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A Better Education for All During—and After—the COVID-19 Pandemic

Research from the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and its partners shows how to help children learn amid erratic access to schools during a pandemic, and how those solutions may make progress toward the Sustainable Development Goal of ensuring a quality education for all by 2030.

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By Radhika Bhula & John Floretta Oct. 16, 2020

Five years into the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the world is nowhere near to ensuring a quality education for all by 2030. Impressive gains in enrollment and attendance over recent decades have not translated into corresponding gains in learning. The World Bank’s metric of "learning poverty," which refers to children who cannot read and understand a simple text by age 10, is a staggering 80 percent in low-income countries .

The COVID-19 crisis is exacerbating this learning crisis. As many as 94 percent of children across the world have been out of school due to closures. Learning losses from school shutdowns are further compounded by inequities , particularly for students who were already left behind by education systems. Many countries and schools have shifted to online learning during school closures as a stop-gap measure. However, this is not possible in many places, as less than half of households in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have internet access.  

Many education systems around the world are now reopening fully, partially, or in a hybrid format, leaving millions of children to face a radically transformed educational experience. As COVID-19 cases rise and fall during the months ahead, the chaos will likely continue, with schools shutting down and reopening as needed to balance educational needs with protecting the health of students, teachers, and families. Parents, schools, and entire education systems—especially in LMICs—will need to play new roles to support student learning as the situation remains in flux, perhaps permanently. As they adjust to this new reality, research conducted by more than 220 professors affiliated with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and innovations from J-PAL's partners provide three insights into supporting immediate and long-term goals for educating children.

1. Support caregivers at home to help children learn while schools are closed . With nearly 1.6 billion children out of school at the peak of the pandemic, many parents or caregivers, especially with young children, have taken on new roles to help with at-home learning. To support them and remote education efforts, many LMICs have used SMS, phone calls, and other widely accessible, affordable, and low-technology methods of information delivery. While such methods are imperfect substitutes for schooling, research suggests they can help engage parents in their child’s education and contribute to learning , perhaps even after schools reopen.

Preliminary results from an ongoing program and randomized evaluation in Botswana show the promise of parental support combined with low-technology curriculum delivery. When the pandemic hit, the NGO Young 1ove was working with Botswana's Ministry of Education to scale up the  Teaching at the Right Level approach to primary schools in multiple districts. After collecting student, parent, and teacher phone numbers, the NGO devised two strategies to deliver educational support. The first strategy sent SMS texts to households with a series of numeracy “problems of the week.” The second sent the same texts combined with 20-minute phone calls with Young 1ove staff members, who walked parents and students through the problems. Over four to five weeks, both interventions significantly improved learning . They halved the number of children who could not do basic mathematical operations like subtraction and division. Parents became more engaged with their children's education and had a better understanding of their learning levels. Young 1ove is now evaluating the impact of SMS texts and phone calls that are tailored to students’ numeracy levels.

In another example, the NGO Educate! reoriented its in-school youth skills model to be delivered through radio, SMS, and phone calls in response to school closures in East Africa. To encourage greater participation, Educate! called the students' caregivers to tell them about the program. Their internal analysis indicates that households that received such encouragement calls had a 29 percent increase in youth participation compared to those that did not receive the communication.

In several Latin American countries , researchers are evaluating the impact of sending SMS texts to parents on how to support their young children who have transitioned to distance-learning programs. Similar efforts to support parents and evaluate the effects are underway in Peru . Both will contribute to a better understanding of how to help caregivers support their child’s education using affordable and accessible technology.

Other governments and organizations in areas where internet access is limited are also experimenting with radio and TV to support parents and augment student learning. The Côte d’Ivoire government created a radio program on math and French for children in grades one to five. It involved hundreds of short lessons. The Indian NGO Pratham collaborated with the Bihar state government and a television channel to produce 10 hours of learning programming per week, creating more than 100 episodes to date. Past randomized evaluations of such “edutainment” programs from other sectors in Nigeria , Rwanda , and Uganda suggest the potential of delivering content and influencing behavior through mass media, though context is important, and more rigorous research is needed to understand the impact of such programs on learning.

2. As schools reopen, educators should use low-stakes assessments to identify learning gaps. As of September 1, schools in more than 75 countries were open to some degree. Many governments need to be prepared for the vast majority of children to be significantly behind in their educations as they return—a factor exacerbated by the low pre-pandemic learning levels, particularly in LMICs . Rather than jumping straight into grade-level curriculum, primary schools in LMICs should quickly assess learning levels to understand what children know (or don’t) and devise strategic responses. They can do so by using simple tools to frequently assess students, rather than focusing solely on high-stakes exams, which may significantly influence a child’s future by, for example, determining grade promotion.

Orally administered assessments—such as ASER , ICAN , and Uwezo —are simple, fast, inexpensive, and effective. The ASER math tool, for example, has just four elements: single-digit number recognition, double-digit number recognition, two-digit subtraction, and simple division. A similar tool exists for assessing foundational reading abilities. Tests like these don’t affect a child’s grades or promotion, help teachers to get frequent and clear views into learning levels, and can enable schools to devise plans to help children master the basics.

3. Tailor children's instruction to help them master foundational skills once learning gaps are identified. Given low learning levels before the pandemic and recent learning loss due to school disruptions, it is important to focus on basic skills as schools reopen to ensure children maintain and build a foundation for a lifetime of learning. Decades of research from Chile, India, Kenya, Ghana, and the United States shows that tailoring instruction to children’s’ education levels increases learning. For example, the Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL) approach, pioneered by Indian NGO Pratham and evaluated in partnership with J-PAL researchers through six randomized evaluations over the last 20 years, focuses on foundational literacy and numeracy skills through interactive activities for a portion of the day rather than solely on the curriculum. It involves regular assessments of students' progress and is reaching more than 60 million children in India and several African countries .

Toward Universal Quality Education

As countries rebuild and reinvent themselves in response to COVID-19, there is an opportunity to accelerate the thinking on how to best support quality education for all. In the months and years ahead, coalitions of evidence-to-policy organizations, implementation partners, researchers, donors, and governments should build on their experiences to develop education-for-all strategies that use expansive research from J-PAL and similar organizations. In the long term, evidence-informed decisions and programs that account for country-specific conditions have the potential to improve pedagogy, support teachers, motivate students, improve school governance, and address many other aspects of the learning experience. Perhaps one positive outcome of the pandemic is that it will push us to overcome the many remaining global educational challenges sooner than any of us expect. We hope that we do.

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Learning in times of COVID-19: Students’, Families’, and Educators’ Perspectives

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The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound and sudden impact on many areas of life; work, leisure time and family alike. These changes have also affected educational processes in formal and informal learning environments. Public institutions such as childcare settings, schools, universities and further ...

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How to Write About Coronavirus in a College Essay

Students can share how they navigated life during the coronavirus pandemic in a full-length essay or an optional supplement.

Writing About COVID-19 in College Essays

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Experts say students should be honest and not limit themselves to merely their experiences with the pandemic.

The global impact of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, means colleges and prospective students alike are in for an admissions cycle like no other. Both face unprecedented challenges and questions as they grapple with their respective futures amid the ongoing fallout of the pandemic.

Colleges must examine applicants without the aid of standardized test scores for many – a factor that prompted many schools to go test-optional for now . Even grades, a significant component of a college application, may be hard to interpret with some high schools adopting pass-fail classes last spring due to the pandemic. Major college admissions factors are suddenly skewed.

"I can't help but think other (admissions) factors are going to matter more," says Ethan Sawyer, founder of the College Essay Guy, a website that offers free and paid essay-writing resources.

College essays and letters of recommendation , Sawyer says, are likely to carry more weight than ever in this admissions cycle. And many essays will likely focus on how the pandemic shaped students' lives throughout an often tumultuous 2020.

But before writing a college essay focused on the coronavirus, students should explore whether it's the best topic for them.

Writing About COVID-19 for a College Application

Much of daily life has been colored by the coronavirus. Virtual learning is the norm at many colleges and high schools, many extracurriculars have vanished and social lives have stalled for students complying with measures to stop the spread of COVID-19.

"For some young people, the pandemic took away what they envisioned as their senior year," says Robert Alexander, dean of admissions, financial aid and enrollment management at the University of Rochester in New York. "Maybe that's a spot on a varsity athletic team or the lead role in the fall play. And it's OK for them to mourn what should have been and what they feel like they lost, but more important is how are they making the most of the opportunities they do have?"

That question, Alexander says, is what colleges want answered if students choose to address COVID-19 in their college essay.

But the question of whether a student should write about the coronavirus is tricky. The answer depends largely on the student.

"In general, I don't think students should write about COVID-19 in their main personal statement for their application," Robin Miller, master college admissions counselor at IvyWise, a college counseling company, wrote in an email.

"Certainly, there may be exceptions to this based on a student's individual experience, but since the personal essay is the main place in the application where the student can really allow their voice to be heard and share insight into who they are as an individual, there are likely many other topics they can choose to write about that are more distinctive and unique than COVID-19," Miller says.

Opinions among admissions experts vary on whether to write about the likely popular topic of the pandemic.

"If your essay communicates something positive, unique, and compelling about you in an interesting and eloquent way, go for it," Carolyn Pippen, principal college admissions counselor at IvyWise, wrote in an email. She adds that students shouldn't be dissuaded from writing about a topic merely because it's common, noting that "topics are bound to repeat, no matter how hard we try to avoid it."

Above all, she urges honesty.

"If your experience within the context of the pandemic has been truly unique, then write about that experience, and the standing out will take care of itself," Pippen says. "If your experience has been generally the same as most other students in your context, then trying to find a unique angle can easily cross the line into exploiting a tragedy, or at least appearing as though you have."

But focusing entirely on the pandemic can limit a student to a single story and narrow who they are in an application, Sawyer says. "There are so many wonderful possibilities for what you can say about yourself outside of your experience within the pandemic."

He notes that passions, strengths, career interests and personal identity are among the multitude of essay topic options available to applicants and encourages them to probe their values to help determine the topic that matters most to them – and write about it.

That doesn't mean the pandemic experience has to be ignored if applicants feel the need to write about it.

Writing About Coronavirus in Main and Supplemental Essays

Students can choose to write a full-length college essay on the coronavirus or summarize their experience in a shorter form.

To help students explain how the pandemic affected them, The Common App has added an optional section to address this topic. Applicants have 250 words to describe their pandemic experience and the personal and academic impact of COVID-19.

"That's not a trick question, and there's no right or wrong answer," Alexander says. Colleges want to know, he adds, how students navigated the pandemic, how they prioritized their time, what responsibilities they took on and what they learned along the way.

If students can distill all of the above information into 250 words, there's likely no need to write about it in a full-length college essay, experts say. And applicants whose lives were not heavily altered by the pandemic may even choose to skip the optional COVID-19 question.

"This space is best used to discuss hardship and/or significant challenges that the student and/or the student's family experienced as a result of COVID-19 and how they have responded to those difficulties," Miller notes. Using the section to acknowledge a lack of impact, she adds, "could be perceived as trite and lacking insight, despite the good intentions of the applicant."

To guard against this lack of awareness, Sawyer encourages students to tap someone they trust to review their writing , whether it's the 250-word Common App response or the full-length essay.

Experts tend to agree that the short-form approach to this as an essay topic works better, but there are exceptions. And if a student does have a coronavirus story that he or she feels must be told, Alexander encourages the writer to be authentic in the essay.

"My advice for an essay about COVID-19 is the same as my advice about an essay for any topic – and that is, don't write what you think we want to read or hear," Alexander says. "Write what really changed you and that story that now is yours and yours alone to tell."

Sawyer urges students to ask themselves, "What's the sentence that only I can write?" He also encourages students to remember that the pandemic is only a chapter of their lives and not the whole book.

Miller, who cautions against writing a full-length essay on the coronavirus, says that if students choose to do so they should have a conversation with their high school counselor about whether that's the right move. And if students choose to proceed with COVID-19 as a topic, she says they need to be clear, detailed and insightful about what they learned and how they adapted along the way.

"Approaching the essay in this manner will provide important balance while demonstrating personal growth and vulnerability," Miller says.

Pippen encourages students to remember that they are in an unprecedented time for college admissions.

"It is important to keep in mind with all of these (admission) factors that no colleges have ever had to consider them this way in the selection process, if at all," Pippen says. "They have had very little time to calibrate their evaluations of different application components within their offices, let alone across institutions. This means that colleges will all be handling the admissions process a little bit differently, and their approaches may even evolve over the course of the admissions cycle."

