A continuity plan for basic education is imperative in a time of Covid-19

With the government already implementing strict measures to curb the spread of Covid-19 in South Africa, including the closure of the country’s schools, the situation has thrown a spotlight on how far behind we are in terms of the digitisation of the education sector compared with global norms.

It’s clear that action in this arena is urgent – especially for our most vulnerable children whose education is in particular jeopardy.

For middle-class families with the necessary resources, including Wi-Fi, devices, and the means to afford mobile data, it’s easier to ensure that their children continue to learn even if schools remain closed. That is however not true for the majority of South Africans.

The coronavirus pandemic has underscored the seriousness of the need for the digitisation of education across communities in an undeniable way. Schools being shut down due to a little-understood and highly-infectious disease previously seemed unimaginable. Yet this is the situation in which we now find ourselves – with no end in sight.

The circumstances signal a missed opportunity in future-education planning; in an increasingly digitised world, where all aspects of society become interconnected, education has definitely been the loser. The tablets promised to learners in the President’s 2019 SONA have yet to be delivered. Now, Covid-19 means that if classroom learning cannot be resumed any time soon, it will again be the poorest of the poor who are most negatively impacted.

What we need right now, however, is far more than technology only or the provision of tablets; the key is adopting a holistic continuity of learning action plan – or COLAP as it is known internationally – that ensures quality educational content continues to be delivered to learners wherever they are. In the event of a prolonged disruption of a traditional school system, such as we are currently seeing, COLAP also allows learning to move seamlessly out of the classroom.

But ebooks, PDFs and broadcast television lessons won’t save us, because parents are not teachers and don’t have the requisite skills to teach their children concepts, nor the ability to effectively monitor their progress. Rather, parents need to take on the role of project manager. They are not substitute teachers, and instead require step-by-step digital interactive and feedback-driven content if they are to cope with the challenge. Similarly, broadcast TV lessons have been widely available since the 1990s in this country, but their impact has been limited. This will not be the solution, in and of itself.

At IDEA Digital Education, we have been working with the national Department of Basic Education, and in particular, the Western Cape government, for a number of years to help schools – one by one – turn hardware into learning environments. We’ve achieved this by creating and deploying exactly this interactive data-driven digital content for learners and teachers that works to democratise education.

And, for the record, it doesn’t require a sophisticated expensive device. If a phone or device has WhatsApp on it, chances are it will be able to access IDEA’s content as delivery can be achieved even in low bandwidth situations, requiring very little data. Additionally, while teachers have been using IDEA to guide learners through the curriculum in the classroom, the system is set up to equally allow parents to do the same in the home environment.

The key conditions required to enable COLAP most effectively in this day and age are, first and foremost, a technology enabled-environment, supported by a curriculum-based learning programme that can be supplied digitally. It must be supported by digital resources that facilitate interactive assessment, feedback, reports and learner-centred training videos.

In turn, for COLAP to be successful across a digital world, it must simultaneously enable virtual training for both educator and guardian, while also providing analytics and data to government departments so that completion, progress, and ultimately success rates, can be monitored. And yes, a national digital education roll-out will face challenges. From device saturation to data cost and accessibility, all these are hurdles that will prevent the delivery of a perfectly equitable programme.

But these challenges cannot be a reason to hesitate. Our existing non-virtual learning system was not functioning at 100% anyway, and adopting a virtual plan now rather than later will open the way to potentially improving learning outcomes during this difficult period, and beyond. A lack of decision making or paralysis as we watch weeks of interrupted learning pass is currently the greatest threat to our learners’ futures. And providing them some free access in the hope that they will browse a government website is reckless.

It is critical that we take the opportunity now to design and formalise a blueprint for how we want digital learning to look in South Africa, in order to not only maintain continuity of education during the lockdown, but also to assist learners in their catch-up efforts once they can return to their physical classrooms. Whatever we put in place now, we must ensure it has longevity and will help safeguard education against any similar crises into the future.

Time is ticking, and education as we know it in South Africa, has to change – fast. IDEA, therefore, calls on national and provincial education departments to adopt COLAP now so we are never again caught so off-guard.

Considering where we are now as a country with COVID-19, along with the historical challenges that have plagued our education status quo, it’s hardly arguable that now, more than ever before, it’s time for South Africa to embrace technology as a means of building a bridge towards achieving the kind of educational democracy that goes much further than only ensuring access to the same things for all our learners. Our collective job is to instead guarantee that they all enjoy the same opportunities necessary to see them achieve their self-determined pathways.

Excellence in education is the first step to creating opportunities for every learner in South Africa, present and future, and to rebalancing the social makeup of our work environments. We cannot continue to simply deliver education in the same ways we always have; we must personalise it in order to help learners do much more than only pass. We want to prepare them to thrive, not only in South Africa but throughout the continent, and globally if they so choose.

With the capability of reaching out to all four corners of the globe, but more especially to classrooms everywhere, technology can make this happen – and ensure that the learners and teachers of today become the future custodians of our country’s long-term economic growth and global competitiveness. After all, what could be more worrying than a future workforce that is ill-equipped and under-educated, yet burdened with taking responsibility for the resuscitation of our industries and our economy after this crisis?

Our appeal comes with the full understanding that authorities are currently focused on containing the spread of Covid-19, along with critical, related economic and social interventions. But they cannot ignore the foundering education scenario, which the current climate suggests requires a radical, out-of-the-box approach to restore stability. We cannot afford to leave another generation of learners behind.

This needs to happen now; it cannot wait until the 2020 Matrics are ready to walk into their examination rooms.

About the author: Dr Corrin Varady is the CEO of IDEA Digital Education, a technology company that creates educational content for students, parents and teachers with a focus on the Sciences, English and Mathematics.

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