The Sunday Mail Universal basic online schooling possible

FOR most parents, the lasting damage from Covid-19 will be the gaps in their children’s schooling and a major worry will be how they can help their children maintain their educational progress and catch up.

A lot can be done, once we accept that this year parents are going to have to take a far more active role whether it is managing home-schooling for a while or helping children catch up once schools are able to reopen safely. We have the resources to help most families, and now we need to put the bits together, in a national effort that will involve the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education, mobile communication platforms, radio and television services, parents and well-wishers.

The severe spike in Covid-19 infections seen at the end of last year and still continuing, a spike largely fuelled by so many people wanting to have a “normal” festive season and normal travel and gatherings, derailed hopes that schools could open early this year and, with longer terms, allow teachers and pupils to catch up in a reasonably conventional way. So we need to think unconventionally.

While the higher Level Four national lockdown imposed at the beginning of the month appears to be having the desired effect, with infection rates at long last starting to fall last week after reaching a plateau, the rates are still high and the number of daily deaths, which indicate the number of infections a week ago, shows that any improvement is very recent and very gradual.

So we are likely to be in for a long haul. A lot has been said around the world about online learning. In Zimbabwe, starts have been made in some areas, with some colleges for example using emails and WhatsApp to set assignments, distribute lecture material and at least make a start on distance learning.

This now needs to be extended. While home ownership of computers, laptops and tablets is low in Zimbabwe, at least outside the upper-income and middle-income suburbs of our towns and cities, there is a high level of smartphone ownership, especially once you include the most basic smartphones that might well be limited by memory and screen size, but which can access the internet.

At the same time, we have radio services that cover the whole country, and television services that provide for large swathes, along with near universal access to radio, at least in areas connected to the national Zesa grid. This needs to be added to the now total coverage by the mobile networks.

So there is technology available that can get lessons and guidance to an overwhelming majority of families, or at least to a majority of homesteads. What is now needed is a plan to use this.

For a start, mobile networks need to make their contribution. Data charges are high in Zimbabwe and this makes it difficult for a majority of families, even owning a basic smartphone, to afford downloading a range of lessons and guidance notes. But these same networks manage to run web sites that can be accessed with a free data connection, such as the sites people have to access to get the data service and buy data bundles.

It should thus, be possible to have limited and free education services. The infrastructure exists and is available whether or not anyone is using it. The networks are, therefore, not spending any money, or losing any money, if they run a free education service. Admittedly, the demand for such services, will be such that the networks will have to set technical specifications that use very little bandwidth, but that would be needed in any case since many families do not have large memories on home phones and cannot download vast chunks of data.

Education experts within the Ministry could, however, set basic structured lessons for each grade and form within the set limits, and Zimbabwe has a lot of smart IT people who could ensure the resulting lessons use minimum band width, and even have a basic social media messaging service to back up the lightest possible web pages.

Some sort of system to direct each family to the right web page or access the right message service for each grade would be needed and publicised, but even SMS messages could be used to give the connection details.

Exercise books and basic pens are not that pricey, and are available in general dealers as well as supermarkets, the shops that are allowed to be open under Level Four, so parents can buy something.

This could be backed up with radio lessons. Radio services would need to allocate some hours a day to school, so each form and each grade could have at least an hour a day. But by splitting the load, it should be possible to manage that in a set of four morning lessons on each set of frequencies.

Such a basic system would be far from ideal in many families, but so long as parents take an active role, it would allow children to maintain momentum, being in a structured learning environment for several hours a day. Even though most of the work would have to be repeated when normal classes resume, and teachers can start sorting out misunderstandings and lack of understanding, progress would be swifter as the children would at least be familiar with the topic.

Even without such lessons, and without access to text books, parents can start making some progress. Simply getting children to read and write something every day would maintain basic skills and that critical learning culture.

We do not have to be passive. As a nation, as families, we can overcome, with an emergency programme, free data links for education, radio programmes and a can-do culture.

We need this now, and we will need something for the rest of the year, even when schools reopen, so that parents can take a more active role in supporting their children as they race to catch up.