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A Year After Coronavirus: An Inclusive ‘New Normal’

Six months into a new decade, 2020 has already been earmarked as ‘the worst’ year in the 21st century. The novel coronavirus has given rise to a global pandemic that has destabilized most institutional settings. While we live in times when humankind possesses the most advanced science and technology, a virus invisible to the naked eye has massively disrupted economies, healthcare, and education systems worldwide. This should serve as a reminder that as we keep making progress in science and research, humanity will continue to face challenges in the future, and it is upon us to prioritize those issues that are most relevant in the 21st century.

Even amidst the pandemic, Space X, an American aerospace manufacturer, managed to become the first private company to send humans to space. While this is a tremendous achievement and prepares humanity for a sustainable future, I feel there is a need to introspect the challenges that we are already facing. On the one hand, we seem to be preparing beyond the 21st century. On the other hand, heightened nationalism, increasing violence against marginalized communities and multidimensional inequalities across all sectors continue to act as barriers to growth for most individuals across the globe. COVID-19 has reinforced these multifaceted economic, social and cultural inequalities wherein those in situations of vulnerability have found it increasingly difficult to get quality medical attention, access to quality education, and have witnessed increased domestic violence while being confined to their homes. 

Given the coronavirus’s current situation, some households have also had time to introspect on gender roles and stereotypes. For instance, women are expected to carry out unpaid care work like cooking, cleaning, and looking after the family. There is no valid reason to believe that women ought to carry out these activities, and men have no role in contributing to household chores. With men having shared household chores during the lockdown period, it gives hope that they will realize the burden that women have been bearing for past decades and will continue sharing responsibilities. However, it would be naïve to believe that gender discrimination could be tackled so easily, and men would give up on their decades' old habits within a couple of months. Thus, during and after the pandemic, there is an urgent need to sensitize households on the importance of gender equality and social cohesion.

Moving forward, developing quality healthcare systems that are affordable and accessible to all should be the primary objective for all governments. This can be done by increasing expenditure towards health and education and simultaneously reducing expenditure on defence equipment where the latter mainly gives rise to an idea that countries need to be prepared for violence. There is substantial evidence that increased investment in health and education is beneficial in the long-term and can potentially build the basic foundation of a country. 

If it can be established that usage of nuclear weapons, violence and war are not solutions to any problem, governments (like, for example, Costa Rica) could move towards disarmament of weapons and do their part in building a more peaceful planet that is sustainable for the future. This would further promote global citizenship wherein nationality, race, gender, caste, and other categories, are just mere variables and they do not become identities of individuals that restrict their thought process. The aim should be to build responsible citizens who play an active role in their society and work collectively in helping develop a planet that is well-governed, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable.

 ‘A year after Coronavirus’ is still an unknown, so I think that our immediate focus should be to tackle the complex problems that have emerged from the pandemic so that we make the year after coronavirus one which highlights recovery and acts as a pathway to fresh beginnings. While there is little to gain from such a fatal cause, it is vital that we also use it to make the ‘new normal’ in favour of the environment and ensure that no one is left behind.   

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Top 10 risks and opportunities for education in the face of COVID-19

Subscribe to the center for universal education bulletin, rebecca winthrop rebecca winthrop director - center for universal education , senior fellow - global economy and development @rebeccawinthrop.

April 10, 2020

March 2020 will forever be known in the education community as the month when almost all the world’s schools shut their doors. On March 1, six governments instituted nationwide school closures due to the deadly coronavirus pandemic, and by the end of the month, 185 countries had closed, affecting 90 percent of the world’s students. The speed of these closures and the rapid move to distance learning has allowed little time for planning or reflection on both the potential risks to safeguard against and the potential opportunities to leverage.

With every crisis comes deep challenges and opportunities for transformation— past education crises have shown that it is possible to build back better. To help me reflect on what some of these challenges and opportunities may be, I recently spoke to Jim Knight , current member of the House of Lords, head of education for Tes Global, and former U.K. schools minister; and to Vicki Phillips , current chief of education at the National Geographic Society and a former U.S. superintendent of schools and state secretary of education. They provide perspectives from inside and outside of government in the U.K. and U.S., though their insights can likely help the many countries worldwide struggling to continue education during the pandemic.

Risks and challenges

#1: Distance learning will reinforce teaching and learning approaches that we know do not work well.

Jim: Many countries are shifting to distance learning approaches, whether through distributing physical packets of materials for students or through using technology to facilitate online learning. And there are real risks because many of these approaches can be very solitary and didactic when you’re just asking students to sit and quietly watch videos, read documents online, or click through presentations—that’s really dull. The worst form of learning is to sit passively and listen, and this may be the form that most students will receive during school closures. It serves no one well, especially those who are the furthest behind.

#2: Educators will be overwhelmed and unsupported to do their jobs well.

Vicki: Teachers had little or no notice about their schools closing and shifting to online learning—this can be challenging for anybody. They’ve shared that they are overwhelmed with all sorts of materials and products, and we are seeing educators begin to push back and request help filtering through all the resources to find those that are quality.

At the same time, teachers are just like the rest of us in that they are experiencing this strange new world as mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. They are trying to deal with their individual lives and take care of their kids and find new ways to make sure that learning continues.

#3: The protection and safety of children will be harder to safeguard.

Jim: In the U.K., we have stringent processes around checking who has access to children during school, in after-school clubs and sports. Schools have safeguard measures in place to ensure that predators toward children, such as pedophiles, can’t access young people. Now, once you move to online learning in a home environment, you can’t safeguard against this. People have to be mindful about the design of online learning so that bad individuals don’t get to children outside of their home.

#4: School closures will widen the equity gaps.

Vicki: Over the last decade or so, progress has been made in the number of students who have access to devices and connectivity, making this move to online learning possible. At the same time, not every child has access to digital devices or internet connectivity at home, and we need to ensure those kids get access to learning resources as well. This means that learning resources need to be available on every kind of device and it means, for kids who don’t have access, we still need to find a way to reach them.

#5: Poor experiences with ed-tech during the pandemic will make it harder to get buy-in later for good use of ed-tech.

Jim: We know that some students who use ed-tech during the pandemic will have a poor experience because they’re not used to it. Some people will say, “During the virus we tried the ed-tech-enabled learning approaches, it was terrible, and look at my test scores.” Yes, this will happen. People’s test scores will be impacted. People will become unhappy because the mental health effects of being isolated will be profound. We must be prepared for that. Those poor experiences are really important to learn what does and doesn’t work.

Opportunities to Leverage

#1: Blended learning approaches will be tried, tested, and increasingly used.

Jim: We know that the more engaging learning styles are ones that are more interactive, and that face-to-face learning is better than 100 percent online learning. We also know blended learning can draw on the best of both worlds and create a better learning experience than one hundred percent face-to-face learning. If, after having done 100 percent online at the end of this, I think it’s quite possible that we can then think about rebalancing the mix between face-to-face and online. Teachers will have started to innovate and experiment with these online tools and may want to continue online pedagogies as a result of all this. That’s really exciting.

#2: Teachers and schools will receive more respect, appreciation, and support for their important role in society.

Vicki: I think it will be easier to understand that schools aren’t just buildings where students go to learn, and that teachers are irreplaceable. There’s something magic about that in-person connection, that bond between teachers and their students. Having that face-to-face connection with learners and being able to support them across their unique skills⁠—that’s very hard to replicate in a distance learning environment. Also, many students access critical resources at school, such as meals, clothing, and mental health support that may not be as widely available at home.

#3: Quality teaching and learning materials will be better curated and more widely used.

Vicki: Educators are looking to other educators as well as trusted sources to help curate high-quality online learning tools. At National Geographic, we’ve curated collections for K-12 learners in our resource library. We’ve created a new landing page that allows educators, parents, and caregivers to access our free materials quickly, and inspire young people. But it’s not just teachers struggling—it’s parents and other caregivers who are trying to bring learning to life. To that end, we’re livestreaming our Explorer Classroom model that connects young people with scientists, researchers, educators, and storytellers. During this transition, we want students and families to have access to that larger world, in addition to their own backyard.

#4: Teacher collaboration will grow and help improve learning.

Jim: As a profession, I hope we come out of this crisis stronger by collaborating and working together. I’m a firm believer in not asking heavily burdened teachers to reinvent the wheel. At my company Tes, we’ve got a big resource-sharing platform for teachers, including coronavirus-related resources. There are other platforms too, such as Teachers Pay Teachers and Khan Academy, where teachers can see what others have done. A teacher could say, “well, rather than record a video with the instructional element I need, I might be able to find someone who has done that really well already.” One of the most important things teachers can do now is draw on what others are doing: Form community online, share the burden, and make things a bit easier.

#5: This crisis will help us come together across boundaries.

Vicki: We would be remiss if we didn’t take away a greater sense of empathy for each other—the idea that we can work through anything together—from this crisis. I think it’s an opportunity for the education sector to unite, forge connections across countries and continents, and truly share what works in a global way. I don’t think, prior to this crisis, that we’ve been able to do this, and we will have missed a big opportunity if we don’t try to do that now.

Jim: We will get through this stronger. I live in a divided country, and from where I sit, it looks like the U.S. is a divided country too. When you go through a big national crisis like this, you come out stronger as a country because you’ve been fighting together, working together.

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COVID-19 has fuelled a global ‘learning poverty’ crisis

The pandemic saw empty classrooms all across the world. Image:  REUTERS/Marzio Toniolo

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Stay up to date:.

• Before the pandemic, the world was already facing an education crisis.
• Last year, 53% of 10-year-old children in low- and middle-income countries either had failed to learn to read with comprehension or were out of school.
• COVID-19 has exacerbated learning gaps further, taking 1.6 billion students out of school at its peak.
• To mitigate the situation, parents, teachers, students, governments, and development partners must work together to remedy the crisis.

Even before COVID-19 forced a massive closure of schools around the globe, the world was in the middle of a learning crisis that threatened efforts to build human capital—the skills and know-how needed for the jobs of the future. More than half (53 percent) of 10-year-old children in low- and middle-income countries either had failed to learn to read with comprehension or were out of school entirely. This is what we at the World Bank call learning poverty . Recent improvements in Learning Poverty have been extremely slow. If trends of the last 15 years were to be extrapolated, it will take 50 years to halve learning poverty. Last year we proposed a target to cut Learning Poverty by at least half by 2030. This would require doubling or trebling the recent rate of improvement in learning, something difficult but achievable. But now COVID-19 is likely to deepen learning gaps and make this dramatically more difficult.

Have you read?

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Temporary school closures in more than 180 countries have, at the peak of the pandemic, kept nearly 1.6 billion students out of school ; for about half of those students, school closures are exceeding 7 months. Although most countries have made heroic efforts to put remote and remedial learning strategies in place, learning losses are likely to happen. A recent survey of education officials on government responses to COVID-19 by UNICEF, UNESCO, and the World Bank shows that while countries and regions have responded in various ways, only half of the initiatives are monitoring usage of remote learning (Figure 1, top panel). Moreover, where usage is being monitored, the remote learning is being used by less than half of the student population (Figure 1, bottom panel), and most of those cases are online platforms in high- and middle-income countries.

COVID-19-related school closures are forcing countries even further off track from achieving their learning goals. Students currently in school stand to lose $10 trillion in labor earnings over their working lives. That is almost one-tenth of current global GDP, or half the United States’ annual economic output, or twice the global annual public expenditure on primary and secondary education.

In a recent brief I summarize the findings of three simulation scenarios to gauge potential impacts of the crisis on learning poverty. In the most pessimistic scenario, COVID-related school closures could increase the learning poverty rate in the low- and middle-income countries by 10 percentage points, from 53% to 63%. This 10-percentage-point increase in learning poverty implies that an additional 72 million primary-school-age children could fall into learning poverty , out of a population of 720 million children of primary-school age.

This result is driven by three main channels: school closures, effectiveness of mitigation and remediation, and the economic impact. School closures, and the effectiveness of mitigation and remediation, will affect the magnitude of the learning loss, while the economic impact will affect dropout rates. In these simulations, school closures are assumed to last for 70% of the school year, there will be no remediation, mitigation effectiveness will vary from 5%, 7% and 15% for low-, middle- or high-income countries, respectively. The economic channel builds on macro-economic growth projections , and estimates the possible impacts of economic contractions on household income, and the likelihood that these will affect primary school age-school-enrollment.

