2 million children in Sri Lanka have had their education disrupted for nearly two years first due to the Easter tragedy and now the COVID-19 pandemic. Schools have limped back to a semblance of normalcy but in some provinces, there is still a total lockdown.
The pandemic has exposed multiple challenges within the education sector. Layers of disparity have appeared. In the long period of school closures, many have had little or no education, while others have had the opportunity to access quality education. The challenge of remedial action has been the effort to reach students to provide learning experiences and opportunities under prevailing restrictions.
With the need of contactless delivery of education provision, at the core of the challenge is contact and content. How do we reach children who have little or no connectivity and deliver curriculum content?
The questions that are raised are those of quality; is the contact of quality? Are our teachers equipped to take on tech? Does our curriculum encourage mapping and transfer of content through tech? Are assessments of learning, nurturing rote learning and regurgitating facts? Is the curriculum too vast and unmanageable evidenced by five hour long public exams? Fundamentally, is our educational curriculum and delivery methodology too archaic to deliver online?
To act fast and ensure learning is not disrupted for long periods of time, the more successful models of contactless learning rely on efficacy and efficiency. The efficacy to deliver due to prior knowledge and experience of the mode of delivery, in this instance effective technology, and the efficiency to roll out the need with immediate effect.
Contactless education provision has taken diverse forms. Many international schools have created roll call with virtual classrooms at the start of the school day, collaborative projects driven by self- learning, presentations, assessments, as well as gym and PE sessions, driven by effective curriculum driven learning. Well-established national and private schools within the framework of the local curriculum deliver to scheduled timetables within the constraints of poor net connectivity, compromised tech and in some instances without the resource persons with the relevant tech skills. Yet vast numbers of students have also had to make-do with provision restricted to past papers through Whatsapp and text messages, to no provision at all.
Internet penetration in Sri Lanka is reported to be 47% as at January 2020, with 23% of non users noting that they cannot afford smartphones and 25% that they cannot afford the data costs.
There have been efforts at remedial action with private sector partnerships, state television and phone text information. But little or no evaluations are conducted of these efforts. Rising subscriptions for the services are an indicator of the need but not a reflection of the quality of what is on offer.
In sum we have a marked disparity within our free education system as highlighted in a World Bank Sri Lanka Education Sector Assessment of 2017. While it is commendable that Sri Lanka has an impeccable track record of universal access to education, yet the expansion to access was not accompanied by quality improvements. Sri Lankans spend more time in the education system than neighbours in South Asia, yet major skills shortages and mismatches undermine productivity and thus growth.
The report also notes that when the years of schooling estimated to be 13 by age 18 are adjusted for quality of learning, it is only equivalent to 8.3 years. The glaring learning gap of 4.7 years requires attention. In the current climate of lack of educational opportunities and disrupted education, the learning gap will, no doubt, widen.
We still seem confined to parochial indicators of successful education rooted in Victorian models of Industrial Revolution type mass scale education destroying the diversity of ideas that fuels creative and dynamic scholarship. This trend is further compounded by state and national assessments that operate to standardize the content, an approach classroom teachers take to education to fulfil the state requirements. This approach has caused serious challenges to delivery in a situation of crisis, as the curriculum is not enabling of innovative thinking, curriculum mapping and effective assessment and evaluation.
National averages mask serious disparities. Students in remote locations and students from poor socioeconomic backgrounds have far lower learning levels than the more successful groups. Within the state sector, national schools are featured as the success models, the schools to aspire to. The mission is to facilitate a 1000 national schools and recently 125 have been added to the qualifying list. The hope is that the new national schools qualify in terms of quality teachers and quality provision.
The education consumer is aware of the shortcomings of the system. The Census Report of 2017 revealed that over 1100 schools had received fewer than five applications and of these, 433 had not received a single application. Schools are dying, not because parents are not sending their children to school, but because they are making choices of quality even if it is one of the mushrooming international schools or to better schools which may not be in proximity.
Additionally the lack of data allowing a comparison with international standards adds to the difficulty of properly assessing all dimensions of education quality in Sri Lanka and its improvements over time. Sri Lanka has never participated in international assessments, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), and Progress in International Literacy Study (PIRLS). This prevents benchmarking against international standards and makes it more difficult to identify where issues stand and what their causes are. The concern about insufficient quality within our overall system is apparent but we can only speculate of the extent of the learning gap.
In sum we have a marked disparity of quality within our education system resulting in the Mathew effect; initially aligned with literacy and explained further in the education context, which in a nutshell states that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. So early successes in acquiring reading skills usually leads to later success in reading and children who fall behind in reading read less and so the gap between their peers increases, presenting an educational divide
In effect we have an educational divide transiting to a digital divide – those who have no access to computing, connectivity, communications tools and technology. The second digital divide is between those who have little or no competencies to benefit from tech use to those who do. The ‘one laptop per child’ (OLPC), $100 laptop marvels, was a start, but the overall perspective was that it is insufficient to dump hardware in schools, hoping for magic to happen. Preliminary results from the baseline surveys and impact evaluation of OLPC show large variations in student cognition and study habits across provinces, ethnic groups, socio-economic and parental education backgrounds.
To prevent learners being digital bystanders in a setting of the growth of MOOCs (massive online open courses), face-to-face learning needs to be successfully translated into online learning, identifying and applying a series of approaches from simple technological substitution to redefinitions of teaching. If educators are rooted in using technology to replace what they already do in the classroom, the mismatch is exemplified.
COVID-19 has amplified glaring shortcomings in our education system but it has also presented us with an opportunity for disruptive innovation. Disruption innovation in the education space requires better service models that are built around improved educational programme quality. Disruptive education intends to break with the established model, redefining quality in a much more complex world of knowledge.
True progress will come out of the current era of ‘massification’ into a new era of more relevant and personalized educational pathways. The disruption in terms of content needs to be content that enables educational experiences that are up to date, relevant, adaptive to the interests of the learner, adaptable by teachers and yet thorough. Innovation is one of the watchwords of the 21st century and technology is an essential ally when promoting disruptive education.
Reimagining education Sri Lanka by the Presidential Task Force on Education, a summary report to include an action plan has recently been drafted.
If the challenge is embraced, we see a unique opportunity for disruptive innovation within the education sector. Simply disruptive innovation transforms an existing market by introducing simplicity, accessibility, convenience and affordability. Disruptive innovation is the catalyst for bringing about equitable access to quality education and can spur much needed improvements in education. Disruptive innovation is the mechanism for bringing about a personalized education system.
COVID-19 has challenged the monoculture of mass-scale education. The climate has been unwittingly set for an education revolution which comes from below and hits the epicentre of need.