Beyond the Horizon
Beyond the horizon: what happens to distance education after Covid-19? It probably beats most other models…
Students around the world have enrolled themselves in ‘Zoom University’ (if you are one of the few people who doesn’t already know, ‘Zoom’ is a video-conference software widely used by universities and schools during the lockdown) on Facebook; 600,000 young people from all around the globe gather in Facebook group ‘Zoom Memes for Self Quaranteens’ to share their stories during the quarantine and their experiences of distance education; the paradox of pain and pleasure; the clash of a longed dreamed of prolonged winter holiday and the anxiety about the fact it has gone on so long, (“er hello dream, can you stop now?) and the stories of primary and middle school pupils flooding into the app stores to give a zero star rating to the ‘Dingtalk’, the Chinese communication platform used by many schools during the lockdown.
During the global health pandemic of COVID-19, that has forced the lockdown of half of the world, distance education became the only possibility for many. When physically constrained from the access to what most of us consider the ‘normal’ education resources and school environments like the classroom, library, office hours and even just small chats with the professors and classmates, unsettled teenagers use memes to humorously speak out their dissatisfaction of the quality of distance education. Teachers also complain (no, really?) about the difficulty of conducting teaching online, sometimes, but telling not always, perceiving a decrease of teaching quality. I started to wonder: maybe it won’t be that bad if we do it correctly? Maybe it can even be a solution for many without access to quality education at all?
A while ago, upon visiting my Dad’s hometown, a remote village in Nanping, China, I went to see the local school, Yeyuan Hamlet Primary School, where my Dad has spent his childhood. I saw a shockingly different image from what I imagined primary school education would be. The disparity between the education quality of a rural school, with only three teachers and twenty students, and the one I attended in an urban area, became increasingly apparent.
Although a 9-year education is compulsory in China, 30% of students in rural areas are not able to graduate from middle school, in comparison to 0% to that of their counterparts in urban areas. Only 3% and 2% of rural students manage to complete senior high and college respectively, compared to 63% and 54% for students living in urban areas (Zhang et el, 199-200).
Yeyuan school has two classes. Grade 1 to grade 3 to form one class, and grade 4 to grade 6 form another class. They only offer Chinese and math classes due to a lack of teachers. This is mainly because of its remote location and inconvenience of transportation, as suggested by the former head of the school, Fan Mingshen, who moved to an urban school later on.
However, Yeyuan is not the only very extreme case. 35.8 thousand rural schools with less than 10 students in China also face the same problem (Wu, 11). Because of the small size and the shortage of qualified teachers, they are forced to merge students from different grades into one class, offering limited classes or teaching subjects in which they have no training or expertise (McQuaide, 3). For those schools, combined instruction is usually their only feasible practice. With the limited number of teachers and students, the schools combine different grades together in one class just like Yeyuan. A teacher often needs to teach 2 or even more grades in a class and divide the class time to teach different grades.
The current practice is far from efficient, but distance education could be a solution to the problem. A study of rural education in China has demonstrated that distance learning benefits students’ study ability, independent thinking, imagination, creativity, and hand-on ability to different degrees (McQuaide, 7). With different forms of distance education as the supplement, students would be able to have longer class time, higher teaching quality and more diverse subject choices. That is the hope.
The idea is there, and in reality, the government is the one to decide. But even if the government decides to implement it, whether it would turn out to solve the problem, in reality, it is not that simple. We still need to look into how to solve technical difficulties and how to implement the system efficiently, in the same way as many of us experience right now with Zoom.
But at least the current Covid-19 crisis has given rise to that most rare of commodities; hope.
References
Mcquaide, Shiling. “Making Education Equitable in Rural China through Distance Learning.” The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, vol. 10, no. 1, 2009, doi:10.19173/irrodl.v10i1.590.
Wu, Zhihui. “2017 Report of the Education in China's Rural Areas.” China Teacher, 27 Dec. 2017.
Zhang, Dandan, et al. “Education Inequality between Rural and Urban Areas of the People's Republic of China, Migrants’ Children Education, and Some Implications.” Asian Development Review, vol. 32, no. 1, Mar. 2015, pp. 196–224., doi:10.1162/adev_a_00042.