Most of the potential increase in learning poverty would take place in regions with a high but still average level of learning poverty in the global context pre-COVID, such as South Asia (which had a 63% pre-pandemic rate of learning poverty), Latin America (48%) , and East Asia and the Pacific (21%). In Sub-Saharan Africa and Low-income countries, where learning poverty was already at 87% and 90% before COVID, increases would be relatively small, at 4 percentage points and 2 percentage points, respectively. This reflects that most of the learning losses in those regions would impact students who were already failing to achieve the minimum reading proficiency level by the end of primary—that is, those who were already learning-poor.

To gauge at the impacts of the current crisis in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and Northern Africa we need to examine other indicators of learning deprivation. In these two regions children are on average the furthest below the minimum proficiency level, with a Learning Deprivation Gap (the average distance of a learning deprived child to the minimum reading proficiency level) of approximately 20%. This rate is double the global average (10.5%), four times larger than the East Asia and Pacific Gap (5%), and more than tenfold larger the Europe and Central Asia average gap (1.3%). The magnitude of learning deprivation gap suggests that on average, students on those regions are one full academic year behind in terms of learning, or two times behind the global average.

In the most pessimistic scenario, COVID-19 school closures might increase the learning deprivation gap by approximately 2.5 percentage points in Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America. However, the same increase in the learning deprivation gap does not imply the same impact in qualitative terms. An indicator of the severity of learning deprivation, which captures the inequality among the learning deprived children, reveals that the severity of learning deprivation in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa could increase by approximately 1.5 percentage points, versus an increase of 0.5 percentage points in Latin America. This suggests that the new learning-deprived in Latin America would remain closer to the minimum proficiency level than children in Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. As a consequence, the range of options required to identify students’ needs and provide learning opportunities, will be qualitatively different in these two groups of countries— more intense in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East than in Latin America.

In absolute terms, Sub-Sharan Africa and the Middle East and Northern Africa would remain the two regions with the largest number of learning-deprived children. The depth of learning deprivation in Sub-Saharan Africa will increase by three times more than the number of children who are learning-deprived. This is almost three times the global average, and four times more than in Europe and Central Asia. This suggests an increase in the complexity and the cost of tackling the learning crisis in the continent.

Going forward, as schools reopen , educational systems will need to be more flexible and adapt to the student’s needs. Countries will need to reimagine their educational systems and to use the opportunity presented by the pandemic and its triple shock—to health, the economy, and the educational system—to build back better . Several policy options deployed during the crisis, such as remote learning solutions, structured lesson plans, curriculum prioritization, and accelerated teaching programs (to name a few), can contribute to building an educational system that is more resilient to crisis, flexible in meeting student needs, and equitable in protecting the most vulnerable.

The results from these simulations are not destiny. Parents, teachers, students, governments, and development partners can work together to deploy effective mitigation and remediation strategies to protect the COVID-19 generation’s future. School reopening, when safe, is critical, but it is not enough. The simulation results show major differences in the potential impacts of the crisis on the learning poor across regions . The big challenge will be to rapidly identify and respond to each individual student’s learning needs flexibly and to build back educational systems more resilient to shocks, using technology effectively to enable learning both at school and at home.

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Writing about COVID-19 in a college admission essay

by: Venkates Swaminathan | Updated: September 14, 2020

Print article

For students applying to college using the CommonApp, there are several different places where students and counselors can address the pandemic’s impact. The different sections have differing goals. You must understand how to use each section for its appropriate use.

The CommonApp COVID-19 question

First, the CommonApp this year has an additional question specifically about COVID-19 :

Community disruptions such as COVID-19 and natural disasters can have deep and long-lasting impacts. If you need it, this space is yours to describe those impacts. Colleges care about the effects on your health and well-being, safety, family circumstances, future plans, and education, including access to reliable technology and quiet study spaces. Please use this space to describe how these events have impacted you.

This question seeks to understand the adversity that students may have had to face due to the pandemic, the move to online education, or the shelter-in-place rules. You don’t have to answer this question if the impact on you wasn’t particularly severe. Some examples of things students should discuss include:

• The student or a family member had COVID-19 or suffered other illnesses due to confinement during the pandemic.
• The candidate had to deal with personal or family issues, such as abusive living situations or other safety concerns
• The student suffered from a lack of internet access and other online learning challenges.
• Students who dealt with problems registering for or taking standardized tests and AP exams.

Jeff Schiffman of the Tulane University admissions office has a blog about this section. He recommends students ask themselves several questions as they go about answering this section:

• Are my experiences different from others’?
• Are there noticeable changes on my transcript?
• Am I aware of my privilege?
• Am I specific? Am I explaining rather than complaining?
• Is this information being included elsewhere on my application?

If you do answer this section, be brief and to-the-point.

Counselor recommendations and school profiles

Second, counselors will, in their counselor forms and school profiles on the CommonApp, address how the school handled the pandemic and how it might have affected students, specifically as it relates to:

• Grading scales and policies
• Graduation requirements
• Instructional methods
• Schedules and course offerings
• Testing requirements
• Your academic calendar
• Other extenuating circumstances

Students don’t have to mention these matters in their application unless something unusual happened.

Writing about COVID-19 in your main essay

Write about your experiences during the pandemic in your main college essay if your experience is personal, relevant, and the most important thing to discuss in your college admission essay. That you had to stay home and study online isn’t sufficient, as millions of other students faced the same situation. But sometimes, it can be appropriate and helpful to write about something related to the pandemic in your essay. For example:

• One student developed a website for a local comic book store. The store might not have survived without the ability for people to order comic books online. The student had a long-standing relationship with the store, and it was an institution that created a community for students who otherwise felt left out.
• One student started a YouTube channel to help other students with academic subjects he was very familiar with and began tutoring others.
• Some students used their extra time that was the result of the stay-at-home orders to take online courses pursuing topics they are genuinely interested in or developing new interests, like a foreign language or music.

Experiences like this can be good topics for the CommonApp essay as long as they reflect something genuinely important about the student. For many students whose lives have been shaped by this pandemic, it can be a critical part of their college application.

Want more? Read 6 ways to improve a college essay , What the &%$! should I write about in my college essay , and Just how important is a college admissions essay? .

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12 Ideas for Writing Through the Pandemic With The New York Times

A dozen writing projects — including journals, poems, comics and more — for students to try at home.

By Natalie Proulx

The coronavirus has transformed life as we know it. Schools are closed, we’re confined to our homes and the future feels very uncertain. Why write at a time like this?

For one, we are living through history. Future historians may look back on the journals, essays and art that ordinary people are creating now to tell the story of life during the coronavirus.

But writing can also be deeply therapeutic. It can be a way to express our fears, hopes and joys. It can help us make sense of the world and our place in it.

Plus, even though school buildings are shuttered, that doesn’t mean learning has stopped. Writing can help us reflect on what’s happening in our lives and form new ideas.

We want to help inspire your writing about the coronavirus while you learn from home. Below, we offer 12 projects for students, all based on pieces from The New York Times, including personal narrative essays, editorials, comic strips and podcasts. Each project features a Times text and prompts to inspire your writing, as well as related resources from The Learning Network to help you develop your craft. Some also offer opportunities to get your work published in The Times, on The Learning Network or elsewhere.

We know this list isn’t nearly complete. If you have ideas for other pandemic-related writing projects, please suggest them in the comments.

In the meantime, happy writing!

Journaling is well-known as a therapeutic practice , a tool for helping you organize your thoughts and vent your emotions, especially in anxiety-ridden times. But keeping a diary has an added benefit during a pandemic: It may help educate future generations.

In “ The Quarantine Diaries ,” Amelia Nierenberg spoke to Ady, an 8-year-old in the Bay Area who is keeping a diary. Ms. Nierenberg writes:

As the coronavirus continues to spread and confine people largely to their homes, many are filling pages with their experiences of living through a pandemic. Their diaries are told in words and pictures: pantry inventories, window views, questions about the future, concerns about the present. Taken together, the pages tell the story of an anxious, claustrophobic world on pause. “You can say anything you want, no matter what, and nobody can judge you,” Ady said in a phone interview earlier this month, speaking about her diary. “No one says, ‘scaredy-cat.’” When future historians look to write the story of life during coronavirus, these first-person accounts may prove useful. “Diaries and correspondences are a gold standard,” said Jane Kamensky, a professor of American History at Harvard University and the faculty director of the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute. “They’re among the best evidence we have of people’s inner worlds.”

You can keep your own journal, recording your thoughts, questions, concerns and experiences of living through the coronavirus pandemic.

Not sure what to write about? Read the rest of Ms. Nierenberg’s article to find out what others around the world are recording. If you need more inspiration, here are a few writing prompts to get you started:

How has the virus disrupted your daily life? What are you missing? School, sports, competitions, extracurricular activities, social plans, vacations or anything else?

What effect has this crisis had on your own mental and emotional health?

What changes, big or small, are you noticing in the world around you?

For more ideas, see our writing prompts . We post a new one every school day, many of them now related to life during the coronavirus.

You can write in your journal every day or as often as you like. And if writing isn’t working for you right now, try a visual, audio or video diary instead.

2. Personal Narrative

As you write in your journal, you’ll probably find that your life during the pandemic is full of stories, whether serious or funny, angry or sad. If you’re so inspired, try writing about one of your experiences in a personal narrative essay.

Here’s how Mary Laura Philpott begins her essay, “ This Togetherness Is Temporary, ” about being quarantined with her teenage children:

Get this: A couple of months ago, I quit my job in order to be home more. Go ahead and laugh at the timing. I know. At the time, it was hitting me that my daughter starts high school in the fall, and my son will be a senior. Increasingly they were spending their time away from me at school, with friends, and in the many time-intensive activities that make up teenage lives. I could feel the clock ticking, and I wanted to spend the minutes I could — the minutes they were willing to give me, anyway — with them, instead of sitting in front of a computer at night and on weekends in order to juggle a job as a bookseller, a part-time gig as a television host, and a book deadline. I wanted more of them while they were still living in my house. Now here we are, all together, every day. You’re supposed to be careful what you wish for, but come on. None of us saw this coming.

Personal narratives are short, powerful stories about meaningful life experiences, big or small. Read the rest of Ms. Philpott’s essay to see how she balances telling the story of a specific moment in time and reflecting on what it all means in the larger context of her life.

To help you identify the moments that have been particularly meaningful, difficult, comical or strange during this pandemic, try responding to one of our writing prompts related to the coronavirus:

Holidays and Birthdays Are Moments to Come Together. How Are You Adapting During the Pandemic?

Has Your School Switched to Remote Learning? How Is It Going So Far?

Is the Coronavirus Pandemic Bringing Your Extended Family Closer Together?

How Is the Coronavirus Outbreak Affecting Your Life?

Another option? Use any of the images in our Picture Prompt series to inspire you to write about a memory from your life.

Related Resource: Writing Curriculum | Unit 1: Teach Narrative Writing With The New York Times

People have long turned to creative expression in times of crisis. During the coronavirus pandemic, artists are continuing to illustrate , play music , dance , perform — and write poetry .

That’s what Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell, an emergency room doctor in Boston, did after a long shift treating coronavirus patients. Called “ The Apocalypse ,” her poem begins like this:

This is the apocalypse A daffodil has poked its head up from the dirt and opened sunny arms to bluer skies yet I am filled with dark and anxious dread as theaters close as travel ends and grocery stores display their empty rows where toilet paper liquid bleach and bags of flour stood in upright ranks.

Read the rest of Dr. Mitchell’s poem and note the lines, images and metaphors that speak to you. Then, tap into your creative side by writing a poem inspired by your own experience of the pandemic.

Need inspiration? Try writing a poem in response to one of our Picture Prompts . Or, you can create a found poem using an article from The Times’s coronavirus outbreak coverage . If you have access to the print paper, try making a blackout poem instead.

Related Resources: 24 Ways to Teach and Learn About Poetry With The New York Times Reader Idea | How the Found Poem Can Inspire Teachers and Students Alike

4. Letter to the Editor

Have you been keeping up with the news about the coronavirus? What is your reaction to it?

Make your voice heard by writing a letter to the editor about a recent Times article, editorial, column or Opinion essay related to the pandemic. You can find articles in The Times’s free coronavirus coverage or The Learning Network’s coronavirus resources for students . And, if you’re a high school student, your school can get you free digital access to The New York Times from now until July 6.

