AI-generated summary
The post-Covid-19 world presents significant global challenges, with education playing a pivotal role in addressing them. The pandemic has accelerated the digitalisation of classrooms and pedagogical reforms, pushing for rapid implementation of online and hybrid education models. Key challenges include bridging the digital divide, as many students lack internet access or appropriate devices, requiring initiatives to provide equitable technological resources. Online education, once a supplementary tool, is now becoming central, necessitating efficient mixed learning systems combining face-to-face and remote classes. Demotivation among students due to disrupted routines must be tackled by emphasizing the equal value of online learning. Additionally, fostering territorial cohesion within education policies and promoting lifelong learning are crucial to adapt to ongoing societal and economic changes.
Teachers will need to transform traditional methodologies to suit more flexible, demanding educational models, while restoring social interaction and teamwork remains essential for student development. The pandemic may also drive increased interest in health and scientific careers, compelling universities to prepare for higher demand. Schools must be agile in responding to potential virus outbreaks with swift protocols for transitions between in-person and remote learning. Finally, educational authorities must address the lost instructional time without overwhelming students, ensuring a balanced integration of missed content. The outcomes of upcoming academic events, such as university admissions, will serve as indicators of progress as communities strive to overcome these educational challenges.
The school year closes, paradoxically, with an uneven and timid opening of the classrooms that speaks to the challenges of education that we will have to face, in record time, for the next academic year.
The post-Covid-19 world is a challenge that humanity will have to face globally. To this end, education will play a key role. What was being implemented slowly but surely, such as the digitalisation of classrooms and the unstoppable reform of pedagogy, as well as the educational narrative, now have an upcoming and, in some cases, pressing implementation date. In any case: calm. The foundations are solid, the awareness of public administrations and the private sector of education is complete to a level that was impossible less than a year ago. Here are some of the challenges of education that we will have to face and how we will be able to solve them:
- Digital divide: Unfortunately, Covid-19 has exposed the painful fact that a sensitive part of the population does not have the internet or the necessary technology to receive distance classes. One of the challenges of the education of the future will be to find a way to provide each student with a connection and a suitable terminal (tablet or laptop). Experiences such as the digital conversion of schools carried out by the Junta de Extremadura in 2010, and which did not receive the necessary interest or support, could now be recovered to prevent a part of the student body from being left behind.
- Online education: Access to education from anywhere in the world; the possibility of being able to access any source of knowledge or to follow a class, despite being hundreds of kilometers away, is a scenario in which work has been carried out since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Although the exponential growth of technology had given a strong push, the truth is that it has been the pandemic that has made us look towards “online education” not as a complement, but as the basis of the entire educational model. For now, and starting in September, it is most likely that a mixed system will be opted for where face-to-face classes will alternate with following classes from home. Its implementation will have to be carried out in record time to face one of the challenges of education that we are facing.
- Demotivation: The lack of positive discipline of schedules, classes and the usual rhythm of homework, and, of course, the habit of following classes remotely, has caused many children and young people to show symptoms of demotivation. The challenge of education has to be to send a clear message to students that online classes are worth the same as face-to-face classes.
- Territorial cohesion: Although in Spain the ministries of education of the autonomous communities are the ones that articulate territorial education policy, it will be necessary to make an effort to unite the entire territory in a single direction to find, among all the public administrations, the most appropriate formulas and protocols for students, regardless of their place of residence.
- Life-long learning: Or, in other words, “never stop learning”. Yes, one of the main objectives of education systems will be to encourage their students to continue their education throughout their lives. As these almost three months of confinement have made clear to us, this is a world where economic and social models have faced a test of strength offered by the unpredictable. Training ourselves to adapt to changes in the labor market, reinvent ourselves or find our way in a world that changes at all times is very important.
- Educational methodology: Teachers will have to adapt what they have learned in these three months of non-face-to-face classes to apply it in the future and adapt classes to this liquid model in which the student will combine face-to-face classes with online classes. It is intuited that the new educational system will be more flexible, but also more demanding, where it will be necessary for teachers to alter traditional paradigms.
- Sociability: Despite the fact that confinement has isolated us from our closest circle of friends and family, it is necessary to reconnect all those relationships and, at the same time, reconnect with our groups of friends, co-workers, etc. Although we can no longer, for now, meet as often as we used to and that is natural in human beings.
It will be very important that the educational system re-educates us in teamwork as a basis for rediscovering that necessary social cohesion , putting individualism aside and knowing the advantages of teamwork. The fact that a group of students is far away does not mean that they cannot work collectively. - New vocations: It would not be surprising if careers such as medicine, nursing or all those related to health have an upturn in applications for access. The sciences, already booming, will also have a strong increase in these requests and, in general, any career related to programming.
Spanish universities will have to respond to this foreseeable increase in health vocations in the best possible way so that the centres do not suffer collapses. Japan’s plans to prioritize scientific careers for this year, a decision that Shinzo Abe’s government made long before the outbreak of Covic-19 in our lives, does not seem now, far from it, meaningless. - Responsiveness: Schools will have to be willing to provide quick and very effective solutions in much less time than now. For example: in the face of the unpredictability of the virus, rebounds or the creation of new sources of contagion cannot be ruled out. Educational centers, despite the measures that are going to be taken (taking students’ temperatures, masks, distancing), may suffer eventualities of this type. If they have to face immediate closures and the return of all students to their homes to spend another time of exclusively “online” classes,they will have to have the necessary express action protocols.
- A lost time?: The anomalous situation we are experiencing has prevented the normal educational development of an entire generation at a global level. Given the fact that millions of students around the world – from primary school to university education – have missed a year and are carrying an educational deficit, the system has to do everything in its power to mitigate this in the next academic year, trying not to burden students with more work or increase the syllabus. It seems simple, but the greatest concern of the administrations in Spain is to see how to interweave the knowledge of this current course and add, without traumas, the syllabus that circumstances left out of the “online” classes. It should not be forgotten, moreover, that teaching has been uneven, that the protocols were not very developed, if there were any, and that, therefore, it has not been possible to equate all schools and institutes in the same province, for example. Thinking in the most positive terms in this aspect and understanding that the deficit – if there is one – affects everyone, will help teachers a lot not to be in a hurry and students not to get frustrated.
After the delay of the dates of the EBAU, the old “selectivity”, we will be able to see a little more light in the development of the events of the next academic year. The success of these calls and their normal development will be a good thermometer to know how we face everything that awaits us. In the meantime, we can only wait for the plans that the autonomous communities are designing to work at full capacity before the end of the summer and to be able to overcome the challenges of education.
