Many countries closed their schools over the past four months after the outbreak of the Corona virus (Covid-19), which forced about 1.5 billion students to rely on distance education via the Internet until at least the end of the current school year, but what is the future for schoolchildren? ? And when will they return to their schools? Do they receive at the same level of education that the school provides? Although it is too early for researchers in the field of distance education to provide in-depth and accurate studies of its results worldwide, some problems have arisen and must be avoided by the ministries of education and educational institutions.
Food security
Governments in many countries provide school students with well-studied daily meals to meet their nutritional needs, in order to ensure the health of future generations, especially from low-income groups. For example, in the United States of America, the Ministry of Agriculture oversees the second largest food aid program in the country, the national program For lunch in schools, the program covers more than 100,000 public and private schools, and provides a daily lunch for free to more than 30 million children in more than 50 American states. For low-income families, but some experts worry that these meals will not reach students during this period due to transportation problems, and this applies to many countries. The results of that decrease are already beginning to appear, as a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine indicated that the health problems children are experiencing as a result of losing these meals include fatigue, the inability to focus, and their weak immune response.
Internet connection
Distance education requires fast connections to the Internet, especially since students enter the network almost simultaneously to follow their lessons, and not all countries have the necessary infrastructure to support this heavy use of the Internet, even in major developed countries. For example, one of the studies conducted after Schools closed that more than three million students in the United States of America do not have internet access in their homes, and revealed that 17% of families whose children are learning remotely lack laptop or office computers, and indicated that 18% of homes lack internet services.
Digital education
Are current technologies and policies developing the way children learn? Will students of the twenty-first century adapt to the major social and cultural changes brought about by the pandemic?
In fact, we are currently living at the level of most of the countries of the state of emergency in the direction towards distance education, but governments - according to the report of the Dubai Foundation for the Future on the future of education, which I published recently - must accelerate the approval of regulations and new platforms to accommodate the high demand for distance learning , And the start of regulatory bodies in the education sector to make several transformational changes in traditional education by developing innovative solutions that include training parents to teach. Many schools and traditional educational systems, according to the same report, did not take e-learning platforms seriously enough to use them in the educational process.
Technical options for distance education
YouTube is one of the most popular and widely used social media platforms among students, so teachers can create virtual educational classes on their channels on the site. They can also host 40-minute educational meetings on Zoom, record, save and review them with students.
For distance education to succeed in preparing students for the post-Coved-19 world, students must ensure that students have access to educational materials that stimulate their skills and help them adapt.
Several problems children are starting to experience, such as fatigue and the inability to concentrate.