To see examples, read the letters written by young people in response to recent headlines in “ How the Young Deal With the Coronavirus .” Here’s what Addie Muller from San Jose, Calif., had to say about the Opinion essay “ I’m 26. Coronavirus Sent Me to the Hospital ”:

As a high school student and a part of Generation Z, I’ve been less concerned about getting Covid-19 and more concerned about spreading it to more vulnerable populations. While I’ve been staying at home and sheltering in place (as was ordered for the state of California), many of my friends haven’t been doing the same. I know people who continue going to restaurants and have been treating the change in education as an extended spring break and excuse to spend more time with friends. I fear for my grandparents and parents, but this article showed me that we should also fear for ourselves. I appreciated seeing this article because many younger people seem to feel invincible. The fact that a healthy 26-year-old can be hospitalized means that we are all capable of getting the virus ourselves and spreading it to others. I hope that Ms. Lowenstein continues spreading her story and that she makes a full recovery soon.

As you read, note some of the defining features of a letter to the editor and what made these good enough to publish. For more advice, see these tips from Thomas Feyer, the letters editor at The Times, about how to write a compelling letter. They include:

Write briefly and to the point.

Be prepared to back up your facts with evidence.

Write about something off the beaten path.

Publishing Opportunity: When you’re ready, submit your letter to The New York Times.

5. Editorial

Maybe you have more to say than you can fit in a 150-word letter to the editor. If that’s the case, try writing an editorial about something you have a strong opinion about related to the coronavirus. What have you seen that has made you upset? Proud? Appreciative? Scared?

In “ Surviving Coronavirus as a Broke College Student ,” Sydney Goins, a senior English major at the University of Georgia, writes about the limited options for students whose colleges are now closed. Her essay begins:

College was supposed to be my ticket to financial security. My parents were the first ones to go to college in their family. My grandpa said to my mom, “You need to go to college, so you don’t have to depend on a man for money.” This same mentality was passed on to me as well. I had enough money to last until May— $1,625 to be exact — until the coronavirus ruined my finances. My mom works in human resources. My dad is a project manager for a mattress company. I worked part time at the university’s most popular dining hall and lived in a cramped house with three other students. I don’t have a car. I either walked or biked a mile to attend class. I have student debt and started paying the accrued interest last month. I was making it work until the coronavirus shut down my college town. At first, spring break was extended by two weeks with the assumption that campus would open again in late March, but a few hours after that email, all 26 colleges in the University System of Georgia canceled in-person classes and closed integral parts of campus.

Read the rest of Ms. Goins’s essay. What is her argument? How does she support it? How is it relevant to her life and the world?

Then, choose a topic related to the pandemic that you care about and write an editorial that asserts an opinion and backs it up with solid reasoning and evidence.

Not sure where to start? Try responding to some of our recent argumentative writing prompts and see what comes up for you. Here are a few we’ve asked students so far:

Should Schools Change How They Grade Students During the Pandemic?

What Role Should Celebrities Have During the Coronavirus Crisis?

Is It Immoral to Increase the Price of Goods During a Crisis?

Or, consider essential questions about the pandemic and what they tell us about our world today: What weaknesses is the coronavirus exposing in our society? How can we best help our communities right now? What lessons can we learn from this crisis? See more here.

As an alternative to a written essay, you might try creating a video Op-Ed instead, like Katherine Oung’s “ Coronavirus Racism Infected My High School. ”

Publishing Opportunity: Submit your final essay to our Student Editorial Contest , open to middle school and high school students ages 10-19, until April 21. Please be sure to read all the rules and guidelines before submitting.

Related Resource: An Argumentative-Writing Unit for Students Doing Remote Learning

Are games, television, music, books, art or movies providing you with a much-needed distraction during the pandemic? What has been working for you that you would recommend to others? Or, what would you caution others to stay away from right now?

Share your opinions by writing a review of a piece of art or culture for other teenagers who are stuck at home. You might suggest TV shows, novels, podcasts, video games, recipes or anything else. Or, try something made especially for the coronavirus era, like a virtual architecture tour , concert or safari .

As a mentor text, read Laura Cappelle’s review of French theater companies that have rushed to put content online during the coronavirus outbreak, noting how she tailors her commentary to our current reality:

The 17th-century philosopher Blaise Pascal once wrote: “The sole cause of people’s unhappiness is that they do not know how to stay quietly in their rooms.” Yet at a time when much of the world has been forced to hunker down, French theater-makers are fighting to fill the void by making noise online.

She continues:

Under the circumstances, it would be churlish to complain about artists’ desire to connect with audiences in some fashion. Theater, which depends on crowds gathering to watch performers at close quarters, is experiencing significant loss and upheaval, with many stagings either delayed indefinitely or canceled outright. But a sampling of stopgap offerings often left me underwhelmed.

To get inspired you might start by responding to our related Student Opinion prompt with your recommendations. Then turn one of them into a formal review.

Related Resource: Writing Curriculum | Unit 2: Analyzing Arts, Criticizing Culture: Writing Reviews With The New York Times

7. How-to Guide

Being stuck at home with nowhere to go is the perfect time to learn a new skill. What are you an expert at that you can you teach someone?

The Times has created several guides that walk readers through how to do something step-by-step, for example, this eight-step tutorial on how to make a face mask . Read through the guide, noting how the author breaks down each step into an easily digestible action, as well as how the illustrations support comprehension.

Then, create your own how-to guide for something you could teach someone to do during the pandemic. Maybe it’s a recipe you’ve perfected, a solo sport you’ve been practicing, or a FaceTime tutorial for someone who’s never video chatted before.

Whatever you choose, make sure to write clearly so anyone anywhere could try out this new skill. As an added challenge, include an illustration, photo, or audio or video clip with each step to support the reader’s understanding.

Related Resource: Writing Curriculum | Unit 4: Informational Writing

8. 36 Hours Column

For nearly two decades, The Times has published a weekly 36 Hours column , giving readers suggestions for how to spend a weekend in cities all over the globe.

While traveling for fun is not an option now, the Travel section decided to create a special reader-generated column of how to spend a weekend in the midst of a global pandemic. The result? “ 36 Hours in … Wherever You Are .” Here’s how readers suggest spending a Sunday morning:

8 a.m. Changing routines Make small discoveries. To stretch my legs during the lockdown, I’ve been walking around the block every day, and I’ve started to notice details that I’d never seen before. Like the fake, painted window on the building across the road, or the old candle holders that were once used as part of the street lighting. When the quarantine ends, I hope we don’t forget to appreciate what’s been on a doorstep all along. — Camilla Capasso, Modena, Italy 10:30 a.m. Use your hands Undertake the easiest and most fulfilling origami project of your life by folding 12 pieces of paper and building this lovely star . Modular origami has been my absolute favorite occupational therapy since I was a restless child: the process is enthralling and soothing. — Laila Dib, Berlin, Germany 12 p.m. Be isolated, together Check on neighbors on your block or floor with an email, text or phone call, or leave a card with your name and contact information. Are they OK? Do they need something from the store? Help with an errand? Food? Can you bring them a hot dish or home-baked bread? This simple act — done carefully and from a safe distance — palpably reduces our sense of fear and isolation. I’ve seen the faces of some neighbors for the first time. Now they wave. — Jim Carrier, Burlington, Vt.

Read the entire article. As you read, consider: How would this be different if it were written by teenagers for teenagers?

Then, create your own 36 Hours itinerary for teenagers stuck at home during the pandemic with ideas for how to spend the weekend wherever they are.

The 36 Hours editors suggest thinking “within the spirit of travel, even if many of us are housebound.” For example: an album or a song playlist; a book or movie that transports you; a particular recipe you love; or a clever way to virtually connect with family and friends. See more suggestions here .

Related Resources: Reader Idea | 36 Hours in Your Hometown 36 Hours in Learning: Creating Travel Itineraries Across the Curriculum

9. Photo Essay

Daily life looks very different now. Unusual scenes are playing out in homes, parks, grocery stores and streets across the country.

In “ New York Was Not Designed for Emptiness ,” New York Times photographers document what life in New York City looks like amid the pandemic. It begins:

The lights are still on in Times Square. Billboards blink and storefronts shine in neon. If only there were an audience for this spectacle. But the thoroughfares have been abandoned. The energy that once crackled along the concrete has eased. The throngs of tourists, the briskly striding commuters, the honking drivers have mostly skittered away. In their place is a wistful awareness that plays across all five boroughs: Look how eerie our brilliant landscape has become. Look how it no longer bustles. This is not the New York City anyone signed up for.

Read the rest of the essay and view the photos. As you read, note the photos or lines in the text that grab your attention most. Why do they stand out to you?

What does the pandemic look like where you live? Create your own photo essay, accompanied by a written piece, that illustrates your life now. In your essay, consider how you can communicate a particular theme or message about life during the pandemic through both your photos and words, like in the article you read.

Publishing Opportunity: The International Center of Photography is collecting a virtual archive of images related to the coronavirus pandemic. Learn how to submit yours here.

10. Comic Strip

Sometimes, words alone just won’t do. Visual mediums, like comics, have the advantage of being able to express emotion, reveal inner monologues, and explain complex subjects in ways that words on their own seldom can.

If anything proves this point, it is the Opinion section’s ongoing visual diary, “ Art in Isolation .” Scroll through this collection to see clever and poignant illustrations about life in these uncertain times. Read the comic “ Finding Connection When Home Alone ” by Gracey Zhang from this collection. As you read, note what stands out to you about the writing and illustrations. What lessons could they have for your own piece?

Then, create your own comic strip, modeled after the one you read, that explores some aspect of life during the pandemic. You can sketch and color your comic with paper and pen, or use an online tool like MakeBeliefsComix.com .

Need inspiration? If you’re keeping a quarantine journal, as we suggested above, you might create a graphic story based on a week of your life, or just a small part of it — like the meals you ate, the video games you played, or the conversations you had with friends over text. For more ideas, check out our writing prompts related to the coronavirus.

Related Resource: From Superheroes to Syrian Refugees: Teaching Comics and Graphic Novels With Resources From The New York Times

11. Podcast

Modern Love Podcast: In the Midst of the Coronavirus Pandemic, People Share Their Love Stories

Are you listening to any podcasts to help you get through the pandemic? Are they keeping you up-to-date on the news? Offering advice? Or just helping you escape from it all?

Create your own five-minute podcast segment that responds to the coronavirus in some way.

To get an idea of the different genres and formats your podcast could take, listen to one or more of these five-minute clips from three New York Times podcast episodes related to the coronavirus:

“ The Daily | Voices of the Pandemic ” (1:15-6:50)

“ Still Processing | A Pod From Both Our Houses ” (0:00-4:50)

“ Modern Love | In the Midst of the Coronavirus Pandemic, People Share Their Love Stories ” (1:30-6:30)

Use these as models for your own podcast. Consider the different narrative techniques they use to relate an experience of the pandemic — interviews, nonfiction storytelling and conversation — as well as how they create an engaging listening experience.

Need ideas for what to talk about? You might try translating any of the writing projects above into podcast form. Or turn to our coronavirus-related writing prompts for inspiration.

Publishing Opportunity: Submit your finished five-minute podcast to our Student Podcast Contest , which is open through May 19. Please read all the rules and guidelines before submitting.

Related Resource: Project Audio: Teaching Students How to Produce Their Own Podcasts

12. Revise and Edit

“It doesn’t matter how good you think you are as a writer — the first words you put on the page are a first draft,” Harry Guinness writes in “ How to Edit Your Own Writing .”

Editing your work may seem like something you do quickly — checking for spelling mistakes just before you turn in your essay — but Mr. Guinness argues it’s a project in its own right:

The time you put into editing, reworking and refining turns your first draft into a second — and then into a third and, if you keep at it, eventually something great. The biggest mistake you can make as a writer is to assume that what you wrote the first time through was good enough.

Read the rest of the article for a step-by-step guide to editing your own work. Then, revise one of the pieces you have written, following Mr. Guinness’s advice.

Publishing Opportunity: When you feel like your piece is “something great,” consider submitting it to one of the publishing opportunities we’ve suggested above. Or, see our list of 70-plus places that publish teenage writing and art to find more.

Natalie Proulx joined The Learning Network as a staff editor in 2017 after working as an English language arts teacher and curriculum writer. More about Natalie Proulx

The Impact of Covid-19 Pandemic on Education

by Hang Nguyen | Aug 6, 2020 | eLearning

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of human activities including education. It poses serious concerns to education systems such as learning disruptions and decreased access to education facilities. Besides, the pandemic has also facilitated the creation of innovative teaching methods that may reshape the future of education in the 21 st century. This blog will cover the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on education and how we are dealing with it. 

Photo by Julia M Cameron from Pexels

How has the Covid-19 Pandemic Affected Education?

