Enabling learning in the current crisis may help improve the future of education

Since early this year, we’ve all seen the unfolding of a global pandemic that has disrupted our daily lives and created unprecedented levels of social isolation and behavior change for individuals, families, and societies. 

In addition to the public health and global economic implications, learning around the globe has been severely impacted. According to UNESCO, there are over 188 countries with nationwide school closures impacting over 1.5 billion students or 91% of the world’s students—and those numbers continue to rise. 

In response to these school closures, dozens of multilateral organizations, corporations, and nonprofits—including Code.org—have joined the COVID-19 Global Education Coalition organized by UNESCO. This coalition is mobilizing actors and resources to develop an effective and unified immediate response, as well as to coordinate actions to maximize impact, avoid overlap, and reach the disadvantaged. A good example of this is the identification of distance learning solutions for education authorities and administrators to use during these times of school closures. The coalition will also work on mid and long term solutions to build resiliency for future scenarios where education may be disrupted like it’s happening today.

More than ever, teachers are relying on us all to help them adapt to this new reality. At Code.org, alongside our global network of over 100 partners, we have been hard at work coming up with ways to support teachers, parents, and students as more and more students are continuing their studies from home.

Our Founder and CEO Hadi Partovi outlined how we are supporting our community during these school closures in a recent blog post. I want to highlight a couple of these initiatives in case they are helpful for the students in your country.

Learning computer science when schools are closed

For an introduction to computer science, one of the best resources to share with parents and students is the Hour of Code tutorials list. The page will display tutorials at the top which are translated into their chosen language and these tutorials are designed to be self-guided. For those looking for a more in-depth experience, we recommend either the CS Fundamentals Express Course or the Accelerated Intro to CS Course (depending on which one is translated into your language).

We’ve also put together a new page on our website with suggestions for parents whose children are learning from home due to school closures. This new page even includes ideas for students learning with just smartphones or for those who don’t have any devices or internet access, and will be translated into 30 languages in upcoming weeks.

Code Break

One of the new initiatives we’re trying in an effort to support students is a weekly online interactive classroom session to teach the basics of computer science. We’re calling it Code Break. It takes place each Wednesday at 10:00 am US Pacific Time. To join live, the timing works well for people in the Americas and even in parts of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Students in Asia and the Pacific can still access the recordings of past episodes on demand on the same page or on our YouTube channel, although we’ve been surprised to see students from India and even China join our sessions live each week. 

Future of Education

No matter how the education systems are dealing with providing continuous learning opportunities for their students while schools are closed, one thing is clear: this health crisis is forcing not only teachers and school administrators but also parents, students, and society as a whole to rethink the learning experience. 

I have no doubt that the post COVID-19 world of education will accelerate the need to change not only how our children learn but also what they learn. Parents and teachers may now be convinced about the need for adopting more equitable tools for distance learning and models that replace the traditional lectures for interactive and collaborative learning where the teacher serves more as a facilitator of individualized learning journeys. 

But our schools should teach the curriculum of the future, not just the curriculum of the past. In an increasingly digital world, learning computer science will help students better understand how the world works, in the same way that all of us studied biology, chemistry, or physics as foundational subjects to learn about life, matter, and movement. 

Many countries have already started this shift, both in form and content, and Code.org is working with many of them, and others that have not started yet, to help integrate computer science into the curriculum in a fun and engaging way. Once the current health crisis is behind us we shouldn't simply return to the status quo. We need innovative solutions to better support our students for what lies ahead. It is key for young people to gain the skills they will need to succeed in the future.