Teachers and Online Education

In the context of Covid-19 pandemic, authorities call on all teachers in Romania to resort to online teaching where the situation requires it

Daniela Budu, 24.09.2020, 13:50

In Romania, against the background of the Covid-19
pandemic, online schooling has brought about several problems. In some cases,
the necessary equipment for online classes has not been purchased, and in
others the infrastructure for online teaching is still being worked on. There
are also teachers who refuse to use the internet, not only for lack of devices
or internet connection, as it usually happens in rural areas. They say they
do not want to use the platforms that
would collect personal data, and those who already teach online are faced with
many technical issues.

Teachers in Romania must learn to teach online, Prime
Minister Ludovic Orban has stressed again, as there are teachers who do not
want to hold their classes in this way.

Ludovic Orban: All summer we organized courses aimed at
improving teachers’ digital skills. We will carry on with this approach, and
teachers need to get used to this way of teaching. It is difficult to predict how
long the pandemic will last and when a vaccine will be discovered. It is clear
that education will take place in keeping with one of the three scenarios: with
children physically attending classes, in a mixed, hybrid system and online,
if a school is part of what we called the red scenario.

Due to the pandemic, the Education Law has been
amended and provides that preschool, school, pre-university and university
education can be done online during a state of emergency or siege. As the
legislation does not include onlcine courses during the state of alert, in
which Romania has been since mid-May, the head of the Executive has not ruled
out, in recent days, a new amendment to the Education Law. Ludovic Orban has
stated that, in addition to supporting the learning process, there will be ‘lessons
on national television, as it happened under the partnership in place during
the state of emergency, and subsequently until the end of the school year.

Since the start of the new school year, on September
14, dozens of schools have left the green scenario, the one in which all children
go to school, and moved to the yellow
one, which entails both physical school attendance and online courses, and even
to the red one, which is exclusively online teaching. If we look at the
official figures, more than 300 schools in Romania should be online, and more
than 4400 should function in the hybrid system. The remaining 12.500 educational
units have organized their courses in the traditional way, with all the
necessary health protection rules in place.

Less than two weeks after the start of the new school
year, due to the local elections that will take place on September 27th, almost
the entire education network will work exclusively online, for three days,
given that most of the nearly 19,000 polling stations will be organized in
these units. (M. Ignatescu)