by Valerie Strauss, Washington Post:https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2020/10/29/what-school-looks-like-now-striking-pictures-around-world/
The hope last spring was that the massive disruption to schooling around the world caused by thecoronaviruspandemic would not last long — and by fall 2020 classrooms would be packed with children again, like they have been in the past.
That didn’t happen. Virtually nowhere are things back to normal, meaning before covid-19.
The pandemic has persisted, and, so in the United States and around the globe, students are going to school in ways they never did before until this year — in their homes; outside; in classrooms wearing masks or not wearing masks, and sitting apart from each other or very close; and sometimes behind plexiglass barriers.
Some kids are in school a few hours or a few days a week and spend the rest of the time home, while others never go in, or go in five days a week. Teachers sometimes work from otherwise empty classrooms, giving remote lessons to students not allowed back in school buildings because of covid-19 rates.
The statistics are grim: There have been more than 43 million cases of covid-19 worldwide with more than 1.1 million deaths, according to the World Health Organization. In the United States, there have been more than 8.5 million cases of covid-19 — more than half a million in the last week — and more than 225,000 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Fears of learning loss are high. Millions of children in the world’s poorest countries have not been back to school since the pandemic started and aren’t expected to ever return, especially girls. In the United States, concerns are highest for the neediest students, those who live in poverty, have special needs and are English Language Learners — but month after month of disrupted education will affect every child.
As coronavirus cases are rising in most U.S. states and many countries, educators are still trying to find ways to teach kids. Here are some pictures from around the world that show what school looks like in October 2020 in the grip of the worst pandemic in more than 100 years.
THE PHILIPPINES
A view of a facility where teachers conduct online tutorials with students in need of assistance through a hotline program, in Taguig City, south of Manila, on Oct. 12. Until a covid-19 vaccine is available, the Philippines has closed its classrooms and has imposed a model of remote learning to slow the spread of coronavirus (Francis R Malasig/EPA-EFE/REX/ Shutterstock).
INDIA
Students wearing protective face masks are seen inside a classroom of a government-run school after authorities ordered schools to reopen voluntarily for classes 9 to 12 in Gurugram, India, on Oct. 15 (Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters).
GERMANY
Classroom windows of the Freiherr-vom-Stein secondary school in the North Rhine-Westphalian city of Bonn, are opened for venting against the spread of covid-19 as school resumes with protective masks following the autumn holidays in Germany on Monday (Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters).
UNITED STATES
Students from Public School 11 take part in art and science classes at the High Line Park on Oct. 21 in New York. This fall, the High Line will serve as an outdoor classroom for four High Line partner schools, providing after school programming to a total of nearly 400 students from elementary through high school (Frank Franklin II/AP).
A kindergarten class socially distances while preparing to leave their classroom at Stark Elementary School on Oct. 21 in Stamford, Conn (John Moore/Getty Images).
ALGERIA
Students sit in a classroom while wearing face masks due to the covid-19 pandemic on the first day of school following the resumption of classes in the Algerian capital, Algiers, on Oct. 21 (Ryad Kramdi/AFP/Getty Images).
RUSSIA
A schoolteacher gives an online lesson for 10th-grade students in an empty classroom, in Moscow on Oct. 20. Rising covid-19 cases prompted Moscow officials to recommend the elderly quarantine at home and to order employers to have 30 per cent of their staff work remotely (Pavel Golovkin/AP).
A teacher wearing a face mask talks to fourth-grade students in a classroom in Moscow on Oct. 20 (Pavel Golovkin/AP).
ETHIOPIA
A teacher wearing a face mask conducts a lesson as students sit socially distanced in class at the Ethio Parents elementary and high school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on Monday after schools reopened following a seven-month closure (Amanuel Sileshi/AFP/Getty Images).
ARGENTINA
High school seniors attend classes at an improvised classroom in the yard of their school in Buenos Aires on Oct. 13 amid a lockdown against the spread of covid-19. The city government allowed students in their last year of high school to attend face-to-face classes under a strict sanitary protocol and in the schools' open spaces (Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images).
