My sincere greetings to all the distinguished panelists and participants.
Girija Prasad Koirala Foundation has been organizing series of interaction programs in multidisciplinary direction and welcome you all in this panel discussion of Transforming Education System post Covid-19.
As we all are suffering from the pandemic most of our daily life components such as health, education, economic, social and political activities have been affected.
Most of the developed counties which are technologically advanced have adopted distance learning as an alternative and they quickly enhanced their e-learning platforms along with covid outbreak. But low income countries seems to lack proper strategies to face the challenges in schools and universities created by the pandemic.
This crisis taught and pushed us forcefully towards E-learning methodology that unveiled number of advantages. It is noticed that E-learning contributes to reducing time, transportation costs by not mobilizing students, teaching and administrative staffs to the institutions, and even to reducing infrastructure costs, because it saves on the maintenance of the physical structure of the educational centers.
Therefore I think that post covid education should be prioritized based on e learning. But for those countries having low economic income may have the problem to maintain the high speed internet and other required digital devices to all the students.
Almost all schools and universities in developing countries such as Nepal have no experience of conducting online classes previously. Teachers do not seem to have proper skills to run online classes as they have neither been trained to do so nor have been involved in online teaching before.
I just remembered that while my father Girija Prasad Koirala was Prime minister of Nepal has formulated a number of Information and communications technology (ICT) and education related policies since 2000; however, the challenges now our school and universities experiencing in amidst of Covid-19 are mainly due to its faulty implementation strategies and inability to implement those policies.
There is another part of learning with physical presence in school and colleges. Going to school is the best public policy tool to raise skills. While school/college time can be fun and can raise social skills and social awareness, it increases a child’s ability and learn more by interacting with different group of students.
Therefore I think in coming days we should focus for both E learning and current methodologies equally so that we can shape our education system in new and better direction and can make more stable.
Thank you so much all of you and I’m curious to hear more about it from academic experts presenting here.