Abstract:

Covid19 has hindered the achievement of SDG4, according to the UN report1, school closures have kept 90% of students out of school, meanwhile distance learning remains out of reach for at least 500 million students, for which educational inequalities have been exacerbated. Moroccan rural schools were not an exception. The aim of this study is to co-design an optimal model of distance education in rural areas with the different educational stakeholders. The importance of this work is that it explores in five different rural areas, through focus groups with parents, students, teachers and administration, the real experience of distance education during covid19, and the challenges of innovation and digitalization they faced, before designing better and convenient model. The results show that the government had made a significant effort to provide equal educational opportunities in rural and urban areas even before Covid19.  These efforts are outlined in supplying schools with books, ICT equipment (data show, tablets for students, multimedia classroom, Wi-Fi subscription for schools…), as well as diffusing the courses in TV and radio. Despite all these initiatives, stakeholders reported that the educational continuity during the school closure has failed, because of a series of challenges among them; having the equipment installed only within the school, once the school was closed, both students and teachers remained disconnected and without a computer, security problems consisted in the theft of materials, Parents unable to communicate with the school to follow their children's progress, lack of digital competence among all the stockholders, parents with a very low economic status are unable to purchase the necessary equipment. Considering all these challenges, we co-develop and propose a kit of four pedagogical suitcases for each of the stakeholders: the teacher, the students, the parents and the headteacher, and then propose a training and support program to ensure that they will know how to use it. 

Keywords:

Remote learning, rural schools, transition, educative technology.