BRAZIL
View of a classroom with protective shields on the tables and safety distance at Santa Maria school in Sao Paulo, Brazil (Miguel Schincariol/Getty Images).
TUNISIA
A public health worker disinfects a classroom in an effort to prevent the spread of covid-19 in Tunis, on Oct. 2 (Mohamed Messara/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock).
JORDAN
Children on their way to their classroom at The United Nations Relief and Works Agency Nuzha Elementary Girls School, in Amman, Jordan, on Oct. 1 (Andre Pain/EPA-EFE/REX/ Shutterstock).
TURKEY
Students wearing face masks attend computer lessons in a classroom at Atatürk Vocational and Technical Anatolian High School in Ankara, Turkey, on Oct. 8 (Adem Altan/AFP/Getty Images).
SPAIN
A teacher demonstrates a robot that takes the temperature of children and displays it on a screen in a kindergarten in Madrid on Sept. 4. Spain was the first country in Western Europe to have more than 1 million confirmed covid-19 infections as the country of 47 million inhabitants struggles to contain a resurgence of the coronavirus (Paul White/AP).
BELGIUM
A teacher conducts an online class in an empty classroom at a secondary school in Izel, Province of Luxembourg, Belgium, on Tuesday. Secondary schools were closed for 15 days in Belgium on Wednesday amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic (Julien Warnand/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock).
ITALY
A teacher wears a face mask as students sit distanced from one another in a classroom at a school on the outskirts of Rome on Oct. 21 (Cecilia Fabiano/AP).
A teacher in Brescia, Italy, gives an online lesson from inside of an empty classroom of the Abba-Ballini high school, an institute that complies with the new regulations for distance learning amid the covid-19 pandemic on Monday (Filippo Venezia/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock).
HUNGARY
A Hungarian soldier wearing a hazmat suit disinfects a classroom in an elementary school in Szolnok, Hungary, on Monday (Janos Meszaros/AP).
NORTH MACEDONIA
First-graders attend their first class in the garden of the primary school in Skopje, Republic of North Macedonia, on Oct. 1. The government of North Macedonia reopened educational institutions to resume primary classes as part of a phased reopening of schools that were shut due to the coronavirus pandemic. Only the first-, second- and third-graders attend in-school classes, going in three shifts with no more than 20 pupils in the classroom (Georgi Licovski/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock).
The new learning economy is creating opportunities for universities to move on from the current focus on cutting costs, downsizing and job losses. Many universities appear stuck in a downward spiral, but now may be the time to offset this with new initiatives. Growth in the need for ongoing learning creates these opportunities.
Current education providers, as well as new entrants, have the chance to replicate the business models and innovative practices of Spotify, YouTube, Uber, Airbnb and other disruptors of other sectors. For example, we can envisage a platform provider brokering crowd-sourced production of education content. The resourcing of expertise from the higher education sector would provide access to new, scaleable and more widely available forms of academic content.
Significant disruption is imminent. We believe those with ambition will thrive in the emerging new learning economy. They will not only disrupt, but also generate new forms of demand and supply for education.
Old assumptions overturned
The education market has been stable for generations. This stability has relied on three assumptions.
First, knowledge gained through upfront education equips people to master the immediate and ongoing needs of work. As a basis of lifelong competence, the knowledge gained by novice professionals is expected to be sufficient for career entry and beyond.
Second, as we gain experience in our career, we only occasionally require new learning. Experience builds incrementally and continuously on upfront knowledge over time, leading to ever-increasing competence.
Third, there is no need for learning consciousness. In other words, the individual does not need to know how much they know, what else to learn, or how to unlearn.
These assumptions have driven government policy, student demand, employer practices and university business models. With changes to the future of work and digital disruption, these assumptions can now be seen as creating three systemic learning disorders:
the rate of innovation and knowledge development has accelerated, so our knowledge is out of date sooner
experience gained through repetitive work and professional practice is of less value in a world of changing practices and new requirements
our competence is something about which we have less consciousness or literacy – we increasingly don’t know what we don’t know, and not knowing how to learn and unlearn matters even more.
The 3 learning disorders explained
We illustrate these disorders in the three charts below. These plot the way knowledge, experience and competence develop over lifetimes, and the impacts of the emerging learning disorders.
