Burning Questions on Redefining Educational Publishing in a Post-pandemic World
With the global pandemic causing the largest education disruption since World War 2, UNESCO found that over 1.6 billion students in 190 countries were out of school in 2020. While evidence on the long-term impacts of school closures remain sparse, lost learning, estimated at two-thirds of an academic year, on average, will have significant socio-economic impacts globally.
Throughout this unprecedented global education disruption, educational publishers played a vital role in supporting national education systems, schools, and teachers in transitioning to online learning. Academic publishers were on the frontlines by providing policymakers, public health workers, and the medical community with evidence-based research to make informed decisions and expedite vaccine research. Unfortunately, the focus of educational authorities, policymakers, teachers, educational and academic publishers, and other stakeholders on maintaining student engagement, participation, and progression during the pandemic has left little time for industry-wide, cross-stakeholder reflection on the future.
As an educational publisher who has worked extensively on educational quality, access, and equity in the Middle East and North Africa, I recently found myself contemplating how educational publishers globally may need to redefine the value of educational publishing in a post-pandemic world. Despite some preliminary attempts to understand how the future may play out, such as the UK Publishers Association’s study on how teachers are using resources in remote learning, educational publishers have very little information to support them in shaping their businesses post-pandemic. In this environment of uncertainty, in which educational publishers have been significantly affected by lack of clarity about educational budgets, school re-openings, and how persistent education digitization trends may be, there are a lot of burning, unanswered questions on how educational publishing may evolve post-pandemic.
How can educational publishers positively shape and contribute to discussions about what future education systems will look like?
The resilience of education systems is being tested by the global pandemic. In this process of stress testing, the International Publishers Association’s report From Response to Recovery: The Impact of Covid-19 on the Global Publishing Industry found improved dialogue between publishers, teachers, and librarians. However, teachers, policymakers, publishers, learners, and the many other stakeholders involved in education have begun to ask important questions about the post-pandemic future of education: Do teaching and learning approaches need to evolve? Are there better ways of assessing learning outcomes? How should education systems adapt to asynchronous learning? What role should educational publishers play in teacher training? Are open educational resources living up to their promises?
With profound questions about the future of education systems being mulled, there is significant opportunity for educational publishers to proactively contribute to discussions on how the future may play out. For example, in the midst of Europe’s Covid crisis, the European Commission hosted an open public consultation on how the global pandemic will shape education and training which surfaced some interesting findings. The consultation found that 95% of respondents consider the pandemic a turning point for how technology is used in education and training which will lead to increased demand for more relevant, interactive, and easy-to-use content. Findings from the consultation were used to inform the Commission’s Digital Education Action Plan.
Europe’s rethink on what education will look like post-pandemic is likely a precursor to similar initiatives globally which would greatly benefit from the input of educational publishers. Oxford University Press’ Smart Curriculum, Pearson’s Future of Qualifications and Assessment, and Cambridge University Press’ Shape Education initiative are examples of effective attempts by publishers to become more involved in these future-defining discussions. Perhaps there is room for a global consultation or online event that engages stakeholders in defining a future-focused, coordinated educational publishing recovery road map?
Is there a need to redefine the post-pandemic educational publishing advocacy agenda?
With teachers gaining significantly more confidence in their ability to use technology in the classroom during school shutdowns, they are showcasing increased desire for more professional autonomy on lesson planning. However, teachers still acknowledge the main reason they use paid resources, like textbooks, over their own resources is to reduce their workload. In a post-pandemic world, this desire could translate into increased demands by teachers to co-create resources in partnership with educational publishers rather than rely on content curation. In seeking choice and localized solutions, teachers may want to have even more influence than in the past on what textbooks and curriculum resources they use and more flexibility in customizing them for their classrooms.
As educational publishers become more involved in multi-stakeholder national and regional consultations and dialogues on the post-pandemic future for education, the focus of publishing ecosystem collaboration is likely to shift towards digital transformation, digital skills, and the precursors for high-performing digital education ecosystems. Whereas educational publishers have traditionally collaborated with government, teachers, and authors on delivering national curricula, future collaboration is likely to mean much more substantive involvement of publishers in building the digital capacities of education and training institutions, teacher training, defining digital skills and competencies, and the storage and use of student data.
All of this is to say that the roles and expectations of educational publishers is very likely to change quite substantially as its value reassessed and redefined in a post-pandemic world. It seems likely that we as educational publishers will need to revisit our advocacy agenda to ensure it proactively asserts our voice around the right themes at this critical turning point for education.
How can educational systems and publishers work together to bridge the digital divide?
With technology portrayed as the great savior of education in the pandemic, the persistence of a digital divide has been glossed over. The TLDR narrative of the global pandemic’s impact on education and digital acceleration forgets the millions of students who have been unable to attend school globally and are being left behind.
Nowhere is this problem more acute than in Africa. In reviewing the entries for the African Publishing Innovation Fund, I came across the shocking figure that over 250 million children are out of school in Africa. In rural communities, lack of internet connectivity, library facilities, and significant urban-rural digital divides have left students unable to attend remote learning. Girls, in particular, have been affected more by closures since they are often expected to take on childcare responsibilities and household chores. At risk is a potentially lost generation of youth which lacks critical literacy, livelihood, and life skills.
Based on my discussions with publishers associations globally, the risk of the digital divide creating a lost generation of youth is not isolated to developing publishing markets. Digital infrastructure, teacher familiarity with technology, and access to quality teaching and learning materials is an increasingly real issue even in education systems in more developed publishing markets as well. Unfortunately, publishers and global educational systems don’t appear to have many compelling ways to deal with universal access to quality education as education and training systems adapt to a covid-accelerated digital age.
The global pandemic has underscored that the digital divide can manifest in a multitude of ways: differing capacities to pay for textbooks, inconsistent levels of teacher digital skills, varying levels of national educational publishing system maturity, and emergent copyright systems that don’t incent investment in quality resources. For this reason, redefining post-pandemic educational publishing appears as much about equity and inclusion as it is about industry progress and adaptation to evolving realities.
More Questions Than Answers
As many education systems are still in the midst of the global pandemic, it is difficult to reflect on how education might change post-pandemic. It seems there are far more questions than answers at the moment. However, this is a very defining moment for educational publishers to make their voices heard. As we look to the future, the role of publishers in shaping future-oriented educational policy discussions, our advocacy agenda, and how we address equity and inclusion in increasingly digitized national education systems may all need to be re-evaluated for what appears to be a critical turning point for educational publishers.
