Prof. Dr. Md. Mahmudul Hassan :
The UN declared Sustainable Development Goal – 4 (SDG-4) focuses only on education and its sustainable development. It aims at ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all. However, the COVID pandemic has tremendously affected its sustainable growth due to the lockdown and longtime closure of all educational institutions throughout the whole world. As a result, the educationists have suggested using the transformation process in Education with changing courses in its different levels.
Now, this is a common concern of the public that how the COVID-19 pandemic will alter the future of teaching and learning. In fact, we don’t know the extent to which COVID-19 will cause some proportion of schools, colleges, madrashas and universities to close down or merge. The most vulnerable of tuition-dependent institutions, particularly the ones already facing demographically driven declines in demand, will be the hardest hit by the pandemic.
The higher education future that COVID-19 will give us, is not entirely bleak. If we look far and hard enough into our postsecondary post-pandemic landscape, we can glimpse some reasons for optimism. Nowhere is the higher education post-COVID-19 future as positive or as interesting as in the realm of teaching and learning.
This is sure that our post-pandemic pedagogy will be altered across the whole education system into three basic requirements, such as;
1. Developing Blended Teaching-Learning Process: The remote teaching and learning efforts that all our teachers and students are now engaged in do not resemble what we think of as traditional online education. Quality online learning programs are high-input operations, requiring both time to develop and significant investments to run. Many of us are worried that the rapid shift to remote learning will tarnish the reputation of online education. This does not mean the COVID-19-necessitated move to universal remote teaching will be all bad for students’ learning. The biggest future benefits of virtual instruction will come after our teachers and students return to their physical classrooms.
The necessity of teaching and learning with asynchronous (black/white board, physical classroom etc) and synchronous (Zoom, teams, google meets etc) platforms will yield significant benefits when these methods are layered into face-to-face instruction. We will come back from COVID-19 with a much more widely shared understanding that digital tools are complements, not substitutes, for the intimacy and immediacy of face-to-face learning. Residential courses will be better for the practice that professors have received in moving content online, as precious classroom time will be more productively utilized for discussion, debate and guided practice.
2. Strategic priority of Online Education in every institution: Very few schools, colleges, madarashas and universities were doing absolutely nothing with online education in pre-COVID-19 time. There was wide variation, however, in the degree to which online education was central to an institution’s strategic planning. This will all change after COVID-19. In the future, every authority of the institutions will understand that online education is not only a potential source for new revenues. Instead, online education will be recognized as core to every school’s plan for institutional resilience and academic continuity.
This post-pandemic understanding will change how schools plan for, manage and fund online education. Gone will be the days when individual institutions will be able to go their own way with online education.
Previously decentralized and distributed online course development and student support functions will be centralized, subject to institutional planning and cross-campus governance. Management of online learning will be integrated into existing academic leadership structures and processes.
3. Rethinking of Existing and Potential OPM Partnerships System: If there is one big thing that COVID-19 has taught us; it is that it is a mistake to outsource core educational capabilities. Teaching and learning are core capabilities of every single institution of education.
Schools that invested in their learning design resources, by both hiring instructional designers and by reorganizing campus learning organizations into integrated units, were able to manage relatively efficiently the transition to COVID-19-required remote teaching and learning. We suspect that those schools that are dependent on online program management providers to run online programs had a harder time in making this transition. (Although in fairness, the research to support or contradict this hypothesis has not yet been done.)
What will happen more and more is that campus instructional design capabilities will be centralized and augmented. Schools will move away from all-inclusive revenue-share models for partnering with OPMs in developing and running online programs.
Finally, we may say that the COVID-19 has made the whole world as change maker in all sectors especially in the education and also the teaching learning methodologies have been transformed to the modern technology based pedagogical education. The authorities of all category institutions have easily transformed their operations to the teaching with blended learning process. This is the main change in the courses and modules for ensuring the quality education. So, it is obvious that the transformation of education is the most required thought and great strategic priority in this post pandemic situation for a sustainable development of the word.
(Dr. Mahmudul Hassan is Principal, Daffodil International School, Dhaka and President, Bangladesh Smart Education Network (BdSEN)
