- In conversation with Tara de Mel
Tara de Mel[/caption]
Brunch spoke with Worldwide Commission to Educate All Kids (Post Pandemic) Member, Education Forum Sri Lanka Co-Co-ordinator, and former Ministry of Education Secretary Tara de Mel at length on how the world is treating digital learning (DL) in what is, hopefully, the tail-end of the pandemic, with schools starting to open for physical learning again.
Mid pandemic and with a view to the future, what measures are international organisations like, for example, the World Bank and the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), taking regarding DL?
The most glaring issue of pandemic learning since March 2020 has been the lack of opportunities for DL. Countries with low and medium access to technology suffered the most, and they continue to suffer. Policymakers in most countries continue to underestimate the importance of the universalisation of DL through system-wide changes. Yes, these need massive investments.
UNESCO and UN agencies like the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) have been playing a significant role in trying to enable DL access to most countries that can be categorised as under-privileged. Some initiatives of these agencies include expanding access to DL through facilitating low-cost internet access; developing IT skills of young people and access to devices; ensuring content and data are affordable for teachers, students, and schools; investing in teacher training and scaling innovative practices to enable DL; investing in improving the capacity and skills of young people to better enable schools to navigate work and life transition; encouraging youth to engage in understanding the importance of DL, its relevance, and how to use DL responsibly and ethically; addressing the gender gap and the role it plays in the digital divide; and equipping girls and young women with necessary skills and tools to overcome these challenges, has also been a priority.
The pandemic resulted in students from most countries suffering significant “learning losses” and academic regression. Quoting a recent document of the World Bank “...unless this regression is reversed, learning poverty and the associated human capital loss, will hold economies and societies back for decades. Children must be given a chance to recover the education they have lost. They need access to well-designed reading materials, DL opportunities, and transformed education systems that will help them prepare them for future challenges. Well-qualified teachers and effective use of technology are fundamental to this process…”
Since the latter part of 2021, when students began their return to in-person learning in class, DL has emerged as the new frontier in education. Innovation in DL is a key enabler of this transition and is driving sector-wide change, and improving access to quality learning opportunities.
In most developing countries, initiatives on DL are focusing on the development of multiple types of skills – foundational, digital, transferrable, and job-specific skills which can be accessed by the majority of students. What’s important is that these types of initiatives should be accessible to even marginalised communities in low-income countries.
Whilst in-person learning using face-to-face teaching-learning methods is the hallmark of conventional education delivery, scaling of world-class DL solutions and innovations that can reach all children is a must.
Spurred by the education fallout of the pandemic, some countries are expanding internet access using novel low-cost technology and with simplified and affordable data packages, enabling multi-service telecommunication towers and satellite links, creating device libraries within marginalised communities and schools, together with device service and sustainability systems within and out of schools. A repository of data is accumulating, on how to scale DL to reach every child, in affluent or impoverished societies, even in no-tech/low-tech contexts.
For millions of students to leapfrog into fast-paced, digitised, and interconnected economies, DL is a must. More opportunities for peer learning through inter-nation co-operation; overcoming country-specific barriers with public, private, and development partners, become imperative. UN agencies, the World Bank, ADB (Asian Development Bank) and similar agencies are facilitating this process so that countries can learn from one another on how to use digital technologies to improve access and expand education across the board, and also to facilitate a robust digital economy.
Has Sri Lanka taken a formal stance on DL and 2021, especially now that schools have largely reopened?
Not to my understanding.
Schools re-opening fully for in-person learning is very welcome news. But without a firm policy stance on integrating DL into all classrooms, without allocating funds for implementation, and without speedily rolling out these policies at the school level, government pronouncements and aspirations alone, would remain as rhetoric only.
A Department of Census and Statistics survey done in 2020 showed that only 22.2% of households owned a laptop or PC. Nearly 75% of students attending government schools do not have home-based computers. Only about 35% of the entire population had access to the internet, with fixed internet subscribers amounting to only 1.67 million people. A 2020 LIRNEAsia study showed that less than 45% of school-age students had access to internet-based education (even in the form of notes delivered as PDF using WhatsApp). As for access to real-time, face-to-face online learning using laptops, tabs, and PCs, less than 10% of students had these facilities – many of whom were from urban and privileged backgrounds. Although 96% of households possessed at least one mobile phone, the device usually belongs to the parents and would often be shared with children for educational purposes, which can be challenging.
