Due to its role in addressing school closures amid the COVID-19 pandemic, emergency online education (EoE) is politicized and assumed to be the new normal in the post-crisis age. This chapter aims to answer the following questions: Should online education be the new normal for all, and if not, what should it be like? After briefly introducing how the world ensures educational continuity and distinguishing EoE from conventional online education, it examines education in the discourse of sustainable development goals, EoE from an equality-equity-justice perspective, and lessons learnt from EoE. It is argued that instead of OE, the new normal for all should be a package of solutions able to cater for learners of various types, minimizing inequality and inequity to allow as many people as possible to access quality education and hence enhance educational equity and justice. Issues related to the new normal are then discussed. The chapter concludes by calling on educational stakeholders to use this crisis as an opportunity to think about how to fix our already ailing educational system.
TopEmergency Online Education: A Makeshift Response To School Closures At A Global Scale
When human-to-human transmission of coronavirus was confirmed in January 22, 2020 (World Health Organization, 2020), the world was simply caught by surprise although reactions varied from one country to another. Some countries immediately took precautionary measures such as practicing social distancing, mandating mask wearing, working at home, closing high-risk venues and locations, isolating infected neighborhoods and even shutting down whole cities while others seemed to take a wait-and-see approach due to numerous reasons (Bozkurt et al., 2020).
Nevertheless, regardless of our efforts, all walks of life have been devastatingly hit, to varying extents, ever since the outbreak and education is among the most severely affected worldwide because millions and millions of families are involved. The magnitude and severity of the impact on education is echoed by the statistics from the United Nations. As of August, 2020,
The COVID-19 pandemic has created the largest disruption of education systems in history, affecting nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries and all continents. Closures of schools and other learning spaces have impacted 94 per cent of the world’s student population... (United Nations, 2020, p. 2).
When faced with this global disaster, governments, educational communities, educational institutions, and individual educators all over the world have wasted no time in mobilization to deal with school closures, which ‘has been nothing short of miraculous’ (Olcott, 2020). Indeed, the pandemic is unprecedented and our response is also unprecedented (Bates, 2020d). Measures taken by a particular country may be influenced by its human development level (United Nations Development Programme, 2019), albeit no evidence of consistent correlation between the two. Approaches in support of education continuity are many and various, ranging from no-tech, low-tech to high-tech solutions (United Nations, 2020), for example, from ‘old’ technologies used in earlier generations of distance education such as printed materials, telephone, radio and TV to high-tech such as digital devices, online platforms and mobile applications (Bozkurt et al., 2020; García & Weiss, 2020; McBurnie, 2020). Nevertheless, despite this diversity, online education has emerged seemingly as ‘a victor ludorum’ (Dhawan, 2020, p. 7) globally, both in developed and developing countries, obviously overshadowing other emergency solutions. In light of this predominance, this chapter will focus on the ‘online’ solution.
The response to global school closures due to the coronavirus emergency is proclaimed as ‘the largest-scale Internet-based education experiment in the human history’ (Zhang, 2020) or ‘the Great Online-Learning Experiment’ (Zimmerman, 2020), which has caused controversy over the legitimacy of its being labelled as online teaching, online learning, online education, or any other already existing terminology (for the sake of convenience, the term ‘online education’ will be adopted thereafter). Critics argue that this is not an online education experiment because online education has long been in practice and well researched, insisting that
it [online education during the COVID-19 pandemic] was legions of dedicated instructors doing their best to figure out how to deliver courses they had built for a physical classroom to a group of now-dispersed students, using whatever technology and often rudimentary pedagogical practices they (with help from their colleges' instructional designers and faculty development staff members) could master in a matter of days (Lederman, 2020).