In May 2020, we partnered with OpenIDEO for their COVID-19 Reimagine Learning Challenge - a global call to bring together parents, students, and educators to share ideas, inspiration, and approaches that address the educational challenges we are facing amidst the pandemic. The goal? To radically reimagine the future of pre-K-12 education in the post-pandemic world. Together we sought meaningful and relevant answers to the question: How might we help educators, parents, and students adapt to remote learning while also using this moment to radically reimagine what we need our education systems to be?
A team of designers and researchers from IDEO synthesized submissions to better understand how current solutions and practices may foreshadow future trends in education. Furthermore, the #IDEOReimagineLearning community illustrated five bold ways of how participants in the Challenge liked to reimagine learning:
- Equity will no longer be an afterthought
- The “classroom” will be everywhere
- Students will manage their own schedules
- Schools will support families rather than just the other way around
- There will be new measures of success
To read more about these bold thoughts, check out OPENIDEO’s blog post here.
Selection Criteria
High school students who have been adapting to school closures reviewed the submissions, based on their alignment to the Principles of Impact and Scalability developed by HundrED. The students looked at seeing if the submissions were:
- Innovative: Is it fresh?
- Relevant: Does it answer the call to reimagine learning?
- Equitable: Does it make learning more equitable and inclusive for all?
- Scalable: Will it work elsewhere?
More than 400 creative ideas from around the world were submitted by people striving to reshape schools and learning post-COVID. Times of crisis provoke intense learning and experimentation, and it was an honor to bear witness to successful experimenters, entrepreneurs, and dreamers around the globe.
Two of these ideas stood out to us here at HundrED. To celebrate their incredible success and commitment to serving students, we have organized a HundrED Webinar on “How to Turn your COVID-19 Response into a Full-Time Offering”. In it, the winners will talk about how they pivoted their innovation model in response to COVID and offer tips to other innovators looking to do the same.
When: Thursday, 30th July 2020, 1800-1900 UTC
About the COVID-19 Reimagine Learning Challenge Winners
Broad Class- Listen to Learn “Parhai Caro-Na”
POWER99 Foundation has initiated the implementation of Broad Class – Listen to Learn “Parhai Caro Na” Interactive Radio Instruction program, a distance learning initiative for young children (5-11 years) and offers them a way to safely continue their education in the midst of this medical emergency due to coronavirus pandemic.
While many other educational services have stopped entirely in Pakistan, Broad Class - Listen to Learn program was redesigned as a radio education program called Parhai Caro Na (Lets Learn in Urdu) for this uncertain time. The overall goal of the program is to provide uninterrupted quality education to students during the school closure period. The objectives of the project are to provide uninterrupted access to education services as well as increase awareness on Coronavirus (prevention & response mechanism) through these radio programs.
Parhai Caro-Na program can be described as an emergency assistance intervention that believes in active and cooperative learning activities, listening exercises, speaking activities, riddles, sound games and role-playing with music and stories. The pedagogical techniques have been devised on social, linguistic, cognitive, and emotional contexts and the content of the program is socially and culturally relevant.
Include2020 is an inclusive education application that can be downloaded for offline access to Arabic-language inclusive education content. There are sections of the application directed at adult caregivers, at siblings and at children with special needs. Content focuses on
- Skills for independent living,
- Academic skills, and
- Communication skills.
The application's content is produced by teachers who have been trained in inclusive education by "A Global Voice for Autism", and who are refugees and unemployed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These teachers are often unemployed or underemployed due to a lack of recognition of their teaching skills in the communities where they reside as refugees. However, they have many skills to offer and Include2020 gives these teachers the opportunity to use their skills to support children that face barriers when accessing education.
Include2020 targets children with special needs in the Middle East who have largely been excluded from transitions to online education as well as children who have been excluded from school systems altogether due to their unique learning needs. Include2020 capitalizes on the high percentage of families who have a smartphone in their households as a vehicle to disseminate content while accounting for challenges related to internet access by allowing all content to be downloaded and accessible offline.
Register for the upcoming HundrED Webinar on How to Turn your COVID-19 Response into a Full-Time Offering NOW!
