Covid-19 enhanced e-learning

Islamabad : Despite posing posed serious challenges for education and health sectors across the world, COVID-19, however, has only accelerated the already inevitable process of e-learning including in Pakistan.

This was a consensus reached between educationists and research analysts during an online dialogue “COVID-19 Pandemic and health and education challenges to public and private education system’ organized here by Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI).

Dr Ayesha Babar Kavish, Head of MPH, Pakistan Institute of Ophthalmology, Al-Shifa Trust Eye Hospital, Rawalpindi, said that education, health, and economy are interconnected and the pandemic has adversely affected all of these areas. She said that it is high time to create balance between education and health and, therefore, moving towards e-learning is the area to be focused upon at the moment.

Qaiser A Raja, CEO, Skills Enhancement Academy (SEA), UK, said that the crisis resulting from by Covid-19 provided an opportunity to update the curriculum and remove whatever became obsolete before putting it online.

Ayesha Aslam, HoD, Junior Section at National Level, Pak-Turk School Systems, was of the view that the pandemic pushed back our development goals including in the education sector in an unprecedented manner. The challenge for the teachers and the students is now to be quickly adaptive to e-learning to overcome this learning-crisis.

Saima Subtain, School Education System Analyst and Director SEA- Pakistan office, said that launching educational channel has been a timely initiative by the government as an effort to respond to the challenge. She said that various institutions from the public as well as from the private sector are busy in building their capacity to strengthen e-learning which is an encouraging sign.

Dr Sajid Amin, policy research analyst, SDPI, said that every change initially seems disruptive to existing opportunities but eventually, it leads to opening up of the new opportunities. He said that the crisis resulted from the pandemic would be over after a few months but adapting the new technology would have a positive result on our education system.

He said that online learning would also be expected to reduce the number of drop-out children as well as the gender gap and the girl students may get benefitted from e-learning that was finding traditional education inaccessible for various reasons including culture.

Mr Shahid Minhas from SDPI earlier presented an overview of the pandemic and its impact on the education.