Dear Editor,
I WRITE with grave concern as a parent and university student about the technological preparedness of our teachers at our primary and secondary schools, and our lecturers at our premier university to ascertain the quality and effectiveness of virtual education of our nation’s children during this pandemic.

We all witnessed, by mid-March, how the pandemic caused by COVID-19 has caused many schools to quickly shut down and switch over to Online teaching. The scale and speed of this move to Online classes has caught many teachers and schools off-guard. This pandemic has forced students and teachers to cope as best they can, but the quality of education that has been received Online has often been compromised. This pandemic has certainly highlighted a big gap in teacher education and professional development.

So, what can be done next? Countries like Guyana clearly need a new generation of school teachers who will be comfortable with any future rapid large-scale shifts to Online teaching and learning. In this sense, our schools and university now need to pay serious attention to having educational technology subjects front-and-centre of all teaching degrees. The trickier challenge, though, will be to boost the knowledge, skills and confidence of the teachers who are already working in schools. This will require governments to commit to sustained programs of professional development. Teaching Online is definitely a skill that takes time to perfect, and it is time for us to ask the critical questions about digital learning.

The closing of schools and rapid switch to Online tuition has illustrated how flexible our education systems can be. I noticed social media has been full of families celebrating the new-found freedoms of this enforced screen time, and took the opportunity and time to learn new skills and explore different subjects together through the Internet. Elsewhere, the EdTech industry has celebrated what they see as an unexpected business opportunity, a tipping-point after which schools and universities will finally adopt digital education as a mainstream mode of teaching and learning. However, there are increasingly raised concerns over the privacy and surveillance implications of hundreds of of students being forced onto commercial software that has not been properly tested and vetted for educational uses.

These diverse reactions highlight the fact that technology use in education is never a neutral tool or easy fix. There are always wider connotations and unintended consequences of adopting any technology in education. So, in the aftermath of COVID-19, all schools and universities need to take a good look at the haphazard technological arrangements that got them through the lockdown crisis. The question is: Who stands to profit from the use of this technology in education; what forms of control are being established, and which students stand to benefit most from learning Online? In short, what is lost, as well as gained, when education goes digital?

I’ve noticed that there has been a heightened awareness of the limits of digital ‘solutions’, however, I hope that one of the educational legacies of COVID-19 is a more realistic conversation about the limits of digital technology and education. I have seen in the past few years the growing enthusiasms for Online education, personalised learning systems, and virtual classrooms. These technologies definitely have their place, but, now that everyone has first-hand experience of a mass shift to Online learning, we should all be well aware of the many practical problems that lie behind this hype. COVID-19 has demonstrated that there is something irreplaceable about students and teachers coming together to learn in person. Online videos, digital content and discussion forums are very different (and often inferior) forms of schooling.

In particular, I hope that educators will have a heightened awareness of the many digital inequalities that persist in society. Rather than presuming that all students (and educators) have perfect ‘always-on’ connectivity and powerful devices, it is clear that significant digital divides persist, with large numbers of people lacking the basic technology access to work outside of school and university. If we are serious about moving to forms of digital education, then governments and educators need to provide free access to devices and the Internet for those households without the technology.

The COVID-19 school shut-down has pushed many teachers and students unexpectedly into fully-Online modes of learning. This is proving a disorientating experience for many reasons, including the sudden loss of everyone’s shared ‘sense of place’. Face-to-face campuses and classrooms still remain the brilliant way of giving students a common lens through which they experience and make sense of teaching and learning. For all its faults, face-to-face schooling is still an effective means of supporting what experts’ term ‘situated learning’, a common sense of identity, and shared understandings of the world in which we are all part.

These qualities are proving much harder to replicate in the virtual learning spaces that many schools have been thrown onto during the pandemic. Poorly-designed Online education can quickly become sterile and desensitizing, leaving students and teachers feeling uprooted and disembodied from the learning material.

It is my hope that people’s experiences of Online learning during COVID-19 will lead to more careful future planning and designing of virtual schooling. Online learning does not have to involve countless video-meetings, Online assignments and quizzes. More creative and engaging forms of virtual schooling are possible that support place-based teaching and learning practices. To make this a reality, it will require school-specific platforms being designed for, and by, teachers and students. It is my hope that once schools have moved past the current Online struggles, discussion on how virtual education could be better should be high on the agenda for the Ministry of Education and educators alike.
Yours faithfully,
Vernon Benons, Jr.