According to UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) , the Covid-19 has resulted in closures of schools in more than 100 countries worldwide, impacting over 1,1 billion learners out of the classroom, accounting for 67.6% of total enrolled learners.

Across the globe, educational disruptions can have long term implications, especially for the vulnerable. When schools shut, children from lower-income households who rely on school-based nutrition programs will lose access to school meals. We don’t know how long the pandemic can last. But this will cause psychological and physical harm to children even if the food insecurity happens for a short time. Moreover, nutrition shortfalls can also cause financial burdens on those families as the true cost to families of feeding children is high.

Due to the coronavirus outbreak, many countries have decided to cancel or postpone the upcoming semester or final exams. Standardized tests widely used for college admissions in the United States such as A-Level, SAT, and IB have been canceled, either.

Even when schools reopen, economic depression may increase inequality and constrain expanding access to education. It’s the government’s responsibility to bridge the gap of equality and not let the vulnerable be left behind.  

How do Teachers and Students Overcome this Situation?

The impact of Covid-19 pandemic on education quite serious. Within a few months since the outbreak of the pandemic, the lifestyle of the entire world has been changed thoroughly. Billions of people are forced to “stay at home”. Most schools and educators are looking for solutions to continue teaching during this coronavirus pandemic. In fact, not all students have access to the Internet and digital devices. Therefore, establishing effective forms of online education will grant access to institutional resources. This will help students who have fewer opportunities to be able to access alternative learning methods. The resources are divided into three main categories, namely Curriculums Resources, Professional Development Resources, and Tools.  

Curriculums Resources

These include lessons, videos, interactive learning modules, and any other resources that directly support students in acquiring knowledge and skills.

Professional Development Resources

These are resources that can help teachers or parents in supporting learners, guiding them to content, developing their skills to teach remotely, or more generally augmenting their capacity to support learners now learning more independently and at home, rather than at school.

These include tools that can help manage teaching and learning. They are communication tools, learning management systems (LMS), or other tools that help to create educational content. These tools have also led to changes in the ways of teaching and learning in this Covid-19 pandemic. For example, with a communication tool, teachers are able to keep in touch with their students more efficiently through chat groups or video meetings. Whilst, ActivePresenter seems to be the most comprehensive tool for creating education content as teachers can design, edit, export, and publish courses to an LMS right in the software without using any plug-ins or external applications. Learners then can easily access and interact with the course content on any device having internet access. 

Educational Challenges and Opportunities 

The Covid-19 epidemic poses both challenges and opportunities for education worldwide. Starting the school year late and losing access to facilities completely disrupt many students’ lives, especially to those who are involved in physical activities or sports. Though it’s just a temporary replacement, exercising at home without any equipment and limited space can still be possible. These activities can be stretching, climbing stairs, dancing to music, or even doing the housework.

Switching from traditional learning to online learning may be the most effective way to reduce educational disruptions during this pandemic. However, if we do not act appropriately, it will increase the equality gaps. Many children do not have internet connectivity or a laptop at home, others do. Fortunately, the appropriate strategy in many countries is to use all possible infrastructure. Postcards and other recourses that require less data usage such as content delivered by radio or TV are also available.

The impact of Covid-19 pandemic on education systems is adverse all over the world. The quarantine and school closures across the world may be inconvenient, but it’s necessary to contain the spread of the virus. Also, this is an opportunity for education systems to adopt technology and appropriate teaching methods to adapt to the current situation. With online learning trends emerging in many parts of the world, some people are wondering if it will continue to persist post-pandemic and how it would impact on the education systems worldwide.

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I Thought We’d Learned Nothing From the Pandemic. I Wasn’t Seeing the Full Picture

M y first home had a back door that opened to a concrete patio with a giant crack down the middle. When my sister and I played, I made sure to stay on the same side of the divide as her, just in case. The 1988 film The Land Before Time was one of the first movies I ever saw, and the image of the earth splintering into pieces planted its roots in my brain. I believed that, even in my own backyard, I could easily become the tiny Triceratops separated from her family, on the other side of the chasm, as everything crumbled into chaos.

Some 30 years later, I marvel at the eerie, unexpected ways that cartoonish nightmare came to life – not just for me and my family, but for all of us. The landscape was already covered in fissures well before COVID-19 made its way across the planet, but the pandemic applied pressure, and the cracks broke wide open, separating us from each other physically and ideologically. Under the weight of the crisis, we scattered and landed on such different patches of earth we could barely see each other’s faces, even when we squinted. We disagreed viciously with each other, about how to respond, but also about what was true.

Recently, someone asked me if we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, and my first thought was a flat no. Nothing. There was a time when I thought it would be the very thing to draw us together and catapult us – as a capital “S” Society – into a kinder future. It’s surreal to remember those early days when people rallied together, sewing masks for health care workers during critical shortages and gathering on balconies in cities from Dallas to New York City to clap and sing songs like “Yellow Submarine.” It felt like a giant lightning bolt shot across the sky, and for one breath, we all saw something that had been hidden in the dark – the inherent vulnerability in being human or maybe our inescapable connectedness .

More from TIME

Read More: The Family Time the Pandemic Stole

But it turns out, it was just a flash. The goodwill vanished as quickly as it appeared. A couple of years later, people feel lied to, abandoned, and all on their own. I’ve felt my own curiosity shrinking, my willingness to reach out waning , my ability to keep my hands open dwindling. I look out across the landscape and see selfishness and rage, burnt earth and so many dead bodies. Game over. We lost. And if we’ve already lost, why try?

Still, the question kept nagging me. I wondered, am I seeing the full picture? What happens when we focus not on the collective society but at one face, one story at a time? I’m not asking for a bow to minimize the suffering – a pretty flourish to put on top and make the whole thing “worth it.” Yuck. That’s not what we need. But I wondered about deep, quiet growth. The kind we feel in our bodies, relationships, homes, places of work, neighborhoods.

Like a walkie-talkie message sent to my allies on the ground, I posted a call on my Instagram. What do you see? What do you hear? What feels possible? Is there life out here? Sprouting up among the rubble? I heard human voices calling back – reports of life, personal and specific. I heard one story at a time – stories of grief and distrust, fury and disappointment. Also gratitude. Discovery. Determination.

Among the most prevalent were the stories of self-revelation. Almost as if machines were given the chance to live as humans, people described blossoming into fuller selves. They listened to their bodies’ cues, recognized their desires and comforts, tuned into their gut instincts, and honored the intuition they hadn’t realized belonged to them. Alex, a writer and fellow disabled parent, found the freedom to explore a fuller version of herself in the privacy the pandemic provided. “The way I dress, the way I love, and the way I carry myself have both shrunk and expanded,” she shared. “I don’t love myself very well with an audience.” Without the daily ritual of trying to pass as “normal” in public, Tamar, a queer mom in the Netherlands, realized she’s autistic. “I think the pandemic helped me to recognize the mask,” she wrote. “Not that unmasking is easy now. But at least I know it’s there.” In a time of widespread suffering that none of us could solve on our own, many tended to our internal wounds and misalignments, large and small, and found clarity.

Read More: A Tool for Staying Grounded in This Era of Constant Uncertainty

I wonder if this flourishing of self-awareness is at least partially responsible for the life alterations people pursued. The pandemic broke open our personal notions of work and pushed us to reevaluate things like time and money. Lucy, a disabled writer in the U.K., made the hard decision to leave her job as a journalist covering Westminster to write freelance about her beloved disability community. “This work feels important in a way nothing else has ever felt,” she wrote. “I don’t think I’d have realized this was what I should be doing without the pandemic.” And she wasn’t alone – many people changed jobs , moved, learned new skills and hobbies, became politically engaged.

Perhaps more than any other shifts, people described a significant reassessment of their relationships. They set boundaries, said no, had challenging conversations. They also reconnected, fell in love, and learned to trust. Jeanne, a quilter in Indiana, got to know relatives she wouldn’t have connected with if lockdowns hadn’t prompted weekly family Zooms. “We are all over the map as regards to our belief systems,” she emphasized, “but it is possible to love people you don’t see eye to eye with on every issue.” Anna, an anti-violence advocate in Maine, learned she could trust her new marriage: “Life was not a honeymoon. But we still chose to turn to each other with kindness and curiosity.” So many bonds forged and broken, strengthened and strained.

Instead of relying on default relationships or institutional structures, widespread recalibrations allowed for going off script and fortifying smaller communities. Mara from Idyllwild, Calif., described the tangible plan for care enacted in her town. “We started a mutual-aid group at the beginning of the pandemic,” she wrote, “and it grew so quickly before we knew it we were feeding 400 of the 4000 residents.” She didn’t pretend the conditions were ideal. In fact, she expressed immense frustration with our collective response to the pandemic. Even so, the local group rallied and continues to offer assistance to their community with help from donations and volunteers (many of whom were originally on the receiving end of support). “I’ve learned that people thrive when they feel their connection to others,” she wrote. Clare, a teacher from the U.K., voiced similar conviction as she described a giant scarf she’s woven out of ribbons, each representing a single person. The scarf is “a collection of stories, moments and wisdom we are sharing with each other,” she wrote. It now stretches well over 1,000 feet.

A few hours into reading the comments, I lay back on my bed, phone held against my chest. The room was quiet, but my internal world was lighting up with firefly flickers. What felt different? Surely part of it was receiving personal accounts of deep-rooted growth. And also, there was something to the mere act of asking and listening. Maybe it connected me to humans before battle cries. Maybe it was the chance to be in conversation with others who were also trying to understand – what is happening to us? Underneath it all, an undeniable thread remained; I saw people peering into the mess and narrating their findings onto the shared frequency. Every comment was like a flare into the sky. I’m here! And if the sky is full of flares, we aren’t alone.

I recognized my own pandemic discoveries – some minor, others massive. Like washing off thick eyeliner and mascara every night is more effort than it’s worth; I can transform the mundane into the magical with a bedsheet, a movie projector, and twinkle lights; my paralyzed body can mother an infant in ways I’d never seen modeled for me. I remembered disappointing, bewildering conversations within my own family of origin and our imperfect attempts to remain close while also seeing things so differently. I realized that every time I get the weekly invite to my virtual “Find the Mumsies” call, with a tiny group of moms living hundreds of miles apart, I’m being welcomed into a pocket of unexpected community. Even though we’ve never been in one room all together, I’ve felt an uncommon kind of solace in their now-familiar faces.

Hope is a slippery thing. I desperately want to hold onto it, but everywhere I look there are real, weighty reasons to despair. The pandemic marks a stretch on the timeline that tangles with a teetering democracy, a deteriorating planet , the loss of human rights that once felt unshakable . When the world is falling apart Land Before Time style, it can feel trite, sniffing out the beauty – useless, firing off flares to anyone looking for signs of life. But, while I’m under no delusions that if we just keep trudging forward we’ll find our own oasis of waterfalls and grassy meadows glistening in the sunshine beneath a heavenly chorus, I wonder if trivializing small acts of beauty, connection, and hope actually cuts us off from resources essential to our survival. The group of abandoned dinosaurs were keeping each other alive and making each other laugh well before they made it to their fantasy ending.

Read More: How Ice Cream Became My Own Personal Act of Resistance

After the monarch butterfly went on the endangered-species list, my friend and fellow writer Hannah Soyer sent me wildflower seeds to plant in my yard. A simple act of big hope – that I will actually plant them, that they will grow, that a monarch butterfly will receive nourishment from whatever blossoms are able to push their way through the dirt. There are so many ways that could fail. But maybe the outcome wasn’t exactly the point. Maybe hope is the dogged insistence – the stubborn defiance – to continue cultivating moments of beauty regardless. There is value in the planting apart from the harvest.

I can’t point out a single collective lesson from the pandemic. It’s hard to see any great “we.” Still, I see the faces in my moms’ group, making pancakes for their kids and popping on between strings of meetings while we try to figure out how to raise these small people in this chaotic world. I think of my friends on Instagram tending to the selves they discovered when no one was watching and the scarf of ribbons stretching the length of more than three football fields. I remember my family of three, holding hands on the way up the ramp to the library. These bits of growth and rings of support might not be loud or right on the surface, but that’s not the same thing as nothing. If we only cared about the bottom-line defeats or sweeping successes of the big picture, we’d never plant flowers at all.

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How the COVID-19 Pandemic Is Reshaping the Education Service

Byeongwoo kang.

