Covid-19 Impact on Digital Learning

This report (from LearnPlatform competition notebook)  represent my analysis of Covid-19 impact on digital learning. The data in my possession enabled me to highlight the following three essential points on student engagement.  

    

• Student's engagement in digital learning is best if education technology (Google Docs, Google Meet, etc..) allows students to have easy an reliable internet access connectivity. And also, it goes to the basic needs of the students and the teachers.
• The socio-economic aspect is the main problem that can decrease the engagement of the pupils because a parent who has a wage loss during the confinement of the population and the closure of economic activities can lead him to a poverty, to an expulsion of home, abrupt stopping or absenteeism of his child in digital learning.
• To reduce the impact of Covid-19 on the socio-economic life, some American states have preferred to increase the minimum hourly wage and to reopen certain economic activities. To solve the problem of eviction from home, some American states have chosen to give moratoriums on evictions to homeowners (some are still active; others are expired). Thanks to this, we observe an improvement in student engagement in some states.

Here, we present to you some figures and tables that are related to this three essentials points on student engagement. 

School closures in the worldwide

Duration school closures

Let's define this two terms

• Full school closures refer to situations where all school were closed at the nation-wide due to Covid-19.
• Partial school closures  refer to school closures in some regions or for some grades, or with reduced in-person instruction.

Duration school closures in the worldwide  

Between the Sep 2020 - Jun 2021 school year, many countries are using digital learning recommended by UNESCO. Therefore, many countries have undergone third or fourth wave caused by Covid-19 variant and mutation. For example, USA(Delta, Cal.C20, etc..), India(hybrid variant), England(Delta), etc..
Do not forget that the duration school closure depends on the pandemic control of the country.

USA school closures

USA K-12 public school closure

Only 41.2% of the states had chosen to close school on 2020-03-16 and the following day, 17.6% of the states had also chosen to close school. Two days only, 58.8% of the States were forced to decide to close schools; which demonstrates that the spread of the SARS-Cov II virus was very rapid within the American population.

Despite the spread of Covid-19 in the world, each country try to control the disruptions to education by trying partially open school. UNESCO recommend each country to use online learning or distance learning but this solution have huge challenge that we discover below.

The challenge of the digital learning in USA

The digital connectivity and engagement

 In USA, many Black/Hispanic student have connection ratio in their resident between 0.18 and 1. And only 20% of Black/Hispanic student have connection ratio between 1 and 2.

student internet connectivity

Residential fixed connection

According to the two charts above, we can show you the engagement index in USA for year 2020.

engagement index

According to the date a state closed K-12 public schools statewide chart, we can see that the engagement index increases between Mar-Apr 2020. After decreasing slowly between Apr-Jun 2020; at this time each state opened partially their school. The Sep-2020 to Jan 2021, engagement index increases very fast than the previous academic year (USA have closed school during 40 weeks, see Duration school closures chart. )

The effect of the Covid-19 pandemic on distance learning

It was on March 13, 2020 that President Trump declared Covid-19 a national emergency. March 19, 2020 - California issues statewide stay-at-home  order. Three days before i.e March 16, 2020 41.2% of states closed K-12 schools and the next 2 days 17.6% and 13.7% of states in the USA were doing the same (see: the date a state closed K-12 public schools statewide chart).

Between March-August 2020 in USA, the partial closure of schools lasted 16 weeks while for Sep 20-Jun 21 it lasted 39 weeks so 20 more than the year 2020 (see: Duration school closures). This is the reason why in the following figure, we observe a higher engagement index. 

Engagement index area

Student engagement and the type of education technology

During the school closures, five provider have participated to the distance learning. We have Google LLC, Microsoft, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Learning A-Z, IXL Learning. But here we present only the product that have large student engagement index.

Google LLC product

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

IXL Learning product

Student engagement depends on the type of education technology. If a technology offers ease of internet access and moves toward the basic need of students and teachers then engagement will be positive.  For example, Google Docs, YouTube and Meet have positive engagement index. 

Student engagement and socio economic status

All USA states have alerted the state of emergency, some ceased the alert (Florida, Massachussets, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Virginia) but others not implemented. By this emergency, all of us instructed the confinement in March.  Many families lost their salaries during confinement. For solving this problem, some states have improved their minimum hourly wages. 

Minimum hourly wages ranking

Let's see the wage losses of each state during the state of emergency with confinement 

Wage losses of each USA states

Closing and reopening of bars, casinos, restaurants, gym, etc..

Let's see the behavior of bars, casinos, gyms, etc.. according to the policy of each state to fight against Covid-19.  Some states decide to close or reopen some economic activities.  By this decision, we can see how each activity losses many profit and impact on salaries of the some employees.

Economic activity duration closure

By seeing this chart, many employees in their activity have a considerable wage losses which has a huge impact on the payment of rent, internet subscription and can also hinder the digital learning of his children.

Overall moratorium on evictions

Student engagement is more influenced by a moratorium eviction. We present to you two type of the moratorium on eviction: Currently in place and expired.

Student engagement and moratorium on eviction currently in place

Moratorium on eviction currently in place

Student engagement and moratorium on eviction expired

Moratorium on eviction expired

NB: The states with good engagement index are those who have a moratorium on expulsions currently in place.

This is an end of my report from Competition Notebook LearnPlatform. If you need to see detail on my work from Kaggle Data Science community, see it below 👇👇👇👇👇 For all questions you can comment.

Thank you for reading !! 

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