Learning alone

The post-COVID-19 future for the Philippines should be focused on information technology (IT) and agriculture. IT because of a large, young population that was born to it. Agriculture because we’ve got the soil and climate. But these must now be taught, and how these and other subjects are taught must change.

The Philippines has a young population where living in the Cloud is a natural part of life — particularly those under 10 who have never known a nonsmartphone world. I love books, but I’m 80 years old. 10-year-olds live on a tablet. That’s what they must have in the schoolroom, and now, increasingly more, at home. With COVID-19 changing the way we live, distance learning will become the new normal way of learning in many instances.

Generation Z must have a curriculum of the future, not the past.

The Department of Education (DepEd) has recognized this in its planning, but needs money to turn that into practice. But with COVID-19 sucking all the money away, where will it get the funds needed?

This will be the real problem in digitizing our classrooms: money. There just isn’t enough of it. COVID-19 could be good reason to provide much of it. It can be the trigger to getting all children online with a laptop. Owned by the school, lent to the child. Whether in the classroom or at home, the shift now must be toward computerized learning: every child with a tablet, and all learning will be on-screen.

Australia, given its vast open spaces and widely scattered families, introduced distance learning decades ago. Today, those early systems have developed into a whole program of online learning for every child. Australia has brought distance learning to a fine art. It has the School of Isolated and Distance Education, or SIDE, an online school that “provides a high level of education to children needing additional flexibility and who cannot attend school in a traditional classroom setting.” According to the country’s education department’s website, “classes are taught in real time through engaging, two-way communications to children in primary and secondary school.”

The Australian government is helping DepEd introduce such systems here. But there’s a long way to go, with limited funds and too many households too poor to even think about internet activity.

With COVID-19 disrupting everything, Australian universities have introduced a novel concept. You can take a course in any of 21 subjects online for free—and get a certificate afterwards. Just go to FutureLearn.com to learn more.

One of my clients, HP, has a laptop specially designed for school use that comes with a wide portfolio of solutions and devices designed for the teaching of kids. Whether it’s HP or someone else, this is what our children must have—a laptop. Phones can pinch-hit and they’re a fine compromise solution. But the bigger screen and specifically designed software of a tablet make learning easier.

Given the realities of the countryside where internet is patchy, if at all, why not use what we’re all using in business now: Zoom, Skype, MS Teams for webinars. Get students together on their phones—smartphones provided for free with a monthly upload. TV could be used a lot more, too: PTV4 or, better, a new dedicated TV station.

I’m glad to see that DepEd recognizes the need to shift, and has introduced a digital platform called DepEd Commons that gets teaching on the road to online learning. Together with Open Educational Resources, it gives teachers and students a number of courses toward an end goal of full education without the need of a school.

For the 20–29 age group and older, special courses are being devised to retrain them with the new skills the future needs.

With COVID-19 changing the way we all live, teaching will have to be done at home possibly for quite a long time. And once COVID-19 is over, we’ll be faced with the frequent disruptions natural calamities frequently bring to the Philippines. With distance learning, schooling need not be disrupted. Distance learning will become a common practice. It would have been essential now, if kids had had tablets. As it is, they’re sitting at home twiddling their thumbs, they’re not learning. With classrooms half-empty for the next year or two (are we going to allow our kids to mix when there’s no vaccine or cure?), learning at home is an urgent need. I see a mix of class and at-home learning as the new norm into the future.

Schools won’t disappear. Social intercourse and teamsmanship in sports are as equally important as developing the brain. We need the ability to shift from one to the other with agility.

Email: wallace_likeitis@wbf.ph