Teachers’ Voices on the Impact of COVID-19 on School Education: Are Ed-Tech Companies Really the Panacea?

Abstract

COVID-19 has brought about changes to the education system that impact teachers in multiple ways. The article discusses the views of affected teachers under the three-gap framework: access, usage, and pedagogical skills gap. Between 29 April 2020, and 29 May 2020, an online survey was administered to 550 Delhi and National Capital Region (NCR) teachers, of which 288 responded. The data show that the inequalities between private schools and government schools are sharpened by the move to online education. This is compounded by the fact that students from economically weaker sections of society have become hard to reach, and teachers do not know how to support hard-to-reach students who are also severely affected by the pandemic. The data also show that teachers have not been trained in online pedagogies. Ed-Tech companies have been stepping in, presenting themselves as a panacea to the problem with further consequences to teachers’ profession, standing, and livelihoods. However, Ed-Tech solutions are not relevant for hard-to-reach students or teachers in schools that serve hard-to-reach communities. The article first presents the voices of teachers affected by the pandemic and then critically examines the role of Ed-Tech companies, which pertain to fill the online pedagogical gap.

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“…We have been living in a great social gap, for many years, but in these times, the digital gap has been added, which must be shortened since it is essential for the education sector, in these times of distance education that everyone has a signal digital (Díez & Gajardo, 2020). Likewise, it is proposed to work based on three gaps: the gap in access to education, since many students, for various reasons, did not access virtual classes; the pedagogical skills and digital literacy gap as many teachers and parents were not prepared to connect digitally; the use gap, since many of the students and teachers did not have the opportunity to use technology due to lack of electronic devices or internet service (Jain et al, 2020). Thus, added to the problems of the teaching profession implementing virtual education, teachers had to assume those of their students who, due to lack of connectivity or because they were alone, could not assume the educational activities that corresponded to them (Costa, 2020; Aguilar, 2020;…”

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“…On top of that, one greatly affected domain, requiring rapid adaptation to the new circumstances, is education (e.g. Di Pietro et al 2020;Jain et al 2020: Tadesse & Muluye, 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a rapid transition of global learning systems to online teaching, disrupting everyday routines, with consequences for teachers' and students' psychological wellbeing.…”