1.5 billion learners out of school: A global educational crisis

by | Wednesday, April 01, 2020

The scale of the COVID19 crisis and its impact on global education is hard to comprehend. UNESCO has a website (COVID-19 Educational Disruption and Response) providing almost real-time data on school closures. It is shocking to imagine that in a mere 45 days we have had schools close in over 180 countries, affecting 1.5 billion learners! As Yuval Harari wrote in The world after coronavirus:

In normal times, governments, businesses and educational boards would never agree to conduct such experiments. But these aren’t normal times.

We are living through the largest educational social experiment in history! I am part of an ongoing conversation on the silverliningforlearning website devoted to better understanding the present we are living in and the future that we will be emerging into.

Below is a short promotional video for this project with data and animation showing school closures across the world from the UNESCO site above.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Evaluating creative learning environments: New instrument

Evaluating creative learning environments: New instrument

Note: There is a more recent, May 2023 post (Scaling up the SCALE instrument) that offers an update on other researchers who have utilized the instrument for their own research. Creativity is a key educational goal and essential 21st century skill. That said, much of...

Human Creativity^AI: Team Energy Blog post

Human Creativity^AI: Team Energy Blog post

Below is Team Energy's blog post for my Human Creativity x AI for Education class. In the urge to top every other group in class, Team Energy decided to write two posts - one in third person and the other through their individual voices and perspectives. I have...

Keeping tabs on the experts

In an age where experts are a dime a dozen, willing to pontificate at the drop of a pin, it is hard to tell whom to believe, and whom NOT to believe. In comes Phillip Tetlock, an academic who has made it his mission to evaluate the prognosticators! This is described...

Teaching to learning styles, what hogwash

There is an article in today's Chronicle titled Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May Not Help Students. I have been somewhat skeptical of the learning styles literature for a while, not the least for hearing the phrase being bandied about without much...

The Five Spaces for Design in Education

The Five Spaces for Design in Education

Note: This post was co-authored with Melissa Warr. I love to talk about design and education. I like to hang out with people who care about design and education. This brings us to TalkingAboutDesign.com, a website/blog created by a group of graduate students (and...

TPACK Newsletter (#1)

Judi Harris, Matt Koehler, Mario Kelly and I have been working on setting up a regular TPACK newsletter. The first edition of the newsletter went out to subscribers yesterday. I am including the newsletter here for archival purposes. If you are interested in signing...

The Desk, the Test, the LMS: The 5 Spaces for (re)Design in Education

The Desk, the Test, the LMS: The 5 Spaces for (re)Design in Education

What do a teacher's desk, the PISA test and Learning Management Systems (LMS) have in common. Apart from being educational technologies, they are also the heart of a book chapter that Melissa Warr, Kevin Close and I just published in a book titled Formative Design in...

Technology, creativity & illusion

Marco Tempest is magician who loves technology, or a techno-geek who happens to be a good magician. He brings an unique amalgam of high-tech and magic to his shows (see this article for details), but that is not what is most impressive about his work. What is...

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