I was blown away a few years ago when I posted a job on a freelancing website for help creating a logo and the bulk of responders were in countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan. I learned afterward how these sites such as freelancer.com and 99designs have leveled the playing field to allow people in lower-income countries to compete across borders for these free-lancing postings by those in the developed world. Adapt this to education and you have platforms such as Coursera and Udemy, which allow anyone with an internet connection to take college-level courses for free. Just think of youtube as well, and how many skills anyone can learn from watching tutorials on it.
This gets you thinking. Can technology be used to provide a fantastic education for those without access to adequate schooling?
Virtual Classes: Access For Anyone
To say COVID was inconvenient would be the understatement of the century. But because of it, decades of technological leaps happened within the span of a couple of years. Previously unthinkable, work and schooling were conducted remotely over platforms such as Zoom and Google Classrooms. Yes, it was absolutely inconvenient for those of us with young children to sit through virtual classes together, but at the same time, it was pretty amazing to see how learning could be conducted in a virtual environment to the point that there are some preferring that route today.
You may not want all your classes done virtually, but there are certain benefits to this sort of learning. I saw some teachers create incredibly creative lectures they had pre-recorded for my children to watch during their remote lessons. If teachers collaborate to create the best lessons and presentations for children to use in this manner, would that be better than a regular classroom environment? Wouldn’t it also be possible to make such lectures and classes available to those children who don’t have access to teachers?
There could even be circumstances where certain children are not allowed to attend school because of something such as their gender, depending on where they live.
Learning Centers: Reshaping Schools
The obvious challenge for virtual learning to reach those in financial need, especially for those living in nations with extreme levels of poverty would be access to technological resources such as computers. Although it would require the restructuring of the way education is conducted in many places, if teachers were retrained to be coaches who would be accommodating a virtual lesson for a class, then the students wouldn’t all need a computer themselves in many cases. If there was work put in for a lesson plan and curriculum to be standardized within a region then students could expect to receive the same standard of education regardless of their individual school.
In this format, a school would be transformed into something akin to a learning center. Rather than having a single teacher be responsible for lesson planning and teaching all subjects to a class, they would be there to accommodate the lessons that have been pre-recorded. This would free the teachers up to help with assignments and also coach the children in need.
Most importantly though, the lessons would be standardized versus the status quo of teacher variability in most schools.
Closing the Gap: The Road Ahead
There’s a long way to go before classes in remote regions can be fully conducted remotely and online. Technology though is vastly improving and more importantly, it’s getting a lot cheaper. This means, those children in lower socioeconomic areas will be getting more and more access to important learning tools such as computers. This means we as educators can help provide them with lessons.
Just as web designers living in Bangladesh are able to compete for work globally simply because they’ve taught themselves useful skills such as web design and now have access to freelancing platforms, I believe students living in similar locations can also be provided with the same level of education available in the rest of the world. This can allow them to compete on the same level globally in terms of their knowledge. Although that’s not everything, I think it’s a good place to start.