The Future of Online Education is Shaped by the Covid-19 Crisis
I wrote an article on how the Covid-19 crisis has propelled hundreds of millions of students, teachers, parents in China to embrace learning online a week ago. But now it is a full-blown global phenomenon. According to UNESCO, there are 850 million students in more than 100 countries who cannot go to school and have to take classes online as of March 19. Some lessons that we learned in China can be valuable for the global community.
First of all, some disadvantaged communities might not have the necessary digital devices or network connection to access online education. In this crisis, it becomes clearer than ever that access to the Internet is essential to everyday life and should be a basic public service. China also benefited from the collaboration between public institutions and private Internet giants like Alibaba and Tencent, who are able to leverage their massive digital infrastructure to serve the exploding needs of online education. When the new semester started in early February, Tencent Cloud Classroom was where more than 700,000 elementary and middle school students in Wuhan had their first class. Alibaba's DingTalk is now used by more than 20,000 schools to offer live online classes and maintain daily interaction between teachers and students.
Online education is not just about the students, their teachers and parents are facing unprecedented challenges too. Even if some parents can work from home and watch their children, they struggle to prepare all the digital tools and manage their children's behavior. In China's biggest mobile social network WeChat, there are already many chat groups and public accounts (accounts that publish content) that form communities of parents who have children of similar age. Now, these online communities offer parents a must-have channel to release their anxiety and look for advice.
It is the first time many teachers from public schools tried teaching online. They are realizing that teaching in a virtual classroom is very different from in a real classroom. For example, in a virtual classroom they cannot adjust the tempo of their teaching by reading the reaction of their students or control the attention of their students by walking closer to them. But fortunately, in China there are quite many private online education ventures who have experimented with different ways to overcome the problems of online education. For example, the leading online education venture Xueersi has created the "double-teacher" format, in which one senior teacher does the lecturing while another junior teacher focuses on interacting with students. There are also artificial intelligence tools that help teachers to evaluate homework or search for references.
The live-broadcasting and short video platforms are also entering the field of online education. Douyin (known as TikTok outside of China) , the short video platform centered on entertainment, has been trying to attract institutions and teachers to offer live or recorded courses on its platform since February. Douyin's experience in gamified interaction and content personalization might bring inspiration to the format of online education soon.
In general, the education system in China was able to boost its online capability in the past two months by leveraging the digital infrastructure of private Internet giants and drawing upon new forms of online interaction that emerged in the past several years. But what we are seeing is unprecedented: hundreds of millions of new users from students, teachers to parents are entering the ecosystem of online education. Serving their needs is challenging, but the content, activities, and feedbacks that they are contributing will surely incite a new wave of innovation in online education. (The views expressed in this post are mine alone and do not reflect the views of my employer)
Here is my previous article on online education: