The Coronavirus Opportunity
There ARE positives, if you are prepared to look
Beyond fear, there ARE positives — if you are prepared to look
By Dr Stephen Whitehead (views are author’s own)
It’s an ill wind that blows no one any good, every cloud has a silver lining, each problem is an opportunity — the clichés come rapidly to mind.
At time of writing, coronavirus is about to explode across Europe and the Middle East, maybe the world.
And suddenly all eyes are off China.
For two months the world has watched while the Chinese government tried to get to grips with its ‘largest public health emergency’. Within days of the virus kicking off, schools across China started to close. They have remained so ever since. People are ill, over two thousand have died already.
It is difficult to see any positives in all this misery, but there are some, if you are prepared to look.
And I am not talking about the face mask manufacturers.
Given that China has experienced the worst of the virus so far, you’d be forgiven for thinking that students across the country would be enjoying an unexpected break from all that exam revision.
Well, you’d be wrong.
Technology and especially online tuition, is beating the virus hands-down. Online classes abound.
From Beijing to Guangzou, Shenzen to Wuhan, students are receiving classes and lectures delivered by teachers who’ve very quickly had to learn how to adapt their face-to-face classes into compressed online packages, based around PowerPoint, summarized information, and concentrated knowledge.
And with only four months to go (at time of writing) before millions of China’s students take this year’s college entrance exams, there is a definite sense of urgency.
Certainly, the Chinese education sector reacted impressively fast once the educational shutdown was announced across 31 provinces in late January. By 2nd February, 22 online curriculum platforms opened 24,000 online courses for Higher Education institutions to choose from, including 1,291 ‘national excellence course’ and 401 virtual simulation experimental courses, covering 12 undergraduate programmes and 18 tertiary vocational programmes.
On February 18th, while the virus was at its peak in China, 200 million students went back to school — online.
Photo by Leon Seibert on Unsplash
Also that week, the MoE introduced a ‘national internet cloud classroom’, supported by more than 7,000 servers and designed to cater for 50 million elementary and secondary school students at the same time. Lessons cover 12 academic subjects, including ‘moral education’ and ‘epidemic education’.
The same day as the internet cloud classroom opened in China, one of the leading Chinese universities, Tsinghua University, started its new semester with an empty campus. But its online classrooms were full; 4,254 courses planned for this semester, involving 2,681 faculty members, over 25,000 students, with 3,923 courses offered online.
At the epicentre of the outbreak, in central China’s Hubei Province, the People’s Education Press offered three-month digital textbooks and application services, and the National Center for Education Technology transmitted 6,806 courses to Hubei for schools with internet yet lacking quality core teaching resources.
But Chinese students are not just preparing for exams, they are also learning about the coronavirus, epidemic prevention, disease control, and health and wellbeing.
This being China, it will come as little surprise to learn that robots too are playing an increasing role in countering coronavirus’s negative impact on education. One company in China which specialises in robotics for children’s health has already used this emergency as an opportunity to produce infrared temperature measuring robots for schools and kindergartens. Many working parents are also coming to rely on AI — to keep an eye on their kids who are at home studying. Many have installed surveillance cameras at home so as to see what their kids are up to during the day, while they go out to work.
As an outsider, what I see is a quite remarkable coordinated response from the Chinese to this health emergency. One can be justifiably wary of the Chinese authorities’ determination to apparently micro-manage their citizens’ lives, but when it comes to the sort of threat posed by coronavirus, then one cannot help but be impressed.
For many of these students, if not most, the freedom to learn at their own pace and in their own home, will be a welcome relief from the rigidity of Chinese state education.
An unexpected but very welcome outcome from the education lockdown across China, is that a system riddled with inequality ‘has seen a convergence of access to learning resources for all the country’s students’. For the past two decades, the wealthier, urban students have enjoyed the lion’s share of resources in the form of better-funded public schools and access to a highly competitive industry of private prep centers.
Today, due entirely to the coronavirus, that disparity in educational opportunity between rich and poor has narrowed considerably.
This is not to suggest that the coronavirus has entirely democratized education in China, but it has created a situation whereby, ‘technically, for the first time ever, all students — rich and poor, urban and rural — have equal access to classes with the most experienced and best-trained teachers.’
Of course, Chinese schools are not the only ones in South East Asia which have had to make the switch to 100% online learning environment.
Photo by Ryan McManimie on Unsplash
The latest South East Asian news at time of writing, is that Hong Kong schools must remain closed until mid-April at the earliest, affecting over 800,000 students. Japan too has closed its schools.
This is certainly a good time to invest in the online education market, and indeed it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that shares in Chinese online education companies are surging.
One Chinese online learning company, Koolearn Tech Holdings, saw its shares rise 83% after the virus shut down schools, while the whole of China’s E-learning industry has increased in value by $3.2 billion. These companies operate in what had become a fiercely competitive, cash-burning market, but which is now one of the few clear winners from the health crisis. As Eric Yang, founder of the Shanghai-based iTutor Group put it:
‘The coronavirus is redefining the online education sector. I expected online classes would surpass physical tutoring businesses in three years, but now I think the turning point will come much earlier.’
In support of that statement is evidence that by the third week of February, some two million Chinese students had enrolled in online classes in the short-term, due to the coronavirus.
Some online education providers, such as Education First, are expecting that many of these students will not return to the classroom when the epidemic ends, and that virus outbreak could be a catalyst for a boom in online education:
‘We believe online education, particularly online afterschool tutoring, could be the mega trend in China’s education sector over the next three to five years.’
But any boom in online education provision will bring its own challenges, and these will certainly hit any countries which are less prepared to enforce government directives in the way the Chinese authorities are.
Not all universities are fully prepared for online provision in the event of an emergency such as that now generated by the coronavirus. Moreover, there are no mandatory standards for online education.
Around the world, schools and universities are closing, but how different countries react will be really interesting to see.
The coronavirus is going to test not just a country’s medical provision, but most definitely its educational provision, specifically how efficient and effective it is in setting up online courses for students from Kindergarten to Higher Education.
As I say, it’s an ill wind…
By Dr Stephen Whitehead (views are author’s own)
This article will also appear in the next Educational Digest International.