The first chart uses a simplistic model of learning development consistent with the seminal work on self-efficacy in education of Caprara et al. The underlying idea is that competence is a combination of knowledge gained from learning and experience gained from working.
The traditional model of learning: knowledge and experience combine to form competence.Author provided
However, competence is not sufficient. Similar to our understanding of physical well-being (for example, is my blood pressure OK?) or financial well-being (will I have enough super?), we need consciousness about our competence. We suggest this is the basis of educational well-being. The pursuit of this goal gives rise to the new learning economy.
The first disorder, the knowledge disorder, shown in the chart below, captures the fact that the knowledge gained from formalised learning now decays more quickly. This happens due to faster rates of innovation and knowledge development within the periods that learning had been designed to serve.
The knowledge disorder: knowledge is decaying more quickly.Author provided
The rate at which knowledge grows and develops has overtaken our intention to create novice professionals with knowledge lasting a lifetime. One-off degrees that testify to a certain qualification at a certain point in time are no longer sufficient. The world requires educational well-being as much as it requires a healthy and prosperous population.
The third chart shows how the value of experiences we gain in the workplace has changed. No longer does cumulative experience lead to increasing competence. Experiences of old ways of doing things are becoming hindrances to ongoing competence in disrupted environments.
The experience disorder: experience can become unhelpful.Author provided
As a result, experience might matter less. Even worse, it could become counter-productive when unlearning established practices becomes increasingly difficult. In some situations, current knowledge has become more important than past knowledge with added experience.
We can see the impacts of this experience disorder in recent years. Large organisations have let “experienced” staff go, then hired new graduates with contemporary knowledge. NAB was criticised for doing this.
How should education respond to these changes?
We predict we will see on-demand, tailored and customised learning on new platforms. These may be ubiquitous and scaleable programs of what are being called micro-credentials. Google’s “career certificates” are one recent example.
We foresee a need to support continuously improving workplace experience through partnerships between educational well-being providers, maybe universities, and providers and receivers of workplace experiences, employers and employees. We see opportunities for new, platform-based, lifelong experience-management services.
The consciousness disorder arises from us being unaware of how change undermines competence. As US secretary of state, Donald Rumsfeld famously coined the term “unknown unknowns” in highlighting the danger in dealing with complex, fast-changing situations. In such a world, competence becomes more fragile, but we are not aware of it, which makes us vulnerable to disruption.
When Donald Rumsfeld spoke about ‘unknown unknowns’ he wasn’t talking about education, but the concept has emerged as a key issue for the sector.
We can foresee new services to help identify unconscious incompetence. Maybe automated online “health checks” of educational well-being will be made available to alumni. This service could be aligned with personalised access to new knowledge to address gaps.
We believe that responding to these three disorders, in these sorts of ways, provides a blueprint for a new learning economy. This learning economy is global and will scale up to satisfy the demands of citizens who are no longer served by our current model of education.
This evolution of education will not only present new directions for established education providers, but also attract new competitors. They might range from ed-tech start-ups with niche services, to others that see the global learning economy as a high-growth opportunity. Google is unlikely to be the last new challenger to the traditional university model.
EDITOR'S NOTE: I believe some Australian universities are considering this pathway. Let's see what happens.
Image: Reasons to be Cheerful
The menu at the diner where Amy Nelson likes to take a break from work is notable for its side dishes, including caramelized bananas, cinnamon apples and mushrooms and onions.
Each can feed an appetite in its own right. And together with an entrée, they add up to breakfast.
That’s much like the radically new way Nelson and a small number of other pioneering students have been experiencing college.
First they get a credential in a skill they need, then another and another. Each of these can quickly pay off on its own by helping to get a job, raise or promotion. And they can add up over time to a bachelor’s degree.
“Even if I chose not to finish, I would still have these pieces and I’d say, ‘Look what I’ve done,’ as opposed to, ‘I have two years of college’” but nothing to show for it, said Nelson, who works as an information technology consultant and hopes to move into an administrative role.
The concept, known variously as “stackable credentials” and “microcredentials,” she said, “almost seemed too good to be true.”
