Students being left behind with face-to-face classes, says JTA head
Renews call for blended approach amid pandemic
CONCERNED that less students were reached during the phased resumption of face-to-face classes that ended the school term, Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA) President Jasford Gabriel is stressing the need for the main power and Internet service providers to step up their game in supporting online classes come January.
The call is especially urgent as it appears that the shift to online has now firmly taken root among the association’s membership, 92 per cent of whom have been working from home since March.
In a December 11-12 JTA poll of more than 500 teachers across the island, 50 per cent said they want a blend of online and offline classes in the new school year, said Gabriel. Thirty per cent opted for online only, while the other 20 per cent — mostly those in rural areas where connectivity is a challenge — said they would prefer face-to-face classes.
Schools were shuttered in March as the Government put measures in place to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus. In November, 17 schools were reopened for face-toface classes in a pilot aimed at gauging the education system’s ability to return to normal. The roll-out continued with another 125 schools added with about 10 days left for the end of the school term.
“What we saw coming out of the initial 17 schools [used in the pilot] did not support us, at this point in time, opening more schools for face to face. Apart from the spike we are seeing in COVID-19 [cases], the fact is that we are actually reaching fewer students by this modality than when we are fully online,” Gabriel argued.
Taking teachers offline to teach face-to-face classes, he stressed, displaces students who had been successfully attending online sessions. He maintained that the pilot had only seen about 30 per cent of students back in the classrooms.
“In my dialogue with many of these principals, and [during] many visitations, we discovered that it was the same students, basically, who were online that were turning out for face-to-face arrangement; and they were coming out in smaller numbers than [when classes were only being offered] online,” Gabriel said. “My research is telling me that in this short period [December 7 to 18] we are actually going to be connecting with less students, and the majority of them would be students that were online already anyway.
And so, it would be creating more of a gap now in terms of the learning process.”
Having schools offer online and offline classes simultaneously would fix the problem, he suggested, stressing that improving the online experience would be key to a successful implementation.
In addition to a crash course in delivering classes online, teachers — trained to tutor face to face — have this year also had to cope with power outages and interruptions in Internet services.
During the JTA survey, said Gabriel, 57 per cent of participants said interruptions in power supply had a moderately high to high impact on their ability to effectively conduct online classes. In terms of interruptions to Internet service, 42 per cent said that had a relatively low impact as they found ways around the problem — some used phone data, most had students work on pre-uploaded material on their own, while others were close enough to the school to go in and access the Internet there.
“But 30 per cent of them said
it had a high impact in terms of disruption,” said Gabriel.
In response to questions from the Jamaica Observer, the Jamaica Public Service (JPS) said efforts have been made, since March, to minimise the impact of scheduled power cuts on individuals working from home, and students participating in online classes. Steps taken have included starting the outages earlier, and shortening them from the usual eight hours to between five and six hours; pushing them back from weekdays to the weekends; and giving schools advance notice so they can prepare for an interruption in service.
The power supply company also noted that, over the last year, its customers had actually experienced fewer service interruptions — both planned and unplanned. Planned outages, it explained, are needed to conduct system maintenance, and customers are usually given at least 48 hours’ notice.
“Between 2019 and 2020 there was a 21 per cent overall reduction in frequency of outages experienced by customers as measured by the internationally used measurement for electric utilities, SAIFI [System Average Interruption Frequency Index]. On average, there were seven outages per customer in 2020, compared to nine outages per customer for the same period in 2019. This reflects a continuation of a downward trend in outages over the past few years,” said Winsome Callum, director, corporate communications and customer experience, at JPS.
She noted, however, that unscheduled power cuts still remain “a major problem” for the company and its clients. These unplanned interruptions to service, Callum said, are caused by factors such as “electricity theft, motor vehicle accidents, trees coming in contact with power lines, system challenges, inclement weather conditions — like the storm conditions we experienced a few weeks ago, which resulted in landslides dislocating poles and breaking power lines, et cetera”.
Efforts to get data from Flow and Digicel were unsuccessful after more than a week of waiting for their replies.
According to Gabriel, after a study conducted earlier this year by the Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CAPRI) and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) showed that twothirds of students and teachers were being negatively impacted because of connectivity challenges, the telecoms service providers promised that improvements would be seen before next January — especially in rural areas.
A survey is now being commissioned, he said, to get teachers’ and parents’ feedback on whether Internet service has improved.