If somebody in 2019 told you what 2020 would entail, you probably wouldn’t have believed them. Millions of people told to stay inside their homes. Whole industries shutting down across the world for months on end. Hugging and shaking hands not allowed with anybody outside of your household. Most of the governments around the world have been accused of being ill prepared for such a global pandemic, but how do you go about predicting the unpredictable?
Luckily technology has always been able to adapt quickly to solve any problem. Whether it’s whole parliaments meeting via Zoom or being able to order a whole grocery shop when you can’t leave the house, there was a lot of technology in place to cope with social distancing. To solve some of the more complicated problems, engineers and developers have been working around the clock to develop new hardware and software to help.
One of the most pressing issues to solve was how to keep educating people whilst social distancing. Whether it’s a kindergarten, a classroom or even a lecture theatre, traditional education has normally involved a teacher standing at the front of a room filled with people. As that wasn’t possible for a number of months, and in some instances still ill advisable, principals turned to technology to help. Here are some of the ways that technology has been helping education continue during 2020.
From the Very Beginning
When schools around the world were shut towards the start of the year, it left a lot of teachers nervous about how it was going to it impact their students’ education. Parents were even more nervous, as it was feared they would have to replace teachers and teach their children things that they might not even understand.
As many lessons are now taught using computer aids, such as PowerPoint presentations or even videos and interactive games, teachers were soon able to share these with their students virtually. Parents were able to receive detailed lessons plans for every week their child was forced to stay at home. Pupils were even able to meet up on video conferencing software like Zoom to combat problems surrounding isolation. The main problem for parents was keeping their children concentrated on their lessons whilst sat at the dining room table or in the living room, places they normally associate with playing and relaxing.
Keeping that Vital Training Going
Even though there is a pandemic going on, we still need to carry on creating the next generation of workers who will fill some very important job roles. None more so important than those medical staff who have been working tirelessly in our hospitals and practices. Before the pandemic even started, there was already a big need for more people to specialise in children’s primary and acute care. The needs of children are constantly becoming more complex, whether that’s dealing with anything from obesity to depression – the sad reality is that a lot of communities don’t have enough paediatric doctors and nurses to cope with such a demand.
As training in person has become increasingly impractical, luckily there are already a number of well-established paths to become a PNP nurse online from the comfort of your own home. For example, Baylor University run the Louise Herrington School of Nursing Online, which is ranked as one of the top 10 nursing colleges in Texas. Their Pediatric Nurse Practitioner Track prepares students with all the advanced knowledge they need for a role as a pediatric nurse practitioner. Alongside this, the university arrange clinical placement sites for all of their students to carry out the essential practical aspects of the course. The whole process is designed to make students into successful nurses in the most time effective way.
It’s not just nursing that is relying on technology to teach students from a distance. Many other college and university courses around the world have cancelled physical lectures and seminars that aren’t essential to the course. They’ve then replaced these with either online versions of the same lecture or seminar or changed the curriculum completely and created new tasks and assignments.
The scale of the changes has differed massively across the world and even across states and cities. For example, one of the world’s best-known universities, the University of Cambridge, has announced that all of the lectures for the next year will be conducted online. Meanwhile some universities are continuing lessons with increased social distancing and other precautions. Whilst this has left some students feeling like this will be a wasted year, some have seen many advantages to online based courses, including the flexibility to study when and where they like.
Deciding the End Result
Whilst many institutions have already tackled the problems which arise from teaching from a social distance well, there have been many problems assessing students’ final grades from the same distance. The bar exam has always been known as one of the most gruelling exams out there, with potential barristers and lawyers working non-stop for hours to try and pass. This year, there were even more problems to tackle. As many were completed over the internet, those taking the exams had to be constantly monitored on webcam so they weren’t accused of cheating. This led to people urinating in buckets and even wearing adult diapers during the exam. Some people who had poor internet connection were also left worried they would be disqualified from the exam.
Over in England, exam boards had to ask tutors to predict what grade their students would have gotten in place of end of year exams. The government then decided to make sure that all the results were fair, they’d use a complicated algorithm to keep them in line with previous years results. This led to a lot of controversy, with some students finding their final results lowered by one, two or in some extreme cases even three grades.
Whilst technology is ready in some instances, such as training to a university standard, it’s clear that work still needs to continue to make sure all students receive a good education and a fair result in 2020.
Laila Azzahra is a professional writer and blogger that loves to write about technology, business, entertainment, science, and health.