IP 5 Global Health

Let me ask you a question: “if you are not a Canadian, do you have to verify your degree that you are about to get after you finish your MET program?”

My answer is: I do. However, based on a policy enacted in 2018, the Ministry of Education in China classifies all completely online degrees as “non-verifiable”. This means that if I ever want to go to any state-own or any relatively big private-sector company, my official highest educational level will remain as Bachelor.

During the pandemic, China has issued multiple statements indicating that students who were unable to return to school for in-person classes due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic would not be affected in terms of their educational certification (教育部留学服务中心, 2021). However, after several countries announced the resumption of offline teaching, the Chinese Ministry of Education quickly issued a statement stating that the educational certification of students who could attend offline classes but chose not to return to school would not be recognized (教育部留学服务中心, 2022). This clearly highlights a contradiction, as we are still emphasizing the so-called “normal” and what the “correct” way of school education should be. This echoes Boys’ point that “a common-sense belief that online learning is inherently inferior to face-to-face (Boys, 2021, p.16)”.

During the global COVID-19 pandemic, many educational technology software and platforms have emerged and adapted to the needs of online education. Both the education sector and the general public have been “forced” to realize that there is more than one way to conduct classes. As proven by scholars like Kuhfeld et al. (2020) and Bennette (2020) that not all learning results are damaged in the absence of face-to-face classes and when students do not physically go to school.

Policies and attitudes such as these will continue to limit the opportunity for people like me who are financially disadvantaged. The only way to for me to get a quality master’s level education is to do an online one and support it by working along the way. Had I been forced to move to Canada/Vancouver to complete this degree, I would not have even considered doing it at UBC.

The act of bending the rules (during the special global pandemic period) shows the possibilities of a more diverse educational future. However, instead of putting in the effort to verify whether the education offered is legitimate and qualified, my government has elected to deny it all or only recognized normal and formal education is lazy policy. Clearly, policies like this before and after the pandemic shows the determination to discriminate the disadvantage group and indicate the official recognition of what an authenticated education should be. Which led me to believe that the majority of formal education sectors will not remember the lessons learned during COVID-19 and that the efforts to return as close to normal in pre-covid times is be successful. That being said, once COVID-19 was declared to be over by the governments of the world, there was a rush to return to the status quo of 2019 (Pre-Covid). Many of the lessons we learned during Covid-19, regarding work from home, mental health and education were quickly cast aside for the pre-Covid traditions.

Boys (2021) talked about how teachers or “normal” education always want to “see” the students’ performance and when the teacher cannot assess the students by seeing them (either from interaction or facial expression) is the biggest frustration. Teachers need to develop approaches and skills to work with the technology and students to achieve real diversity in education. I completely agree with Boys (2021) that the pandemic exposed the weakness of our current education system and teacher training system. We have not and are not doing a good enough job of educating our educators to be successful teachers in anything other than an in-person, brick and mortar classroom. During the pandemic, teachers did the best they could with what they had but their training is almost entirely designed to teach them how to teach in an in-person environment. Many struggled with the online environments. 

The changes during the pandemic could be great for many but I don’t think the decision makers have the will or the creativity to capitalize on the lessons learned. We saw how groups of people who may be disadvantaged due to wealth, disability, mental health, social issues or location were afforded opportunities like never before but many decision makers seem to want to forget about the strides we have made in supporting these groups of people. It was okay to take these strides when it supported everyone (in a case like the global pandemic) but now that we are back to where these measures can be erased, many are trying to do that and relegate many of these groups of people back to being disadvantaged. At this point, we cannot claim that it is accidental or not possible to support these groups of people and now we cannot claim it is anything except active discrimination against these and other disadvantaged groups of people.

I do hope that there are teachers/educators/jurisdictions who are using the lessons learned from this time to set a new educational foundation because it is needed, but I do not see much evidence in that regard. I hope I’m wrong.