Government’s e-learning project to enhance education
GOVERNMENT’S US$50 -million investment in an e-learning project, launched earlier this year, is expected to significantly enhance the quality of secondary teaching and learning.
In a message read by Robert Pickersgill, at the opening of the fourth Pan Commonwealth Forum on Open Learning at Sunset Jamaica Grande in Ocho Rios, Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller said the programme would last three years.
The objectives of the project, which will impact grades 7 to 11 students in some 150 secondary schools, include the provision of a comprehensive set of standard ICT-based instructional materials for teachers and students, provision of equipment and software to schools and the establishment of a central repository for the materials at the Ministry of Education.
The prime minister said that the e-learning thrust would include providing 100 public libraries and secondary schools with computers and Internet access. Some 180 schools and teachers’ colleges previously equipped would also be upgraded.
But while underlining Jamaica’s effort at keeping up with the rest of the world in e-learning, Simpson Miller bemoaned the fact that demand for Internet access on the island was low, compared to developed countries and even some regional nations. But this was being addressed, she said.
“Our strategy to address this anomaly has been to significantly increase the use of the Internet in schools, thus exposing students and their parents to a technology-based culture,” Simpson Miller said.
The four-day conference, organised by the Vancouver-based Commonwealth of Learning (COL), has attracted participants from Asia, Africa and the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and the Caribbean.
The forum has brought together stakeholders from governments, educational institutions and allied professions, who through discussions and panel presentations based on some 300 papers, will share ideas and help to set the agenda for using open and distance learning to advance international development through widening educational access.
The conference is expected to continue the positive impact that COL has been having on Jamaica in terms of e-learning, noted the Caribbean representative to COL, Jamaica’s Burchell Whiteman.
“For more than 10 years Jamaica has been benefiting directly from Commonwealth of Learning in terms of materials supplied, training programmes set up; partnership programmes where Jamaicans have stayed here and done their online degree in technology with universities in Canada,” Whiteman remarked.
He added: “We’ve had the development of an organisation, supported by COL for distance-learning practitioners and we’ve had a very interesting programme through RADA with farmers who are using technology to improve their own productivity and to enhance their own quality of life.”