Abstract:

The Covid pandemic suddenly appeared and caused havoc in the education systems around the world. Some major problems that occurred within the Bulgarian education system on all levels are presented. The different levels are primary, secondary and university education. The main problems are lack of knowledge and experience with distance education, lack of appropriate for distance education equipment, software solutions and services, lack of emergency plan and structured strategy in education, lack of differentiation of the time required for distance and present face-to-face education and others.

The root causes of all problems and cumulative effects are analyzed in a consistent and interconnected manner in order they to be well understood. Appropriate and reasonable solutions are offered for future crisis situations. The ones we offer we have already successfully applied for different subjects which are part of a university engineering education. The aim is these solutions to become integral part of a future Government education crisis plan. Good planning and predictable order are needed for students’ and teachers’ well-being and for keeping students engaged in distance learning. Such a plan must be designed because the education systems are one of the pillars of countries’ securities. In the Bulgarian case, the emerging Covid crisis led to an education mess because of lack of proper planning. The final effects are two years of poor education, endangered human lives and many disappointed teachers, students and parents. The solutions that we have applied and that we offer allow the distance education work and material development to become an opportunity for improvement of the common face-to-face education process afterwards, instead of a useless burden. Teachers could create a more versatile education approaches with interactive additional materials that could add value to the common current teaching methods and could be used almost immediately in times of crisis. This will create more robust and problem tolerant education systems.

Keywords:

Education, learning, distance, problem, experience, synchronous, strategy, plan.