Institute of Innovation Research, Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, Japan

History teaches us that crises reshape society. While it is still uncertain how COVID-19 will reshape our society, the global pandemic is encouraging and accelerating innovation and advancement, especially in the digital sphere. This chapter focuses on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the education service, which is typically classified as a service industry in industrial classifications. Digital transformation in the education sector has attracted significant attention recently. The current education system in Japan is based on a structure that was institutionalized in the industrial age. Although education has seen innovation since then, it is one of the sectors wherein innovation occurs at a slow pace, and therefore, it does not meet the sector’s expectations and demands. The COVID-19 pandemic is, however, accelerating digital transformation in education: Not only in Japan, but globally too, educators, students, policymakers, and other role players are now actively undertaking efforts to bring about digital transformation in this sector. This chapter reviews the rapid expansion of digital transformation in the education service and explores, in detail, the two main trends in digital transformation in the education service in Japan. These trends are the expanding of distance education and increasing innovation in educational technologies. The discussion further reflects on prior studies questioning the impact of digital transformation on education; it also anticipates and explores the effects of and concerns about the digital transformation in the education service. Finally, the chapter includes a discussion on how to address these concerns and maximize the digital impact. It indicates three concerns of the digital transformation in the education service: (1) poor motivation management, (2) negative effect of IT devices usage in education, (3) educational inequality by digital divide. They can be overcome by changing roles of instructors and further investment in ICT infrastructure in the education service. The discussions in this chapter give insight into how the education service might evolve after the COVID-19 pandemic. The distance education is becoming a new normal in the education service. However, the education community in general is not ready to maximize the merits of distance learning. We need to change the role of instructors from a knowledge teacher to a learning motivator and progress manager. In addition, we need more investment in ICT infrastructure in the education service to enhance educational effects.

Introduction

Although crises tend to reshape society, it is still uncertain how the global COVID-19 pandemic will transform our lives. Currently, numerous discussions are taking place across the globe about whether we should prioritize the treatment of the COVID-19 pandemic over the economy. In a short period, many actions and policies have materialized and been implemented across industries in reaction to the pandemic, despite these demanding social adjustments.

This chapter focuses on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the education service in Japan. The education industry is a typical example of a service industry. 1 In Japan, many actions have been set in motion to address the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an attempt to contain the spread of COVID-19, most governments across the globe decided to temporarily close educational institutions. 2 When Japan closed all its schools in March 2020, many discussions about how the education service should be managed (during and after the pandemic) have taken place. Traditionally, Japan’s academic year starts in April (many other countries’ academic year starts in September). It has been suggested that Japan’s academic year should now start in September too as a measure to manage education. In addition, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) implemented a financial support system for higher education in April 2020, which includes a reduction in tuition fees, waivers, and scholarship provision. 3 Furthermore, students are requesting their schools—in particular private institutions—to lower their tuition fees, because they are not using any school facilities (such as dorms, classrooms, and libraries) while they are in isolation at home. Moreover, many students are now facing financial hardship because they lost their part-time jobs or their families’ income has decreased. 4 Many students are considering terminating their studies. None of the universities in Japan lowered its tuition fees to accommodate students; instead, some institutions have decided to offer scholarships or grants to give students financial support.

However, these measures and actions will not fundamentally change the education industry in Japan. Ultimately, the acceleration of digital transformation, prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic, will reshape the education service in Japan. In fact, some measures and actions taken during the pandemic might become everyday practice once the spread of the virus has decreased.

The rest of this chapter reviews the digital transformation in the education service, and against the background of prior studies, it includes discussions on the impact and concerns that pertain to these technological changes. Then, this chapter introduces the situation in Japan and anticipates how the education service will be after the COVID-19. Lastly, this chapter concludes with the future of the education service and the author’s insight.

Recent Trends in Education Services: Digital Transformation

The two recent trends in digital transformation in the education industry during the COVID-19 pandemic are the expansion of distance education and the increasing innovations in educational technologies. These trends, accelerated by the educational demands during the pandemic, are discussed below.

Expansion of Distance Education

The COVID-19 pandemic compels educators to explore and implement methods of distance learning on a larger scale than ever before. Although distance education practices were in place before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was uncommon, and most learning activities happened in the classroom. Initially, when Japanese schools were closed in March 2020, most schools postponed their classes for a certain period. When this period was prolonged, these schools initiated distance learning practices that, at that point, were quickly becoming the new standard.

Distance education has a long history (Sumnar 2000 ); the first attempts at distance learning were made during the nineteenth century 5 when print-based course materials were sent to learners through the postal service. More recently, the second generation of distance education involved a combination of multimedia (such as radio, television, cassette tapes, and CD-ROMs) and print materials. The third generation of distance learning is Internet-based.

The emergence of Internet-based distance learning is attributed to the information revolution. In addition to print materials, course materials are now available in digital format. Today, students can even conduct virtual experiments and simulations with educational software applications. Aside from these differences, third generation distance learning is unlike the first two generations in a fundamental way. The main objective of the first and second generations was to produce and distribute teaching and learning materials to learners. The learning activities were predominantly one-way, and interactivity was supported marginally. Internet-based learning, on the other hand, enables interaction between instructors and students.

Internet-based distance learning can be categorized into two models: recorded online courses and online interactive sessions. The following section reviews these models and their merits in detail.

Recorded Online Courses

The use of recorded online courses is primarily made possible by the expansion of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). The MOOC is an online educational platform that offers most of its content for free. The MOOC, which is a result of the Kahn Academy on YouTube, offers various courses for, among others, universities, skills and job training institutions, and preschools. Students can select their own courses.

MOOC has many advantages. First, the platform improves learning efficiency by enabling people to learn at their own pace and anywhere. The MOOC even allows learners to customize their learning speed. The traditional education services design curricula to be completed within a certain timeframe (i.e., per semester) and in a classroom. For example, a semester at a Japanese university consists of 15 weeks of classwork. For a standard course, learners and teachers meet once a week for 90 min. In other words, a student must spend 15 weeks to complete a subject and receive the due credits or certificates. MOOC, on the other hand, allows students some flexibility: Students can attend lectures when it suits them and learn at their own pace. A capable student can therefore study intensively and complete a course within a few days.

In addition, the MOOC provides global access, enabling students to choose their course levels and instructors. Traditionally, students must enroll at a specific institution, follow its curricula, and receive instruction from employed teachers; their options are, in other words, limited. At primary and secondary level education, students have almost no alternative options in terms of curricula and instructors. In higher education, the options in terms of curricula and instructors increase: students can enroll at one institution and learn from other institutions too, or use exchange programs and credit transfer systems. Nonetheless, these options are limited to partnered institutions. Aside from this, the preparations and relocation to other regions or countries are costly. The MOOC, however, enables a student to select a course at a suitable level and an instructor who teaches in a way that the student wants to be taught. In short, the MOOC makes customized learning possible for individuals.

Aside from these benefits, the MOOC provides open access and pursues an equal educational opportunity for everyone. However, based on the living conditions of some students, this ideal is not always achieved in the traditional education system. Students whose living conditions are poor find it difficult to commit to learning. Less-educated students are disadvantaged in terms of job seeking and promotion. In addition, unequal learning opportunities in one generation increase the next generation’s disadvantage. In this regard, the MOOC content is mostly free and accessible from anywhere if one has access to the Internet. Currently, parents tend to relocate to other regions so that their children can attend renowned schools. But MOOC, which is free and accessible from anywhere, might decrease such movement between areas. Unlike traditional education, MOOC may provide students with an equal opportunity for learning.

Fourth, the MOOC has the potential overcome the language barrier in the education industry. While most of the courses on the MOOC platform are taught in English—which might be problematic for Japanese students—some recent courses provide Japanese subtitles. Such learning support and aid expand students’ opportunities by enabling them to find suitable online courses taught by excellent instructors across the globe.

Finally, the MOOC meets social demands and addresses needs. Innovations in the high-tech industries occur at such a rapid pace that it is difficult to predict what new technologies will become available and how they will change society. What is clear, however, is that we need to be adaptable to our ever-changing environments. For example, Frey ( 2017 ) predicts that it will be common for us to change occupations several times throughout our lives. Enrolling at higher education institutions and committing to several years of study requires effort and sacrifices. In the future, people would need to learn new skills while they continue to work, and the MOOC would offer them the opportunity to do so. For this reason, online learning in the form offered by the MOOC will become standard.

Live, Interactive Online Courses

Interactive online learning has also become a trend in the education sector. Despite the many merits of the MOOC platform, most lectures are pre-recorded, making it similar to earlier generations of distance learning.

The MOOC relies on asynchronous education as opposed to synchronous education. Asynchronous models allow students to complete courses at their own pace; in other words, students can complete pre-recorded courses when it suits them. While that is one of the main advantages of asynchronous teaching, such a model has its disadvantages too. In asynchronous courses, students cannot ask questions or receive immediate feedback. Moreover, asynchronous teaching does not allow instructors to take immediate and flexible action based on the students’ motivation and attitudes. Additionally, students cannot actively participate in class activities. Because the MOOC is a one-way method of instruction, the platform does not maximize the merits of the third generation of distance learning.

Live and interactive online courses can overcome such challenges by encouraging two-way communication and allowing students to attend a lecture in real-time, ask questions, and discuss work with instructors and classmates from anywhere in the world.

Development and Expansion of Educational Technologies

Most governments around the world have temporarily closed schools in an attempt to contain the spread of COVID-19. Homeschooling is now the obvious option for parents because learning content is accessible remotely and educational technologies (or EdTechs) are developed and shared to assist learning. The COVID-19 pandemic presents the education system with a renewed opportunity to embrace new EdTechs.

In recent years, there has been rapid innovation in EdTechs. Current EdTechs are mainly a utilization of new IT devices and the digitization of textbooks and teaching materials. Although such EdTechs improve the efficiency of education, they do not increase the effect of education and, therefore, do not fundamentally transform the education service.

Learning Management System

Some EdTechs, such as the learning management systems (LMS), will change the traditional education industry dramatically. An LMS is a software application that assists with the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, and delivery of educational courses and training, learning, and development programs. Companies often use LMS for online training courses for employees. Now, the LMS is used in the education service more widely. Despite its merits, an LMS used to be costly, but lately, the development of cloud-based LMSs has reduced the initial and operational cost of these systems.

There are several reasons to introduce an LMS in the education service. First, it improves the efficiency of teaching preparation and communication between instructors and students. For example, students can submit their assignments online. Accordingly, instructors do not need to print out documents and assignments, thus saving costs and acquiring additional time to prepare for teaching. In addition, some LMSs have a social networking service (SNS) function with which instructors, students, and parents can communicate.

Importantly, an LMS informs instructors of education performances immediately because it allows students and instructors to confirm attendance, submit assignments, and complete tests and simple surveys online. An instructor can gain insight into a subject or a student’s performance and provide relevant feedback by analyzing the data on the system. Such efforts will eventually improve teaching materials and methodologies in the education service. (Smartphone applications offer similar services.) As Nakane ( 2005 ) points out, Japanese students tend to be silent in classrooms—even when an instructor encourages them to talk. It has been reported, however, that the use of educational applications, such as the above, improves interactions between instructors and students in the class.

Artificial Intelligence-Based Education Tools

Artificial intelligence-based education tools are regarded as the most innovative among newly developed education tools. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools collect data on a student’s level of understanding, analyze it, and then determine how to improve comprehension.

The two leading EdTech companies in Japan, ATAMA and COMPASS, develop their own AI-assisted education tools, namely, Atama Plus and Qubena. These tools allow students to answer questions and solve problems using a tablet. The AI tool then collects and analyzes the log and other data (such as response times and answers) to determine a student’s level of comprehension, strengths and weaknesses. The AI tool then challenges students with supplementary problems to help them improve their level of understanding. It is widely understood that an ideal education is a customized education, and AI offers the opportunity to offer tailor-made instruction to students. Ultimately, this should increase the effects of education, and for this reason, several cram schools in Japan are introducing similar educational tools. Despite these advantages, customized instruction remains expensive.

The impact of AI tools on education effects was unforeseen, as the case of COMPASS’s Qubena illustrates (Jinno and Sato 2019 ). In July 2018, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), selected Qubena as one of its demonstration projects in math classes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders in a middle school in Tokyo between September 2018 and February 2019. While the course’s standard learning time is 62 hours, students who used Qubena completed the course in 34 hours. Moreover, these students demonstrated a better understanding and higher scores compared to a comparison group. In addition, not only did the students who used Qubena expressed positive attitudes toward relevant subjects; they also had increased interaction with their instructors and classmates, asked more questions, and exchanged feedback with classmates.