That’s one of the reasons it’s been painfully slow to take off: Consumers have trouble understanding it. Even after she began the program, Nelson didn’t entirely get it. Then she started earning high-demand industry certifications, in rapid fire, in subjects such as technical support, cloud technology and data analysis on her way to her bachelor’s degree in data management.
“I don’t think it really dropped on me until I sat down to update my resume,” she said. That’s when Nelson realized that each of those certifications had already increased her value on the job market.
Now the toll being taken on the economy by the coronavirus pandemic is giving microcredentials a huge burst of momentum. A lot of people will need more education to get back into the workforce, and they’ll need to get it quickly, at the lowest possible cost and in subjects directly relevant to available jobs.
The number of people in the same stackable information technology bachelor’s program as Nelson, offered by Western Governors University, has more than doubled since the start of the pandemic, from 4,410 in March to 10,711 in May, the online nonprofit says. The number taking microcredential programs from edX, the online course provider created by MIT and Harvard and the other major provider of this educational model, rose to 65,000 by the end of April, increasing 14-fold since early March alone.
“People are looking for shorter forms of learning during this time. They don’t know whether they have two months, three months. They’ve lost their jobs,” said Anant Agarwal, CEO of edX, which had the fortuitous timing of launching a new stackable bachelor’s degree in computer science in January and three more in May — in writing, marketing and data science — and trademarked the term “MicroBachelors” to describe them.
“For them the ability to earn a microcredential within a few months and improve their potential to get hired as we come out of Covid becomes much more important,” Agarwal said.
Surveys bear this out. A third of people who have lost their jobs in the pandemic, or worry that they will, say they will need more education to get new ones, the nonprofit Strada Education Network found.
They don’t have time to waste. Among lower-income adults, who have already been disproportionately affected, one in four say they have only enough savings to cover their expenses for three months if they’re laid off or get sick, the Pew Research Center reports.
“They don’t have two to three years of runway to put a pause on their life,” said Scott Pulsipher, president of nonprofit, online Western Governors University, or WGU, which has rolled out microcredential programs in states including Nevada that supply certificates and certifications on the way to degrees in information technology and health care.
“The affordability question is factoring in, too,” said Pulsipher; the cost per credit of WGU’s IT microcredential program comes to about $150 per credit and edX charges $166 per credit for its MicroBachelors degrees, compared to the average $594 it costs to earn a credit at a conventional in-person university.
“No one planned for or designed for a pandemic but it starts to heighten the differentiated value that comes from things like microcredentials,” Pulsipher said.
With microcredentials, students first get a credential in a skill they need, then another and another. Each of these can quickly pay off on its own by helping to get a job, raise or promotion. And they can add up over time to a bachelor’s degree. Credit: Nance Coleman / Flickr
Agarwal reports edX signed up as many learners in April as it did in all of last year — it now has 30 million — and a survey of new students found that 11 percent were already unemployed or furloughed and trying to learn skills that would help them get new jobs; edX has announced that it will offer a 30 percent discount on MicroBachelors programs to students who have lost their jobs because of the pandemic.
Even before the coronavirus hit, several providers were making a push for microcredentials. WGU and edX teamed up to create the program in which Nelson is enrolled. BYU Pathway Worldwide, an online spinoff of Brigham Young University-Idaho, has created stackable bachelor’s degrees in all of the subjects it offers. It calls them “Certificate First.”
That’s because students in these programs, and the others like it, first get certificates or certifications — short-term or industry-recognized qualifications — on their way to earning associate or bachelor’s degrees toward which the credits also count.
It’s an approach whose advocates say can help not only people who need credentials quickly to reenter the workforce, but solve a lot of problems that have been dragging down the success rates of college students seeking bachelor’s degrees.
“If you were designing [college] from scratch,” said BYU-Pathway Worldwide President Clark Gilbert, “this is how you’d do it.”
“And you wonder why we’re losing those populations in droves,” said Gilbert.
Earning credentials on the way provides a series of rewards that may make students more likely to persist. Even if they don’t, they’ll have something to fall back on that can help them get, or advance in, a job. Under the existing system, the Clearinghouse reports, 36 million have dropped out with no degrees or certificates to show for their time in college — but often student loan debt to repay.
