Is there learning continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic? Six Lessons

Posted on by Chris McBurnie and Björn Haßler blog, COVID-19
Reading Time: 5 minutes

An effective education response to the COVID-19 pandemic needs to be built on solid evidence and data. For example, what do you know about your population? How many families own radios and televisions? Do children use — and actually learn from — online learning platforms? How much time — if any — do learners spend studying at home?

While the edtech landscape has drastically changed in the past decade, research on edtech has not kept pace (https://edtechhub.org). At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was initially very little data on efforts to ensure learning continuity during school closures. However, a number of research groups have recently conducted surveys and collected data on the education response to COVID-19. Here, we take a look at some of the emerging evidence and summarise this data in six initial lessons.

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Who has what? Assessing who has access to what devices in the education response to the COVID-19 pandemic

Posted on by Björn Haßler, Abdullah Khalayleh, Chris McBurnie, Taskeen Adam and Zoé Allier-Gagneur blog, COVID-19
Reading Time: 6 minutes

As with education in general, our ability to respond to COVID-19  in education depends significantly on access to resources by students and teachers. Even in this moment of crisis, governments should inform their decisions regarding education and educational resources on the available data whenever possible. However, we realise that accessing relevant data is not necessarily straightforward and this should not block other elements of system response-recovery-reform. 

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The role of the Konnect student portal in Bangladesh’s COVID-19 education response

Posted on by Chris McBurnie COVID-19, Konnect
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Last month, the Bangladeshi government announced their decision to suspend all schools to limit the spread of COVID-19. Since the outbreak, the Ministry of Education has sought to leverage multiple modalities such as television, radio and the internet to offer remote learning to a broad range of students. Over the past week, policymakers have looked to incorporate the virtual Konnect platform into their pandemic response strategy.

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The Role of Interactive Radio Instruction in the COVID-19 Education Response

Posted on by Chris McBurnie blog, COVID-19
Reading Time: 3 minutes

At a time when the COVID-19 pandemic has forced over 1.5 billion students out of school, governments in resource-constrained countries have looked to interactive radio instruction (IRI) to ensure educational continuity. In the past week, we spoke with the Rising Academy Network to consider what an IRI programme could look like and why policymakers have adopted this intervention.

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