HEAVY HAND Online learning will fail
BLEND: STILL ROOM FOR TRADITIONAL CHALK-AND-TALK TEACHING
Socioeconomic disparities equal high dropout rate.
Many well-meaning education benefactors and commentators in SA say, in the light of the coronavirus pandemic, online, self-guided learning could solve some of the current teaching problems and address the educational backlog.
What pupils need, the reasoning goes, is to get free internet access to educational support materials online.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, self-guided online learning is doomed to fail.
Research shows an exceptionally high dropout rate, even in developed countries.
Pupils have no incentive to keep at their studies without peer pressure, a teacher at hand or a structured learning environment.
In SA, with its socioeconomic disparities and related problems, the dropout rate would be even higher. More so in key subjects like mathematics and physical science, where prior knowledge, conceptual understanding and self-motivation are critical.
The only answer in the country’s unequal teaching environment is a customised version of blended learning, which integrates computer-assisted online activities with traditional face-toface teaching (chalk-and-talk).
When used by a trained teacher, this approach can add valuable new dimensions to the learning process. It can allow pupils to work at their own pace and teachers to fill in content gaps.
In many developed countries, blended learning has enabled pupils to adapt to the demands of the current pandemic. Digital remote learning and teaching is backed up by dependable infrastructure and skilled, motivated teachers.
By contrast, the differences between SA schools have been thrown into sharp relief. The binary system of a privileged minority and the rest remains after more than 25 years.
More than 80% of public schools are under-resourced.
They are ill-equipped to respond to the teaching and learning challenges of the 21st century, let alone the demands of the pandemic.
The current lockdown has compelled teachers to adopt predominantly online, blended learning teaching practices.
But nearly 90% of households are still without access to the internet.
Few schools had adapted to blended learning before lockdown, nor would have been able to adopt it during the lockdown.
The schools with fewer resources and skills will fall even further behind.
This is especially disappointing since the current cohort of pupils (born after 2000) have long expressed their preference for a blended learning model.
Even the recent recognition by the government that science, technology, engineering and mathematics are important in the Fourth Industrial Revolution has had little effect on the skills development of teachers, infrastructure or modernisation of resources in schools.
Therefore, mainstream blended learning is not the answer.
Since 2002, the Govan Mbeki Mathematics Development Centre
at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth has wrestled with these challenges.
There is no way to make the teaching and learning of maths and science easy.
But they have developed interventions that have lifted the twin burdens of poor training and lack of infrastructure from the shoulders of teachers.
Skills development, linked to the use of user-friendly and interactive digital resources has allowed teachers to focus on attaining a high quality of teaching with subsequent learning successes.
Over the past decade, the centre has experimented with various combinations of online and offline self-directed teaching methods for mathematics and physical sciences in secondary schools.
The greatest success has combined on and offline interactive resources with pre-installed apps aligned with the curriculum.
These can be used as a guide for teaching, home schooling, after-school study and tutoring.
They call it techno-blended learning: a structured approach, using mostly offline apps in an integrated way, with the full participation of a trained or experienced adult mentor or guide.
One of the centre’s more recent interventions is a mini personal computer called the GammaTutor, a device pre-loaded with interactive learning material specifically designed for SA.
The software package is primarily intended for teachers.
Werner Olivier is a professor in mathematics and director of the Govan Mbeki Mathematics Development Centre, Nelson Mandela University
– The Conversation.
Nicci Garner
My husband Robert keeps saying if he was 30 he’d be furious. Sure, he says, we’ll save the gogos from dying of Covid-19, only to watch them and the rest of the country starve to death. Total lockdown risks killing the many to save the few.
I can’t say he’s wrong. And it can only get worse.
The average age of the population in SA is 26.7, according to worldometer, and only a small percentage of people under 50 (just over 3%, decreasing through lower age groups) are among the Covid-19 victims worldwide, according to euronews.com.
So, anybody under 50 should be allowed to get on with their lives as normal, with obvious precautions. Many are unlikely to get significant symptoms, even if they do catch Covid-19.
Those over 50? Sure, lock us down.
Bombastic political rhetoric (“Even one death is too many,” a certain prime minister up north said, flapping his elbows like a fledgling pigeon) and media hysteria have led us to this point: tens of millions out of work, with few prospects of earning a living in the foreseeable future, and shattered economies.
Putting the future of SA in jeopardy this way defies logic, but is perhaps understandable given that most politicians are at a vulnerable age.
We’ve become far too sentimental about a fact of life: everybody dies.
Death is tragic when the person is in the prime of life, especially a good citizen. But when that person is 70 or 80? Sad, yes, but realistically an inevitability that cannot be overly lamented, particularly when the deceased has lived a full and wonderful life.
The bottom line is that over one million people die from malaria every year, according to unicef. org; more than 0.75 million died from HIV-Aids-related illnesses in 2018 (World Health Organisation); there are 250 million to 500 million flu-related deaths every year (WHO) and 464 000 people were murdered in the world in 2017 (reliefweb.int). Governments and media are not hysterical about those numbers.
Old people far outnumber the young, economically active members of society, who are supporting the oldies’ pensions, medical aids and insurances at great cost and should never have been taken out of the workplace because of the coronavirus.
So, perhaps the coronavirus is something that nature “developed” to reduce that imbalance and level the playing fields.