Educational improvements needed to offset COVID impact

How can these huge economic and social losses be mitigated? First and foremost, we need to realize it's vital to take educational losses seriously and pay more attention to rebuilding and rejuvenating our schooling system. More than that, we need to show better performance in education, better even than before the pandemic if we want to compensate for the lost learning time.

Second, reopening schools as soon as possible is essential because it's still regarded as the best way to guarantee quality of learning compared to remote education. Due to the absence of research on massive enrollment in online studies, we have no data at present to weigh in on the phenomenon.

However, one consensus is schools are still the core of students' learning, no matter how old they are or where they are from. According to the Ministry of Education, about 200 million students in China chose online studies from February to May, and a series of experiments were undertaken. The "dual-teacher class", where a superior digital teacher works with an offline assistant to safeguard the quality of digital learning, was employed on campuses after children returned home. The assistant teacher could offset the disadvantages the online courses create, like the lack of necessary interaction between teacher and students.

Third, teachers in school are still paramount in giving instruction for children's learning. On one hand, leading teachers should be urged more intensively to help their students. On the other hand, all teachers should be trained in new methods of e-education even in the post-pandemic era.

Fourth, assessment is a better way to guide our education. Traditional and digital methods could be used to get us enough data about the outcomes of student online or offline learning, thus we could undertake reforms in an appropriate fashion. Asking students to sit the exam is still important right now.

Last but not least, more attention should be paid to disadvantaged learning groups without financial and academic support from their family or community, as they could face worse consequences from the pandemic. Therefore, we can forecast the equality of education will meet greater challenges across the world. More bailout funds should be distributed to them in order to protect the balance of society.

The author is a program director with International Educational Institute on South-South Cooperation.