Internet access expansion should be a priority. IT infrastructure should be developed through an extensive rollout of fibre optic connections to all parts of Sri Lanka, facilitating multi-service tower installation, satellite connectivity, and other methods. Enabling widespread access to affordable data packages should also be done simultaneously. The Government, together with the Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA), the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka (TRCSL), telecom service providers in the state and private sectors, donor agencies, non governmental organisations (NGOs), civil society, and international development partners should jointly prepare an implementation road map, aiming to at least double the current IT penetration in the country within a year, and maybe treble it within two years.
Device accessibility and affordability should simultaneously be identified as a top priority. Current device accessibility data shows that under 30% of households own a laptop or PC. The target should be at least a threefold increase by 2024. Although mobile phone access is almost universal, these are not necessarily smartphones and also, parents and children can’t share smartphones, particularly when the latter use them for education.
In terms of school IT education, access to high-speed internet/broadband, IT infrastructure facilities, smart classrooms, and IT labs are all highly restricted. Total school ICT labs amount to 5,700 with about 150,000 PCs. Digital panels, interactive smartboards, tablets, PCs, and dedicated connectivity are available in less than 5% of all schools. About 50% of schools lack ICT labs and ICT infrastructure and have no device accessibility-sustainability strategy. Out of the 10,100 schools, about 30% have internet connection but with inadequate speed and no data packages. About 2,500 schools do not have any mobile signals or data connections.
Amongst provincial (and some national) schools, and particularly in rural areas with no connectivity or “signal”, IT education is still a luxury. IT, science, and maths-trained teachers, and schools offering these disciplines, amount to less than 1,000 out of the total 10,170 schools. IT infrastructure, digital infrastructure, and device accessibility are all essential if Sri Lanka is to undertake a paradigm shift in IT education and embark on a digital economic recovery plan.
How applicable are the measures being taken globally to the Sri Lankan context?
Very applicable, because we can learn from best practices adopted by certain income-compatible East Asian countries (e.g. Vietnam), African countries (e.g. Rwanda) and also South Asia (Bangladesh and certain states in India are moving apace in enabling DL).
Simultaneously, we should study how wealthy nations are integrating DL into education systems, how they have introduced “coding” from the primary classes, and how teacher-training institutions train teachers in coding and also in artificial intelligence (AI) skills. Sri Lanka’s National Colleges of Education (NCOEs) should be encouraged to start such initiatives, so that teacher trainees can integrate DL into teaching-learning within classrooms. For that to happen, the Government must equip NCOEs with DL infrastructure like PCs, laptops (one per trainee), smart boards, digital panels, and ensure high-speed internet connection.
How can DL play a role now that schools are reopened, assuming they aren’t closed again because of a future outbreak?
DL is one major tool to equip students with the multiple skill sets they need to be equipped with, to face the new job markets they will enter when leaving school in a few years’ time. Future jobs that students would have to compete for (locally and globally) would place a high premium on ICT skills, AI skills, higher-order cognitive skills, collaboration and communication skills, with leadership skills and social-emotional learning. These future jobs would need an understanding of data science, internet of things (IoT), robotics, bio/gene-tech and similar new-age technologies, and machine learning. Having a substantial grasp of DL from a young age, therefore, becomes imperative.
On the possibilities of school closure once again, in March 2020 when the pandemic broke, most countries closed schools based on the presumption that schools were more contagious than communities and that schools can become “super spreaders”, and that kids can infect adults within schools easily.
But in 2021 a lot of research was undertaken and now there is published data that none of those can be considered as valid reasons to keep schools closed. Instead, what’s recommended is to keep schools open, but with necessary health safeguards, vaccinate all teachers and students, and keep testing students and teachers regularly so that early detection and isolating individuals is the solution, rather than closing entire schools. Learning losses due to school closures, academic regression, and education poverty are the reasons to use all measures possible to continue with in-person learning.
DL and rural students – are the gaps that have become present over the last two years being addressed?
The pandemic exposed the huge digital divide in Sri Lanka. At the start of the pandemic, we had less than about 5% of students accessing real-time, face-to-face, online education using laptops and PCs. But during 2021, that number increased to about 10%. But these students were from economically advantaged families residing in the urban sector. Similarly, the internet-based “education” using PDF notes on WhatsApp shared by teachers rose to about 45-50% by 2021, from a much lower figure earlier on in the pandemic, as reported by LIRNEasia. We have seen images of students climbing roofs, trees, and rocks in dangerous terrain trying to access mobile signals. These figures demonstrate the interest taken by parents to try every possible measure to enable students to access education during lockdowns.
The Government needs to accelerate the provision of IT infrastructure to schools as well as enable high-speed internet if Sri Lankan students ever hope to reach standards of global peers in DL, and in driving a digital economy. The urban-rural digital divide should be bridged urgently, and access to affordable devices and connectivity should be hastened.