Dear Education Minister

BitDepth#1263

IT IS the worst of times for your ministry, but while it may not seem like it, it is also the best of times.

The shattering of the education system by covid19 and the terrific inequalities in learning opportunity that the termination of in-person teaching has revealed are sobering.

Some students are well prepared to face this crisis, with access to resources and family support systems, while other children, with little of either, are seeing their chances for improvement through education crumbling.

The ministry should be undertaking at least three tiers of planning, covering the likelihood that school will remain closed until December, the possibility of losing the January school term entirely and a scenario modelling the transition of an entire school year to remote learning.

Your role will be pivotal in establishing continuity in the development of the potential of the country's human resource.

Learning under a new model of interaction will be difficult, but in this adaptation there is an opportunity to shape education to embrace new possibilities for student development even during a time of severely limited mobility.

The hardest lesson that was taught after the end of in-person teaching in March was the uneven distribitution of internet connectivity, a limitation on online learning that was often tied to other social challenges. It’s not possible to intervene in all the issues that make online instruction difficult, but access for students is a core issue that the Education Ministry should address with some vigour. It's likely that all three internet service providers, Flow, bmobile and Digicel, would see value in encouraging the student population to become fluent with computer technologies.

Some hasty steps were taken after the end of in-person teaching by zero-rating some education resources, but a conversation is overdue about improving internet access to our most disadvantaged households.

By now, teachers should be clearer about which students have difficulty connecting to remote learning systems and those households should be targeted for connections capable of delivering at least five megabits of internet access and, where needed, basic computing tools for engaging with learning management systems (LMS).

This is where the business of education finds confluence with the scope of social development, so a collaboration between the two ministries, taking advantage of the intimate ground level understanding in schools, has the potential to bring more students into remote learning.

There are efforts under way to train the teaching body at the primary and secondary-school levels in the principles of remote learning. That training should emphasise flexibility in the education process, with multiple options in choice of LMS and coaching tracks for the most promising models for engagement and learning.

The ministry should, by now, have assigned a dedicated team to evaluate LMS software, online meeting tools and resources and be prepared to discuss their advantages and disadvantages with teachers as part of crafting new approaches to creating learning environments.

The ministry must further acknowledge that any effort at successful remote learning must engage parents in the coaching equation as partners in shaping learning spaces and monitoring engagement.

This is not a time for top-down ministerial mandate, it is a time for collaborative exploration by administrators, managers and teachers.

We face a sometimes terrifying new world that is also an opportunity to embrace technology as a lubricator, not a splint for the fracturing that education has experienced in TT.

Mark Lyndersay is the editor of technewstt.com. An expanded version of this column can be found there