He decided. Jean-Michel Blanquer announced in an interview published in The Sunday newspaper (article reserved for subscribers), Sunday August 22, that level 2 of the school protocol would be applied in all establishments in France and Corsica at the start of September.
These rules provide in particular for seven days of isolation for unvaccinated middle and high school students who will be identified as contact cases. However, gray areas remain as to the system applied when teaching is done both remotely and face-to-face for these few days. It will be “either systems [qui] allow you to have a remote student who sees the class, or it is simply homework and follow-up that are provided by the teacher through digital work environments“, replied Jean-Michel Blanquer, questioned on the subject from August 19. “Each establishment is a particular case and has its educational continuity plan.added the minister.
Moreover, while the primary classes will be closed as soon as the first case of Covid-19 is identified, alternating face-to-face and distance learning remains a challenge. Other countries have been faced with such equations since the start of the health crisis, and sometimes even before. From China to the United States, via Quebec, franceinfo takes a short world tour of the answers provided.
Estonia had started a digital transition before the start of the pandemic. In Tallinn, the capital, many digital tools and platforms have already been available to schools for several years, in particular to ensure the link between teachers, parents and students who find themselves at a distance.
Before the health crisis, it happened that young people were occasionally required to have lessons from home. When they were absent due to illness, all they had to do was connect to eKool, an electronic educational platform set up to ensure the continuity of teaching, where students can get feedback on their work.
These tools were not used systematically, but very quickly became “essentials“with the pandemic, Laura Limperk-Kütaru, who heads the international relations department at the Estonian Ministry of Education, told franceinfo. In general, beyond education, the transition to digital is well underway in schools. minds and morals:More than 90% of public services are online in Estonia, so today people are used to doing everything on the internet“, Explain Laura Limperk-Kütaru.
“We have been training teachers in the use of digital tools, and helping them create online teaching materials for several years.”
Laura Limperk-Kütaru, Director of the Department of International Relations of the Estonian Ministry of Educationat franceinfo
In China, going from face-to-face to distanciel was not new to young people either. “Pandemic or not, teachers are used to recording their lessons in order to make them available to students on platforms“, tells franceinfo Yiqing Qi, a journalist in France who spent all his schooling in China. The country has a national platform dedicated to educational resources and public service. Everything was therefore ready when the approximately 200 million students of the primary and secondary schools started their online lessons on February 9, 2020, explains a Unesco study.
Across the Atlantic, a hybrid education was chosen as a solution in Quebec during the pandemic. In certain “red” areas, where the circulation of the virus was the strongest, second and first year students had to go to school every other day, as explained by Radio-Canada in October 2020. The device recalls the one set up in France, when an alternation of face-to-face and home courses (with half-groups) had emerged during the second confinement, to avoid the complete closure of establishments.
Nevertheless, in Quebec, the reflection had already begun before the health crisis. In 2018, a digital action plan was launched by the Ministry of Education to fundamentally transform the education system. A total of 33 measures have been taken to help implement hybrid and online teaching, and to purchase the necessary digital equipment.
“The plan provides for numerous free online training courses for teachers, in order to support them in this digital transition.”
France Gravelle, professor-researcher in educational management at the University of Quebec in Montrealat franceinfo
Among these trainings, we find in particular a webinar, during which a teacher evokes the virtual class that she has experienced. In the case of a course given 100% remotely, she says she works with three screens: her computer which allows her to communicate with her students and send them documents, an interactive whiteboard allowing her to project the course, and a screen in front of her, on which she can see the reactions of the young people.
On the other side of the Canadian border, in the United States, the closure of schools initiated in mid-March 2020 kept millions of students away from classrooms for months. The situation differed greatly from state to state, sometimes even from county to county. However, seeing millions of children no longer going to school has fueled a debate on accumulated academic delays and the psychological consequences of distance learning.
To compensate for this lessonall distance“While curbing the progression of the epidemic, some cities have attempted a compromise, from the start of the 2020 school year, as in New York, as told by the New York Times*. In New Jersey, a local ABC* station reported in August 2020, a school board had considered hybrid teaching, but had to backtrack due to the withdrawal of hundreds of teachers who did not want to return to class for fear of the pandemic. Functioning according to rotations by half-day, week, or every other day, teaching both in distance education and in physics is debated and remains at an experimental stage in the country.
Local initiatives have also flourished elsewhere in the country. When they had the means, many American parents tried to circumvent public education, betting on learning by “learning pods” (learning modules) as an alternative to virtual classes. The concept? Bring together children from the same neighborhood in one or the other to work with a teacher who could be at a distance.
In the four corners of the planet, the impossibility of providing face-to-face courses has in any case prompted countries to imagine various solutions. Peru has thus developed the national distance education program called “Aprendo in casa” (“I learn at home”) intended for kindergartens, primary schools and colleges. The objective of this program was to help students, despite the digital divide, through the dissemination of lessons and educational content on public television and radio stations. But access to virtual classes has not been optimal: many regions located in very remote areas were struggling to get the telephone or internet network, as reported in a report by Amanda Chaparro, correspondent in Peru for Radio France.
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In several African countries, the same approach has been favored, reports a study by the World Bank. In Kenya, a distance learning plan that already existed, using radio and television, was launched as soon as schools closed in March 2020. A similar program was also reinforced in Sierra Leone, after being in place during the Ebola epidemic from 2014.
This boom in online education now allows some states to consider hybrid education. RThe question is whether this trend will persist after the health crisis to take hold in the long term. At the beginning of June, Quebec was betting on a return “100% normal”although the Delta variant could change things, points out The Press.
* These links refer to articles in English.