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Under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, education is facing unprecedented challenges. These include internet inequalities, online course challenges for students with visual and hearing impairments as well as the poor and vulnerable students, high dropout rates, lack of online teaching skills, and so on. These challenges further exacerbate the pre-existing educational problems under Pandemic. How to deal with these challenges is a common concern for many countries, educational institutions, teachers, students and parents, and I will propose three strategies to address them below.
First, Strengthen the Training of Teachers’ Knowledge and Skills in Online Teaching and Provide Psychological Counseling
Only a handful of teachers have previous experience of teaching online before Pandemic, so for the majority of teachers, online teaching is a new endeavor and challenge. This challenge is even greater for those teachers who have little use of online tools. Therefore, it requires schools to equip all teachers with the knowledge and skills to teach online through customized training. This training needs to be both generalized and customized. In other words, each teacher’s situation is both similar and different, which means that the school’ s training department is expected to integrate different types of skills training to provide teachers with more options. In addition, the COVID-19 Pandemic places varying degrees of stress on teachers, some of whom experience psychological problems due to work and family pressures, which have a direct impact on their health and the quality of their teaching. As such, schools should be able to provide teachers with free online psychological counseling services to relieve their stress.
Second, Support Different Types of Students in Various Ways
Not only the teachers but also the students face many problems and challenges during COVID-19 Pandemic, and their specific situations are more complex. Different types of students have different kinds of challenges. First, to mitigate the effects of the barriers that online classes pose for visually and hearing-impaired students. For hearing-impaired students, teachers will be able to alleviate the problems caused by their hearing impairment through the use of captioning, automated captioning software, chat boxes, online forums, and more. For visually impaired students, a range of software designed for visually impaired students can be utilized in online lessons, including Voiceover, Bravo, Bravo, Braille keyboards, NVDA Screen Reader, JAWS, Audible, Dragon NaturallySpeaking, etc.
Secondly, help for poor students. Many students around the world do not have access to internet and electronic devices. In order to solve this problem, it requires the full cooperation of the government and the telecommunication sectors to provide these students with assistance in the form of materials, electronic equipment and free Internet access. Finally, support for these vulnerable students. As a result of COVID-19 Pandemic, many students in poor countriesare dropping out of school. In some countries and regions, female students who have dropped out of school have become victims of child marriage, early pregnancy and gender-based violence. This requires legal, governmental and international efforts to help them out.
Third, Use of Educational Social Networking Websites to Engage in Educational Discussions and Sharing
The two coping strategies I have mentioned above are important in addressing the challenges posed by COVID-19 Pandemic. However, the solution to the challenges requires not only measures but also a wide-ranging, real-time and continuous discussion on education. Teachers, students and parents need to communicate and share their experiences with each other. It is through sharing and discussion that new problems can be identified, new strategies can be employed, and new ideas can be drawn upon to facilitate problem-solving. When I searched online for social networking websites for education, I found that most of them emphasize one stage or one type of education but lack a platform that includes all stages and types of education.
Eventually, I found https://www.pedagogism.com, a website that stands out to me. It’s a non-profit educational social networking website with a user-friendly design that covers all stages of education, from preschool to higher education. In addition, it covers a wide range types of education, such as Online Education, EducationDuring COVID-19 Pandemic, Happiness Education, Special Education, Parenting Education, Education for Sustainable Development, etc. It aims to provide a free platform for teachers, students, parents and the general public to discuss education, so as to raise questions, identify problems and solve them in a broad discussion on education, thereby promoting the success of education and serving the public interest.In addition, this website includes academic research, and it aims to promote the development of academic research in education.
In short, the world of education faces unprecedented challenges during COVID-19 Pandemic. In order to address these challenges, it is not only necessary for the government and education authorities to implement strategies to solve them, but also for different groups, including teachers, students, parents and the general public, to participate in the education debate, so that they can find and solve problems through collective wisdom. In this way, the education development will be promoted.