Creating an OODA Loop

One aim of digital transformation in the education service is to generate and utilize relevant data to improve learning by applying the OODA loop (Boyd 1987 ). The OODA loop consists of four steps (observe, orient, decide, and action) and a feedback loop (see Fig.  2.1 ). The first step in the OODA loop is to collect and observe relevant data. This step is followed by analyses and a decision. A comparable concept with the OODA loop is the PDCA cycle (plan, do, check, and action). The PDCA cycle is a method used in business for the control and continuous improvement of processes and products (Moen and Norman 2009 ). The PDCA cycle (plan, do, check, and action) starts at the planning stage, where stakeholders formulate assumptions and develop hypotheses. Sometimes the PDCA cycle reveals disparity between assumptions and the reality/practice and does not cover the reality beyond its hypothesis. On the other hand, the OODA loop does not reveal such weaknesses.

The PDCA cycle and OODA loop

Current EdTechs provide infrastructure that will enable the creation of an OODA loop for learning. For example, IT devices that provide educational content generate data that can be used as a new input for the development and improvement of the content. By repeating the loop, innovations in the education service will accelerate. In this sense, the dissemination of EdTechs establishes a crucial infrastructure for learning in the education industry.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, private sector companies in Japan have been offering temporary and free online educational content to children. 6 As a result, a large number of students and their parents are testing online courses and newly developed EdTechs. The author conjectures that these developments will further enable the dissemination of EdTechs and the construction of OODA loops.

Concerns and Limitations in Digital Transformation in the Education Services

The COVID-19 pandemic caused some concerns in the education services including class postponement. Students are concerned that their education would be left behind. However, such concerns are temporary. Schools can arrange supplementary classes. However, there are more fundamental concerns and limitations caused by the digital transformation in the education services. This section aims to introduce them.

As discussed above, the major trends in the education industry give the impression that the sudden and rapid changes in educational technologies will result in an ideal system, which is not necessarily the case. Based on findings from earlier studies, the next section considers the concerns and limitations of these trends: (1) poor motivation management, (2) negative effect of IT devices usage in education, (3) educational inequality by digital divide.

The concerns and limitations in this section is not necessarily caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Poor Motivation Management

Distance learning’s popularity is increasing, and some experts believe that this form of learning will replace traditional education eventually. However, it is still uncertain whether distance learning improves the effect of education or even guarantees successful learning. Live, interactive online sessions are reasonably new, and, yet, there is no research available on their educational effects. There are, however, many insightful studies on the educational effects of the MOOC.

In this regard, Chuang and Ho ( 2016 ) describe the case of edX, an MOOC created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. With edX, students receive a certificate when they complete a course. Chuang and Ho researched edX’s initial four-year progress—from its establishment in 2012 to 2016. The researchers also analyzed the enrollment patterns and the issuing of certificates and found that enrollments on edX increased steadily since its establishment. The system had 2.4 million unique enrollments during these four years, or 1523 days (an average of 1554 enrollments per day). However, only 159,000 of these enrollments resulted in a certificate being issued. About 250 thousand certificates were issued for 4.45 million course registrations. These numbers indicate that the course completion rate is about 5.5%.

Reich and Ruipérez-Valiente ( 2019 ) conducted a follow-up study in 2018, and their findings were the same as Chuang and Ho’s ( 2016 ). In total, 52% of all enrollments had never started the courses. They found that although the number of new enrollments had increased since the establishment of the MOOC, the number of new enrollments started decreasing in 2016. Other studies also indicate that the MOOC has low completion rates. For example, one study analyzed 39 MOOC courses and found that the completion rates were between 2.3 and 19.5%, with a median average of 6.5% (Jordan 2014 ).

The findings of Chuang and Ho ( 2016 ) and Reich and Ruipérez-Valiente ( 2019 ) suggest that distance learning models and tools do not guarantee the proper use of online educational content. Furthermore, EdTechs do not increase learning motivation. Ito et al. ( 2019 ), for example, examined the causal effect of computer-aided instruction (CAI) on children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills. The researchers used a CAI application, called Think!Think!, to support learning among approximately 1,500 students from G1 to G4 in Cambodia. Although their findings show that the use of the application raised students’ expectations in terms of future studies, the use of CAI had no significant effect on their motivation and self-esteem. Their findings suggest that even when students are provided with good educational content in proper education environments, few of them sustain their original motivation.

Negative Effects of IT Devices in Education

IT devices are social infrastructures essential in our daily lives. However, there is a concern over the usage of IT devices among children. Pioneers and leaders of the information revolution are strict about their children’s technology use. Furthermore, even though students admit that IT devices are a distraction, they continue using them, thinking that the benefits outweigh the costs (Kay and Lauricella 2011 ).

Several studies and reports have investigated the effect of the use of IT devices among children. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), for example, regularly evaluate educational systems by measuring 15-year-old school pupils’ scholastic performance on reading, mathematics, and science. In 2015, PISA conducted a comparative analysis of the digital skills that students have acquired and the learning environments designed to develop these skills (OECD 2015 ). A finding from the report indicates that there is no difference in reading, mathematics, or science skills between students in the countries that had invested heavily in information and communications technology (ICT) for education and those in other countries. The report suggests that building deep, conceptual understanding and higher-order thinking requires intensive teacher-student interactions, and technology distracts from this valuable human engagement, although the report presumes other reasons for the result.

Others have studied the use of IT devices among lower-performing students. For example, Mueller and Oppenheimer ( 2014 ) investigated whether taking notes on a laptop versus writing longhand affected academic performance. They conducted comparative experiments among students at Princeton University and the University of California in the United States and found that students with laptops took more notes than those who used longhand. Furthermore, the laptop notes had more verbatim overlap with the lecture than the longhand note. Despite this, students who took notes longhand performed better on tests, especially on conceptual questions. The authors argue that longhand note-taking requires students to select important information and engage with the content, which, in turn, enables them to study more efficiently. In short, although laptops allow students to take notes easily and speedily, the students do so indiscriminately and mindlessly, which has a negative impact on their learning.

Educational Inequality by Digital Divide

Finally, the impact of the digital divide on the education industry should be addressed. The digital divide is a new concept, and it refers to the inequalities in society in terms of knowledge, that is, the gap between people who have access to ICT and those who do not. The digital divide exists not only between more advanced and less advanced countries but also between regions within the same country (Wong 2002 ; Nishida et al. 2014 ).

As mentioned earlier, usage and familiarity of ICT devices in the education industry do not necessarily result in academic performance. The ICT infrastructure is necessary to build an OODA loop in the education service. Schools with good ICT infrastructure will improve their education services faster than those with poor ICT infrastructure. The wider the digital divide, the wider the educational opportunity gaps.

Japanese Education Services During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This section introduces how Japanese education services corresponded during the first few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve this objective, a few systematic surveys by MEXT are reviewed. Additional literature was unavailable because this chapter was drafted soon after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan.

On the Introduction of the Distance Education

MEXT conducted surveys on how universities and colleges in Japan corresponded during the COVID-19 pandemic. The first survey was performed three times: twice in April and May 2020, and once on May 12, 2020 (Tables  2.1 and   2.2 ). Japan’s academic year starts in April; thus, the data were from the first two months of the academic year. Of the 1070 schools that received a survey, 1046 schools responded; thus, the response rate was 97.8%.

Table 2.1

Whether the class started as usual (On April 1st) or was postponed

Source MEXT report “On Correspondence of universities and colleges to the COVID-19 pandemic.” Available at https://www.mext.go.jp/content/202000513-mxt_kouhou01-000004520_3.pdf

Table 2.2

Implementation of distance education

Table  2.1 indicates that nearly 90% of all schools in higher education in Japan postponed their classes. Schools that did not postpone their classes started distance education.

Table  2.2 indicates that 96.6% of universities and technical colleges had started or were discussing starting distance education. Variations between types of schools were observed.

A follow-up survey was conducted on May 20 to assess the types of correspondence used by the surveyed schools to communicate the start dates of their classes. Of the 1075 schools that received a survey, 890 schools responded; the response rate was 82.8%. As of May 20, 185 schools had not replied.

Table  2.3 indicates that 80% of the universities and colleges had started their classes as of May 20. Most schools could start their classes one month later than usual.

Table 2.3

Whether the class started or was postponed further as of May 20

Source MEXT report “Implementation status of university and college class during to the COVID-19 pandemic.” Available at https://www.mext.go.jp/content/20200527-mxt_kouhou01-000004520_3.pdf

Table  2.4 indicates that 90% of universities and colleges started distance education only. A few universities and colleges started distance education and face to face lectures. Some private universities started face to face classes only and started distance education after one to two months of preparation.

Table 2.4

Class method

Source MEXT report “Implementation status of university and college class during the COVID-19 pandemic.” Available at https://www.mext.go.jp/content/20200527-mxt_kouhou01-000004520_3.pdf

Table  2.5 presents the data on the start date of classes for the 26 schools that postponed their classes in Table  2.3 . Most schools started classes before June 15.

Table 2.5

Start of class

The elementary, middle, and high schools had not started distance education. On April 16, 2020, MEXT published a survey of public school superintendents 7 who provided information on their schools’ status of teaching; 1,213 establishers responded, and they temporarily closed 25,223 schools.

Table  2.6 presents the homeschooling policy during the temporary closure of schools: all the establishers started homeschooling using textbooks and paper teaching materials, 5% started homeschooling using live, interactive online courses; 29% started homeschooling using digital textbooks and digital materials.

Table 2.6

Homeschooling policy during the temporal closure of schools (multiple answers)

Source MEXT report “Status of teaching in public schools relevant to school disclosure to prevent the COVID-19.” Available at https://www.mext.go.jp/content/20200421-mxt_kouhou01-000006590_1.pdf

In summary, higher education in Japan quickly started to provide online classes. By contrast, the elementary, middle, and high schools continued to rely on traditional paper-based teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic but gradually introduced online classes and utilization of digital teaching materials. Thus, in Japan, in higher education and in elementary, middle, and high schools, distance education expanded, and educational technologies are under development to complement the distance learning.

Reactions to the Distance Learning

No systematic surveys or reports were available; therefore, reactions to distance learning remain unknown. The available surveys and reports were based on voluntary self-reports done by schools on their employed teachers, or students, and were conducted by using mass media and tens to up to two hundreds of samples. The surveys and reports differed in their questions and other survey elements; thus, a review would neither represent the whole situation in Japan nor allow for comparisons of schools. Accordingly, instead of relying on the data of those surveys and reports, this subsection is based on the author’s knowledge and perceptions after reviewing as many of the available surveys and reports as possible.

In Japan, during the pandemic, distance learning became a new normal in higher education. Notably, the few private universities that were delayed or did not start distance learning had the lowest budgets and were located in suburbs where there are fewer students (Tables  2.1 – 2.5 ). Except for those few exceptions, most higher education institutes managed distance learning well. A few concerns from students were observed, for example, unstable internet connections at home increased the difficulty of accessing distance education. However, such concerns are solvable by providing improved internet accesses. Additionally, before the COVID-19 pandemic, professors taught students remotely to some extent; thus, best practices and sample teaching models of distance education were available from experience in the past. Accordingly, the introduction of distance education in universities and colleges was smoother than expected.

Additionally, distance learning in elementary, middle, and high schools has expanded slower than that in higher education, and most of the schools, save a few exceptions, relied on textbooks and paper teaching materials. Regarding the perceptions of distance learning of students and their parents, many concerns were observed. The most major concerns were as follows: whether students could manage self-education well; whether parents could teach their children, elementary school students, at home while working; whether insufficient homeschooling would result in low educational development; whether (and how) the children should socialize with classmates while homeschooling; and whether students had sufficient internet environments to support distance learning. Additionally, although most teachers were unfamiliar with distance education, there were a few exceptions, for example, all Kumamoto city public schools started the academic year (April 15, 2020) with live, online, interactive classes. 8

Recognizing such difficulties of homeschooling children, many EdTechs have been developed in Japan. Those EdTechs are provided for free for a certain period of time. Students use laptops and tablets to access digital educational materials and EdTechs. This situation is a good opportunity for young students, their parents, and teachers to try EdTechs, and for teachers to apply them their curriculums. EdTech providers have successfully constructed OODA loops and collect data logs from free trials to improve these EdTechs, for example, enhance the educational effects. This phenomenon will promote EdTechs’ further development and use beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.

Notably, the concerns and limitations indicated in Sect.  2.3 remain and will be revealed as more schools employ the distance learning and EdTechs. Accordingly, follow-up studies are necessary to investigate the weaknesses and externalities of distance education.

