Gearing up for new school year

Lany C. Vital

THE month of July has come, and we have one more month before the start of the new school year – a different and exciting one for most of us, as we will not be starting with face-to-face learning.

Since the start of the quarantine, the Department of Education has been coming up with ways to accommodate the “new normal” in education.

It was – and still is – deep in preparation to strengthen the capacity of the DepEd Commons to assist more learners and teachers in distance learning in time for the opening of classes in August.

According to the agency, it is now upgrading the platform to double the numbers of learners that can access the Deped Commons simultaneously.

At this time, according to records, the DepEd Commons has about 8.4 million unique users. While this is already a big number, the DepEd still wants to reach out all of the 17 million or more learners, including the teachers.

In order to achieve this, the Department is now in the process of integrity testing the platform to accommodate more users by August, since online will be one of the alternative delivery modalities to be implemented. Other modalities will be modular and TV and radio-based instruction.

The DepEd Commons, despite having multiple users who are simultaneously logging in to the platform, has been durable especially during the early parts of the pandemic in the country, according to the DepEd.

The DepEd Commons is an online educational platform created by the department for public and private school teachers and learners which supports distance learning, and was being developed even before COVID-19 pandemic hit the country.

The author is Teacher

III

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at Babo Sacan Elementary School