The Covid-19 has not only wreaked havoc globally but has posed a challenge to the learning process across Pakistan. Covid-19's first wave hit and had a great impact on the educational institutions throughout Pakistan. The schools were shut down following the standard operating systems introduced by the state. The institutions were instructed to come up with innovative learning measures and commence online classes through apps such as WhatsApp, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. Schools of Pakistan were shut from 16 march, 2020 until mid-September 2020 during the first wave of the pandemic. As a result, five million school-going children were affected. On the other hand, online learning was initiated by some of the educational institutions however, only a small fraction of students were able to participate due to limited internet access as most of the areas in Pakistan are rural areas without any access to internet data.
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These factors made the learning process a challenge for the majority of the
Pakistani students putting their study process to a halt. Although the covid-19
pandemic created a global crisis recently Pakistan was always facing an
educational crisis. The country has the second-highest percentage of around 44%
of children who are not attending schools (Farooqi, 2020) while students not
having internet connection or low-quality data had left more students out of
the learning process. In September the Schools once again opened and just as
the study process has started to take off, the second wave of covid-19 hit
Pakistan.
Therefore,
the institutions, keeping in view the increased number of covid positive cases
decided to shut down the educational institutions. (Malik, 2020). The political
institutions of the state are taking all the possible actions to ensure the
student's learning process is not put on halt. In the case of Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa, UNICEF is prioritizing opening educational institutions with the
approval of public health organizations as it's in the best interest of the
children.
In
the province of KPK, the UNICEF directed the ministry of elementary and
secondary education departments to practice contingency measures in schools. As
a response to this, the directorate issued a notification to the education
offices instructing teachers to assign four to five weeks assignments to
students as a backup plan in case of the sudden closure of educational
institutions.
Another
countermeasure was taken by UNICEF to deal with the education crisis was to not
only provide technical support but financial support to provincial institutes
for teacher education to develop standardized homework assignments for all
grade levels. This standardized homework would be uploaded on the official
website of E&SED KP. The Directorate of Curriculum & Teacher Education (DCTE)
KP developed Accelerated Academic Calendars and Accelerated Worksheets to help
in process of developing the homework assignments. An announcement was made on
25 November 2020 by the Federal Ministry of Education to once again close all
educational institutions country-wide educational institutions to deal with the
increasing number of corona cases. However, this time the teachers of public
and private schools along with the pupils supported by UNICEF were instructed
to follow the SOP'S and attend the schools on given appointments to visit
schools. It meant that each student would show up in school once a week to get
the homework assignments checked and receive more for the next week.
For
understudies, coming to class a few times per week, remaining at home for the
excess days to finish their errands allotted, would assist them with having a
feeling of routineness, other than that, organized exercises for the whole time
said by Memoona Nazli, Senior Teacher.
In
an interview with Hafiz Muhammad Ibrahim, Director E & SE, KP said that the
following remarkable decision taken by the authorities reflects the readiness
and ability to tackle any challenging situation by thinking out of the box. He
further added that this way the chances of students losing their interest in
studies and never returning would be reduced. Meanwhile, the teachers are
praising the decision and understand that under these challenging circumstances
it's imperative to introduce other learning methods to keep the learning
process going. Several teachers make announcements through the speakers of the
mosques making students aware of their attendance schedule while others have
made study schedules for their students.
Desperate
time’s calls for desperate measures which can be seen in the government’s response
to the covid-19 pandemic nevertheless the learning process has started to
normalize through different alternative methods (digital education response to
covid-19 in Pakistan, 2020) because it's difficult to make digital education
work in low resourced settings as a majority of the households are located in
rural areas with no data availability.
They
plan to work with the telecom companies and subsidize data for Educational
content. Furthermore, recognizing the fact that there is low digital literacy
they plan to introduce easy-to-use technology. This would enable the low-cost
schools to easily share data with their students.
Covid19
pandemic took everybody by surprise so no country was fully prepared to deal
with the challenges however, despite its rapid spread and initial lack of
understanding nature of the disease Pakistan sprang into action and followed
the SOPS bypassing the necessary decisions to prevent the spread of Covid-19
being the third world country Pakistan was able to deal with all the challenges
in a praiseworthy manner.
This article is produced by Zahra Anum, one of the contributors of the SOL Community.