The Education Service After COVID-19

This section reflects on the future of the education industry when the COVID-19 pandemic has subsided. Furthermore, the section considers ways to overcome the concerns and limitations that pertain to the two main trends in the education service by introducing practices in Japan.

Further Acceleration of Digital Transformation in the Education Service

Although the trends discussed above have been taking place since the information revolution, COVID-19 has accelerated digital transformation in the education sector. Prior to the pandemic, digital transformation in the education service happened at a modest pace, and, although the MOOC was increasing its footprint, many educational institutions had not adopted these systems or the array of new EdTechs. Moreover, institutions and students used live, interactive online courses on a voluntary basis. Overall, only a few higher educational institutions adopted these trends.

The MOOC launched in Japan in 2013 when the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University joined Coursera and edX. The Japan Massive Open Online Courses Promotion Council (JMOOC) also launched in 2013. The MOOC, however, has a higher number of available online courses than the JMOOC. As of May 2020, 36 universities in Japan offer approximately 340 courses, and in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, most universities now offer live and interactive online courses.

Although the distance learning in Japan is currently merely duplicating the classroom content and offering it online, distance learning models will evolve to overcome such concerns and limitations as our experience and knowledge accrue and new EdTechs become available.

Changing Roles of Instructors

Section  2.3.1 indicated that only few of students sustain their original motivation over the distance learning and most of them do not finish online courses. New models of distance learning may change the role of instructors too. Aside from teaching, instructors, in the future, might be required to manage students’ learning motivations and progress. The following case study in Japan illustrates this scenario.

The N High School, 9 a Japanese school financed by the Kadokawa Dwango Corporation, was founded in April 2016. Since then, the number of students has increased rapidly from 1,482 to 12,414 in January 2020. All the school’s students begin their distance learning experience with a virtual reality ceremony.

The school’s curriculum includes the regular subjects taught at high schools across Japan. In addition, it offers an advanced program, which includes subjects such as programming, web designing, and novel writing. Each student has an assigned homeroom teacher advising them about their learning progress and future education. The school’s program is designed to overcome the concerns and limitations of digital transformation in the education service to some extent.

Despite its short history, 10 the N High School has a good reputation and outperforms other high schools in several areas. First, the N High School has fewer students who terminate their studies. Furthermore, the school reports that 81.8% of its graduates started entered into careers, 11 as opposed to 61.5% from other distance learning high schools in Japan who started careers or studies at higher education institutions in 2018. 12 Surprisingly, 77.1% of the students who dropped out of other high schools and finished their studies at the N High School started careers after graduation. Moreover, graduates from the N High School are accepted to top universities. In the class of 2019, one graduate enrolled at the University of Tokyo and three at Kyoto University. In the Japanese educational context, this is an impressive achievement for a school with such a short history.

The N High School’s achievements mean that the school’s educational model can be referenced when we consider distance learning in other contexts. Admittedly, its model and approach might not be transferable to distance learning at the university level, but it provides insight into how we can improve distance learning.

To sum up, when the distance learning becomes a new normal, teachers might be required to manage students’ learning motivations and progress.

Further Investment in ICT Infrastructure in the Education Service

Section  2.3.3 indicates that the digital divide in the education service leads to educational inequality. The availability of 5G and AI technologies will further stimulate the transformation and development of distance education and EdTechs. These technologies will support teachers in terms of preparation, innovation, and lesson design to improve online courses.

In addition to these technologies, infrastructures that will allow educators to collect data are also being built. In Japan, for example, the MEXT announced in December 2019 the Global and Innovation Gateway for All (GIGA) school program to prepare children for life in Society 5.0. 13 The GIGA program aims to supply an educational IT device to every student and to establish high-speed, high-capacity communication networks in schools across the nation. With an IT device, a student can search for information on the Internet, complete their homework digitally, or even learn to program (a critical skill in the current era). GIGA is similar to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. 14

Although the educational effects of GIGA and OLPC are still uncertain, 15 these programs would require an OODA loop in the education service, which will improve the educational effects. Determining the effects of educational policy is a costly process as it involves the collection and analyses of data on educational behaviors and performances. For example, to evaluate a new educational policy, researchers might experiment with a small sample size (e.g., a few classes). All the information they receive, however, is recorded in handwritten documents that need to be manually inputted to produce digital data. Since the data have not been standardized, it is difficult to combine or compare sets of data from different experiments.

An IT device can simplify this process. If every child has a device, it will be easy to produce and collect relevant data. Furthermore, it will allow researchers to easily analyze data, observe educational behaviors and effects, and compare data sets to gain detailed insight into a specific group of students. New findings and insights from one analysis can be applied and tested effortlessly. This process results in an OODA loop. It is not yet clear whether GIGA aims to create an OODA loop, but other private educational institutions are making haste to build their own OODA loops to improve their services. Infrastructure such as an OODA loop will facilitate faster and more dynamic innovations in the education service.

To sum up, investment in ICT infrastructure in the education service is necessary to minimize the digital divide in the education service.

Conclusions

This chapter reflected on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the education service, in particular in Japan. Despite its severe impact on the traditional education system, it offers the education industry the opportunity to transform its service. To address the challenges of the isolation policies during COVID-19, many institutions have now started to utilize distance learning supported by newly developed EdTechs. This suggests that the pandemic is accelerating digital transformation in the education industry.

However, digitalization is not a simple process, and the education community is not ready to maximize the merits of distance learning. Currently, distance education entails the duplication of the classroom content on an online platform. Moreover, many teachers and parents are uncomfortable or unfamiliar with technology. Parents also struggle to supervise the distance learning or homeschooling of young children. A full transition to distance learning, therefore, requires not only solid ICT infrastructure, but also support for teachers, students, and parents. Throughout trials and errors in the transition, we can expect improvements such as enhanced online-teaching tools, digital fluency, and attractive and engaging lessons.

It is still uncertain how long COVID-19 will impact our lives, and there might be a second and even third surge of the virus. This uncertainty will only further fuel rapid digital transformation in the education service. The creation of OODA loops will also facilitate innovations in the education industry; Various kinds of educational data will be collected through IT devices adopted in the classroom. Analysis on such data will be used to enhance individual and overall educational performance. This process will be repeated.

Currently, a large number of universities experience challenges with distance learning and EdTechs, particularly because it had to be introduced within a short timeframe. For example, some online lectures have been interrupted by uninvited guests, resulting in offensive and harassing situations. Universities’ servers also went down due to the sudden surge in online access. These issues, however, are minor and should be solved in the future. Meanwhile, they will not hinder digital transformation in the industry.

Digital education and traditional education have their strengths and weaknesses. In the future, distance learning will offer students more opportunities and options than traditional education. Educational technologies will enable students to take ownership of their learning. Students’ taking ownership of their learning is the new normal of the education service that is shaping gradually.

is an associate professor at the Institute of Innovation Research and the Graduate School of Business Administration, Hitotsubashi University. Prior to his current position, he was a research fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies—Japan External Trade Organization and a research engineer at LG Electronics. He earned his Ph.D. in technology management from the University of Tokyo in 2014 and his B.S. and M.S. in communications engineering from Tohoku University in 2006 and 2008, respectively.

His research interest is in economic and statistical analysis of innovation including science and technology strategy analysis and relevant policy analysis with special focus on the standard essential patents and digital transformation. His articles have been published in many journals including Research Policy and Technological Forecasting and Social Change amongst others. He has received a Young Scholars Award 2018 from the International Schumpeter Society and a KDDI Foundation Encouragement Award 2019.

Author’s Insight

This chapter might trigger questions such as the probability of the digital education services replacing the traditional education services after the COVID-19 pandemic. Harvard University, the wealthiest university in the world, offered its staff early retirement 16 and instituted a salary freeze on all exempt employees 17 to reduce expenses. Furthermore, schools have started providing online tuition, and various EdTechs have been released by education startups and tech firms. These incidents can be regarded as initial signals of disruption in the traditional education service.

If education is the sole focus, finding a post-pandemic replacement is, to a great extent, possible. Educational institutions that cannot offer distance learning and competitive educational contents may not survive during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. They will be replaced by attractive MOOC content that allows self-motivated students to continue their education without enrollment into formal educational institutions.

However, education is not the only thing that students get from traditional education service providers. They acquire other assets such as lifelong friends (some of which may become business partners in the future), access to a scholarly network, skills, opportunities, (Galloway 2017 ), and, in case of students in top schools, brands. Although these assets do not always bring rewards, they are still valuable tools for success in future endeavors. Although digital innovators such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg did not complete formal higher education, it was on the campus that they found their passion, business partners, and business opportunities. There is no certainty as to how much of these assets a digital education system can provide.

According to the knowledge management theory, interactions in the same space, which Nonaka and Takeuchi called “Ba” (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1998 ), between people with different knowledge and perspectives encourage knowledge flow between them (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995 ). “Ba” is a shared space that serves a foundation for knowledge creation. Schools play a similar role as students from different backgrounds interact with each other during curricular and co-curricular activities. Although one may argue that virtual spaces such as social media and online communities can play the same role, users are less likely to be exposed to users with different perspectives (Himelboim et al. 2013 ). As the popular saying goes, “birds of the same feather flock together.”

Therefore, it is unlikely that the digital education services will replace the traditional education services completely. Additionally, education startups and tech firms may not be able to replace traditional education institutions.

In the Japan Standard Industrial Classification (JSIC), the education service was originally classified under “Division L –Services.” Since the scale of the education service was expanding along with the increase in learning opportunities, lifelong learning and leisure time, a new division of “Division O – EDUCATION, LEARNING SUPPORT” was established by separating these fields from “Division L – SERVICES” in 2002. For more information, please see “Summary of Development of the Japan Standard Industrial Classification (JSIC) and Its Thirteenth Revision” by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (available at https://www.soumu.go.jp/main_content/000316295.pdf ).

2 Visit UNESCO at https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse .

3 MEXT website on the new financial support system (Japanese), available at https://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/koutou/hutankeigen/index.htm .

4 Free ( https://www.free20180913.com/ ), a student group advocating tuition-free higher education, conducted an online survey (between April 9 and April 27, 2020) on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on university students. A total of 1200 university students from 319 universities and colleges responded. Approximately 70% of the respondents indicated that they lost their part-time income, and more than 40% of the respondents’ financial supporters had lost their income. Approximately 20% of the respondents are considering terminating their studies due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

5 According to (Verduin and Clark 1991 ), Isaac Pitman offered the first recognised correspondence courses in shorthand in 1840 in England.

6 The METI published on the Ministry's website the private sector companies that provide online teaching materials for free: https://www.learning-innovation.go.jp/covid_19/ .

7 The central government, local governments, and corporations, as specified by law, can establish schools in Japan. National schools, prefectural and other municipal public schools, and private schools are founded by the central government, local governments, and corporations, respectively.

8 Kumamoto city prepared the distance education before the COVID-19 pandemic. When a series of earthquakes including a magnitude 7.0, known as the 2016 Kumamoto earthquakes, struck beneath Kumamoto city in 2016, schools in Kumamoto prefecture closed for a while. As a lesson, Kumamoto City Board of Education had been preparing the distance education such as distributing iPads to schools and training teachers for the distance education.

9 Visit the N High School’s webpage at https://nnn.ed.jp/ .

10 The first group of the N High School’s students graduated in 2018.

11 The N High School’s presentation on March 27, 2019.

12 MEXT: School Basic Survey 2018. Available at https://www.mext.go.jp/b_menu/toukei/chousa01/kihon/1267995.htm .

13 See https://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/other/index_00001.htm .

14 The OLPC was initially proposed by Professor Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2005. His vision was to provide a $100 laptop to give all children access to education. Visit http://one.laptop.org/ for more information.

15 Some studies analyzed the educational effects of the OLPC in several countries (Kraemer et al. 2009 ; Warschauer et al. 2012 ; Beuermann et al. 2015 ). These studies compared, for example, learning prior to and after receiving a laptop and learning with and without a laptop. The majority of these studies reported that there was no observable improvement in learning with a laptop. In fact, some researchers have noticed that those students with laptops performed worse in mathematics and linguistics than those who did not receive a laptop.

16 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-09/harvard-offers-staff-early-retirement-in-move-to-cut-expenses .

17 https://www.harvard.edu/president/news/2020/economic-impact-covid-19 .

Contributor Information

Jungwoo Lee, Email: rk.ca.iesnoy@eelj .

Spring H. Han, Email: [email protected] .

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