%T Teachers’ Voices on the Impact of COVID-19 on School Education: Are Ed-Tech Companies Really the Panacea?
%O This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
%D 2020
%L discovery10118689
%J Contemporary Education Dialogue
%X COVID-19 has brought about changes to the education system that
impact teachers in multiple ways. The article discusses the views
of affected teachers under the three-gap framework: access, usage,
and pedagogical skills gap. Between 29 April 2020, and 29 May 2020,
an online survey was administered to 550 Delhi and National Capital
Region (NCR) teachers, of which 288 responded. The data show that
the inequalities between private schools and government schools are
sharpened by the move to online education. This is compounded by the
fact that students from economically weaker sections of society have
become hard to reach, and teachers do not know how to support hardto-reach students who are also severely affected by the pandemic.
The data also show that teachers have not been trained in online
pedagogies. Ed-Tech companies have been stepping in, presenting
themselves as a panacea to the problem with further consequences
to teachers’ profession, standing, and livelihoods. However, Ed-Tech solutions are not relevant for hard-to-reach students or teachers in
schools that serve hard-to-reach communities. The article first presents
the voices of teachers affected by the pandemic and then critically
examines the role of Ed-Tech companies, which pertain to fill the online
pedagogical gap
%A S Jain
%A M Lall
%A A Singh
%K COVID-19, digital gap, teachers, inequalities, government schools, private
schools, Ed-Tech