Challenges and Innovations in Distance Education: Transformative Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, and Tajikistan

• In Event: The State of Education in Eurasia: experiences and challenges

Proposal

Distance education has become an effective education response and tool for ensuring continuity of education in emergencies, but challenges remain in terms of its access and quality. The influence of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has increased existing disparities in educational opportunities and exposed gaps in national policies when it comes to equitable access to education in all formats in education systems around the world. On the other hand, the pandemic has generated an environment in which the prospects for distance education have rapidly become taken much more seriously by policymakers, education workers and students and their families. Formerly separated from most mainstream conceptualizations of school education, has the moment for distance education arrived?
This presentation will report on the early results of research on distance education being undertaken by a recently formed South-South consortium of researcher-practitioners in the Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, and Tajikistan. The consortium is examining strategies for the organization of distance education in these three countries in response to temporary, partial or full school closures as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The aim of the research is to uncover existing innovations (technological, pedagogical, social and others) that are occurring in the switch to distance education, their transformative role in teaching/learning approaches, but also to understand and analyse the challenges that may limit the effectiveness of distance education in the three countries.
The three countries were selected as cases as they share a common historical background and similar problems in political, social and economic development. Tajikistan and the Kyrgyz Republic have similar geographic dimensions and mountainous landscapes, with a predominantly agrarian and rural population. The Kyrgyz Republic and Mongolia share common roots in semi-nomadic livestock farming, lifestyles and spiritual values.
In Tajikistan and the Kyrgyz Republic, unresolved gender problems are quite acute, including early marriages of girls, and “bride kidnapping” in the Kyrgyz Republic that do not allow girls to complete their education. Other gender problems include stereotypes and roles, a high level of migration, small children left in the care of grandmothers and relatives. In all three countries, the problems of connectivity of schools to the Internet remain acute, especially in Tajikistan, where some remote areas have problems with electricity supply. Long distance to school is a serious problem for Mongolian students. High levels of poverty with the ensuing consequences complicates access to quality education, including access to electronic educational resources and distance learning. Covid-19 has exacerbated existing problems inherited from the Soviet past and introduced new challenges to ensuring continuity of education for school children. In all three countries, the educational process was interrupted at different periods. At the same time, various attempts have been made on the governmental level, by school administrators and educators’ communities to organize distance learning for school children.
To date, there has been little research on distance education in these countries although its importance is recognized. For example, it has been identified as having ‘considerable potential for meeting diverse learning needs of Mongolia and a suitable form of education access’. Also, the government of Tajikistan recognizes the importance of ICT in modernizing the education system and legislation encourages the development of distance learning. This project is not only the first major effort to research distance education in the Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, and Tajikistan, but is also breaking ground through its focus on three key intersecting areas of inequality in educational access in these countries: remote rural communities, ethnic minorities, and gender.
Initial research undertaken by the consortium in preparation for the first phase of empirical data collection shows that the pandemic is raising complex and deep issues in relation to education in the three countries that require further elaboration. These issues go beyond the boundaries of simple technological problems, also including governance, capacity building for teachers, developing digital literacies among students and educators, and creating digital infrastructures in local languages.
The research project (2021-23) takes a mixed methods approach that puts education stakeholders at the core through a highly participatory multi-actor series of processes. The core principles of the research project are the concept of the co-construction of knowledge and collective learning and action. Through these core principles, innovations in distance education will be identified not by the project team but by a holistic group of actors involved in education.
At this CIES presentation, members of the consortium will present the results of the first phase of the project. In the first phase (November 2021 to February 2022), locally based researchers are conducting in-depth interviews with students, teachers, school administrators, parents, IT specialists, researchers, and policymakers, emphasizing the three areas of inequality noted above. The interviews aim to provide a better awareness of the causes, configurations, and effects of disadvantage and/or marginalization and will also identify existing pockets of innovation in distance education.
Overall, the research project will contribute to mobilising knowledge on the use of distance learning opportunities in schools, strengthening educators' competencies and skills in ICT, improving and deepening understanding and vision of educational strategies, and supporting long-term positive changes in education systems.

Authors

• Zhyldyz Doolbekova, Taalim-Forum Public Foundation

• Emma Sabzalieva, UNESCO

• Almagul Osmonova, Taalim-Forum Public Foundation