FOR most of 2020 and 2021, learning for hundreds of thousands of school children in Malaysia was anything but normal.

When our schools were first closed as part of the country’s policy in attempts to control the pandemic since March last year, no one knew for sure for how long the schools would be closed. Nor did anyone have a clue about the extent of the impacts of the disruptions.

The consternation over the potential impact, both immediate and long-term, on school education is prolonged with the implementation of the MCO 3.0.

One of the first issues exposed is the digital divide that exists within our society.  According to the former director-general of education last year, less than a third of Malaysian schoolchildren are equipped with a personal computer, a tablet or a laptop.

And only 52% of the urban residents and 37% of the rural residents have access to reliable internet connection. The rest are not as fortunate.

Digital divide aside, loss of learning opportunities at this scale will have long-lasting consequences. And it demands a readjustment of learning contents across school curricula.

A curriculum response is pertinent

All curricula currently implemented at schools are written according to what is allowed by a normal school calendar — a total of which is 190 of school days, or 38 school weeks, a year. Within this constraint, curriculum writers select and order the sequence of contents, not only in accordance with the aims and objectives of the curriculum, but also the time necessary for the learning to ensure that it is deep and meaningful for the students.

In other words, for a student to learn something in a deep and meaningful way, he or she needs the time not only to receive instruction from the teachers, but also the time to make sense the information, the time for the brain to encode what has been successfully learned, the time to identify mistakes and misconceptions along the way, and the time to relearn if it is forgotten.

And more time will be needed if mastery of the knowledge or skills is intended. If hypothetically 40% of the school hours have been lost due to the school closure, no number of remedial classes would be able to recover the lost learning.

At best, remedial classes can recover the lost instruction time. The subject matter experts and curriculum writers must start asking questions such as: given the crisis laying in front of us, do our students really have to learn everything that has been written in the syllabus? Are there contents which can be removed without affecting future learning in the same discipline? Should the nature of curriculum shift from one which is knowledge-orientated towards one which is competency-orientated?

If we ignore the necessity of a curriculum response and do not start streamlining the curricula, we risk forcing our students to resort to rote learning without good understanding, depriving them the chance to build a foundation that is strong enough for future learning.

A pedagogical response

Translocating lessons online as an immediate response to school closures exposes more issues than digital divide — many soon realise that it takes more than a PowerPoint presentation and a reliable internet connection to deliver an effective online lesson.

For instance, distance education poses additional challenges for teachers who are uncomfortable with the use of technology. The change in the learning set up and milieu has altered the nature of interaction among the students and the teacher. This in turn poses more challenges for classroom management and retention of students’ attention.

Project-based learning and problem-based learning become a robust strategy to enhance student participation. ICT literacy of the teachers and the students suddenly becomes a determining factor for an effective lesson.

When the school education in China went fully online last year to mitigate the lost time in school, its education system had already completed two of four phases of a reformation towards digitalisation.

That means teachers in the country had access to a bank of digitised learning materials, electronic platforms which serve the needs of school administration as well as teaching and learning. They had also been adapting and modifying these platforms and resources to allow better integration of the digitalised and conventional education approach.

In comparison, what has the Education Ministry done to ensure efficiency of online teaching and learning? Have we set up sufficient digitalised materials for our teachers and our students? Are our teachers prepared to take on digitalised classroom and online teaching? Are the schools and district education departments ready to support the teachers in realising digitalised teaching and learning?

Besides cancelling or postponing public exams, and a delayed rolling out of educational TV programmes, what are the concrete plans that the ministry has installed?

It is unlikely that issues caused by Covid-19 can be resolved in a period of months. Concerns about the impact of disrupted learning are growing.

It is high time the Education Ministry reveals its plan to the public and starts a much-needed public discourse on how to move our education forward in a timely manner at a trying time like this. – June 21, 2021.

* Chan Yit Fei is a founding member of Agora Society. He is a cellist and educator by profession, and a biotechnologist by training. He writes to learn and to think, and most importantly, to force himself to finish reading books that would otherwise not see much of the light of day.