A school education will never be the same - the impact of the pandemic on secondary education in Kazakhstan was discussed in Nur-Sultan. Over three million school students have been studying distantly for almost the entire academic year. Two million of them did so through the digital platform ‘OnlineMektep’. Experts estimated that this platform has become the most visited educational web resource in this school year. 315 million online classes have been held via this digital platform since the beginning of the academic year. More than 400 specialists of the BilimLand platform and over 500 teachers of Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools participated in the development of digital lessons. They said that OnlineMektep has managed to unite over 370,000 teachers from all over the country. Overall, the platform has many advantages, teachers say. First of all, it allowed Kazakh schoolchildren from the provinces to have access to unique teaching practice.
“In my opinion, to date, OnlineMektep is the main educational platform in terms of distance learning for school students. First of all, I would like to mention the convenience for a teacher to work with this platform. It has an option of restoring the time of completion of the assignments, which puts all students in the same conditions. It is convenient to check the assignments, and to write down teacher’s notes. All student work is saved in the database, so that at any time both the teacher and the parent can view them after the teacher has checked them and read the teacher’s feedback,” noted Lyudmila Bekenova, a teacher at lyceum school №2 in Kokshetau City.
“We want to expand opportunities for teachers, we want to share the best practices of teachers of intellectual schools. Teachers of correspondence schools come up with Olympiad assignments, which prepare students for admission to educational institutions both in Kazakhstan and abroad. So, I am sure it’s a longitudinal project, since the material is unique, distinctive and it has a specific methodology, a specific teacher in accordance with the curriculum of the Republic of Kazakhstan,” Zhanar Abdildina, Director of the Center for Educational Programs of Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools.
Translation by Assem Zhanmukhanova
Editing by Galiya Khassenkhanova
