Online study due to COVID-19 pandemic made thousands of university students not to graduate on schedule. Photo baosuckhoedoisong.vn

HÀ NỘI – More than 70,000 university students could not graduate on time due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the Ministry of Education and Training (MoET)

In a recent meeting reviewing the education activity of 2021 and rolling out tasks of 2022 of the MoET, Minister Nguyễn Kim Sơn asked universities and colleges to set up plans to bring students back to normal studying.

The studying plans were interrupted and changed dramatically, and nearly 20 million students had to temporarily stop going to school and switch to online learning for several months.

Although online learning was necessary to cope with the pandemic but the implementation was still difficult, Sơn said.

More than 1.8 million of students did not have any tools for online learning.

Many families have two or three children but have just one smart phone for online learning. This situation had caused many students to gradually quit learning.

He said it was more urgent to solve this problem than to evaluate what children learned from the online teaching programme.

Online learning was a challenging solution, and the quality was not as good as face-to-face learning so the ministry must set up plans of increasing education for students when they return to school.

In the context of difficulties caused by the pandemic, the education sector had actively changed to minimise the negative impact.

Localities had developed and implemented teaching programmes ensuring the education requirements and quality of both general and higher programmes.

According to the MoET’s statistics, as of January 9 there were nine provinces and cities nationwide allowing students to come back to school, 35 localities implemented an offline and online teaching combination and 19 localities continued online and televised teaching.

The ministry would complete the comprehensive pandemic response strategy so as to minimise the negative impacts of the pandemic and ensure teaching and studying quality, said Sơn.

Regarding the general education, 2022 and 2023 were identified as two key years in the implementation of 2018’s general education programme so it was necessary to oversee all the challenges of human resources and reality conditions to have plans to overcome and implement, the minister said.

In addition, the high school graduation exam and the implementation of university autonomy needed to have more drastic solutions and actions, he added.

This year, the education sector would also enhance digital transformation, inspection to ensure equality in access to educational chances and meet the learning needs of disadvantaged groups and as well as strengthen cultural institutions in the education and training system, Sơn said. – VNS