Agarwal likens getting a bachelor’s degree in this new way to climbing Mount Everest by first hiking to the base camp at about 17,000 feet and getting acclimated to the altitude before attempting to achieve the summit.
Earning that first certificate, Agarwal said, is like reaching the base camp; stacking them into a bachelor’s degree, like getting to the top.
Early returns suggest receiving those rewards along the way is helping the so far limited number of people who have already tried microcredential programs — at edX, for example, they comprise about a tenth of all enrollment — climb more quickly.
At BYU-Pathway Worldwide, officials there report, the proportion of students who drop out between their first and second year has fallen more than 20 percentage points, from 35 percent to 14 percent, since the start of the Certificate First program.
“That early milestone — the early win — is so motivating,” Gilbert said. “Now they understand how education works. And if we lose someone, instead of being a dropout, they’ll have a certificate. Is it as good as having a bachelor’s degree? No, it’s not. But is it better than being a dropout? Yes, it is.”
That’s what student Brian Salazar experienced. “It’s very encouraging every time you pass one of the certification tests,” said Salazar, who has already earned certifications in Amazon AWS system operations administration, IT service management, Linux and several other industry cloud and network subjects.
An IT tech in Carson City, Nevada, Salazar had already gone to community college, but “I didn’t really have many job offers after getting my associate degree.” Once he started earning all of those certifications, “I started getting lots of offers,” even without the bachelor’s degree he expects to finish this year.
It’s no coincidence that the institutions furthest along with stackable credentials are nonconventional ones. Some traditional universities say they want to add them, too, but longstanding practices are hard to alter.
“Education hasn’t changed in hundreds of years, and whenever someone comes and says, ‘Hey, look, this is something cool,’ they don’t understand it, or they look with suspicion on it,” said Agarwal.
Some other universities are trying to embrace this change. Many have programs that already help students earn industry certifications in fields including accounting and manufacturing. The University System of Georgia in January launched what it calls a “nexus degree” — certifications that add up to associate degrees that can then add up to bachelor’s degrees. The financial and enrollment challenges they now face also are pushing colleges and universities to seek new sources of revenue.
Conventional institutions that are working to come up with stackable credentials, however, have been slowed down by accreditation requirements, occasional faculty resistance, the need for certification bodies and academic departments to collaborate and the difficulty of explaining to consumers how the process works.
There’s growing pressure on all colleges and universities to speed up the process of embedding certifications and certificates into bachelor’s degrees. That’s because, even before the coronavirus created new problems for them, traditional higher education institutions already appeared to be losing business to those quicker, cheaper credentials.
Shifting so much attention to vocational skills concerns some higher education experts.
Short-term certificates “can be a positive force in people’s lives,” said Chris Gallagher, vice chancellor for global learning opportunities at Northeastern University and author of College Made Whole: Integrated Learning for a Divided World. But suggesting it’s okay for learners to stop before they reach a bachelor’s degree, Gallagher said — just because they’ve already received some shorter-term credential — leaves them at a comparative disadvantage.
That’s because, while their income potential may be higher than if they quit with nothing, certificate holders who stop short of a bachelor’s degree may miss out on substantially greater earnings; a typical graduate with a bachelor’s degree will earn $1.19 million over his or her lifetime, compared to $855,000 for someone with an associate degree and $580,000 for a high school graduate, the economic think tank The Hamilton Project calculates.
Lifetime earnings estimates for certificate holders comparable to those for bachelor’s degree recipients are not available. Some research, including from the public policy think tank Third Way, has found much less financial benefit from them. The value of some certificates also fades over time as job demands change. Back at her breakfast in Henderson, Amy Nelson said friends have begun to ask her about the stackable credentials model. Their interest was piqued when she posted on Facebook how many certifications she’d already earned on the way to her degree.
“I had only been doing this for one year and I had all this stuff. It just blew my mind, so I wanted to share that,” she said. “To be the girl who was maybe not going to finish high school and now to have all these degrees, it’s sort of amazing.”
