In the sectors of education and higher education, the pandemic has posed significant challenges for teachers, students, investors, and parents. Today, it’s not just learning by discovery to quench curiosity or hunger for information – it’s far beyond that.
The three days online seminar titled – Further Education in Times of COVID-19 was facilitated by Mr. Vickrant Gurung, Consultant & Corporate Trainer. This seminar was designed to inform and explain what we think the future holds in terms of career and studies and ways to adjust to it. It was also organized to explain the future of education post-COVID 19 for students and focused on how education will look and how your plans need to be adjusted. In this seminar, the foreign education system was discussed, most importantly to rethink and re-evaluate.
Mr. Gurung started the session with his introduction and also asked participants to introduce themselves. He also shared his experience working on the education section as a faculty member.
Introduction: Present Situation of the education system due to pandemic
The first topic of discussion in the session was the present condition of the education system due to the COVID crisis. He highlighted that the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic loss of human life worldwide and presents an unprecedented challenge to public health, education, food systems, and the world of work. Various countries have adopted a range of measures to respond to the pandemic depending on their available resources. For instance, technologically advanced countries, such as Italy, France, Germany, Australia, the UK, and the US, have adopted distance learning as a means to compensating for the loss. They quickly enhanced their e-learning platforms (Moodle, LMS, cloud systems, etc.) to create common distance learning center portals and provided students access to e-content and repository through mobile devices. In these countries, all stakeholders, institutions, teachers, publishers, and parents have joined hands together to create digital resources (e.g., textbooks and learning materials) so that they could be delivered through virtual classrooms. Likewise, Nepal also adopted the online teaching-learning process. However, running online classes does not seem to be feasible for most rural schools in Nepal. He also discussed the prospects of technological advancement in the education sector in Nepal.
Mr. Gurung explained the factors that make pandemics unique i.e. Pandemic Factor, Human Factor & Systematic Risk. Likewise, he explained that education brings change to the behavior of the learner.
The Controversy in Education
The most interesting part of the discussion was Controversy in Education. He explained the two controversies i.e. “Achievement VS Attainment” and “Necessity VS Commodity.”
Achievement is the process made by a student in acquiring new skills that are reflected in an improvement in grades. Attainment is reaching a certain skill level that has been set as a benchmark.
Different types of Education
In addition to this, he also discussed the types of education. In terms of Delivery Mechanism, there are formal, informal & semi-formal education, Institution vs Non-Institution education, Offline & Online Education. In terms of Destination, there are Domestic education, International/Foreign education, and Transnational Education. At last, he added the concept of foreign education and it’s status post-COVID pandemic.