A spell of virtual learning

Covid-19 has forced an unprecedented number of children out of school, with an estimated 90 per cent of students impacted globally and with no clear line-of-sight of return to normalcy.

Since the student is no longer in a position to come to school, the only solution has been to try and take the ‘school’ to the student. This has meant exploring rudimentary options such as the back-and-forth of textbooks to the student’s house or slightly more communicative methods via TV or Radio broadcasting. These options have unfortunately proved to have limited efficacy due to their one dimensional nature and unmonitored engagement.

It’s no surprise that the virtual classroom, where internet coverage has supported its creation, has been the most effective pedagogical solution; it’s interactive and allows recreating, to a very large extent, the teaching patterns and methods of a brick and mortal school.

The making of a virtual classroom is dependent on the adoption of a suite of e-learning solutions, either procured independently and stitched together by the school or acquired as a composite LMS (Learning Management System). At the heart of every virtual classroom is a video conferencing collaboration tool, around which the complimenting solutions are either bolted on seamlessly within an LMS or exist in a parallel siloed environment (not ideal).

The saviour of the day and the technology that allows the magical creation of the classroom doppelganger — the virtual classroom, is the ubiquitous computing cloud and its recent offshoots.

Let’s take a closer look. Schools and universities have traditionally worked with the ‘racking and stacking’ method, preferring to keep infrastructure and solutions on-premise.

A Covid-19 level disruption in a pre-cloud era would have meant the loss of a full academic year. However today, in countries with good internet coverage and digitalised curriculum, ‘cloud computing’ has been a saviour and has allowed students to continue with the school year with relatively limited disruption.

Fog computing is described as computing at the edge. It’s the ability create a network that stores and exchanges data closer to the end devices. It is also useful in cases of poor connectivity.

While cloud computing might be the elixir solving the remote learning conundrum for mature economies, not all countries have the necessary coverage to reach each and every student, and therefore the cloud’s offspring — ‘fog’, is the remedy for patchy networks.

Intel used to produce Education CAP (Content Access Point) devices which served as both routers and content storage units, able to store education material and connect to the network either through WiFi or cellular capabilities. In South Africa CAP devices were installed in schools with poor connectivity. Today these same devices could be placed in either community town halls or installed in vehicles and taken to residential areas where students can access them and download/upload content as per a set schedule.

This would be creative usage of fog computing to ensure a wider coverage of students and overcome the issue of limited network coverage.

Extending the concept of fog computing, dew computing takes computing even closer to the end user through the usage or inclusion of end user devices. It allows for some engagement with data even without internet coverage. Dropbox and OneDrive are great examples of this.

YouTube has now made it possible to download certain videos from their mobile app to watch offline. These videos are available from 48 hours to 29 days, after which one needs to reconnect to a cellular or Wi-Fi network to reactivate it. Many LMS companies are also exploring this option of making content available offline on their mobile apps.

This again offers an interesting solution in countries with poor connectivity, where teachers can load their subject curriculum tutorials onto YouTube for students to ingest and follow at their homes even without constant connectivity.

Many more such creative options are on the table due to the ‘cloud’, which would have been inconceivable even a decade ago.

It’s now up to ministries and educational institutions to take stock of their environment — accessibility, tools and capabilities — and deploy the available cloud resources in the most impactful possible manner within their communities, to keep education ongoing for the students under their care.

The day is not far when we are all digitally connected and no one is left behind.

It’s ‘raining’ computing — I hope it’s torrential and I hope we all get delightfully drenched! And that we save the students while we are at it.

In countries with good internet coverage and digitalised curriculum, ‘cloud computing’ has allowed students to continue with the school year.