PUNCHLINE
Ike
Seneres
What is bigger than a paradigm shift?
I think it was Bill Gates who said that a “sea change” is bigger than a
paradigm shift. The present paradigm in Philippine education emphasizes the
importance of teachers, classrooms and textbooks, and apparently nothing else.
That has been the paradigm in this country for many decades now, and perhaps it
is time to think about having a sea change in this area of our national life.
In the budgeting system of the Philippine
government, the salaries of teachers are taken from miscellaneous operating and
other expenses (MOOE) while the allocations for the construction of classrooms
and the procurement of textbooks are taken from capital expenses. It is
therefore understandable how and why the budgets for public education are
easily eaten up by these two line items.
It may still take a
long time before it becomes the norm, but many private schools in the
Philippines are already using desktop computers and handheld devices as the
replacement for textbooks. So far, classrooms and teachers are not yet being
replaced by whatever, but it seems that the usefulness of classrooms would
ultimately decline as more handheld devices would be used to replace desktop
computers.
Dr. Sugata Mitra, a
well respected Indian educator from the United Kingdom argues that students
could learn on their own even without teachers, for as long as they are given
access to computers and the internet. He is careful to add however that
teachers could still be useful as “coaches” or as “cheerleaders”, who could
prod the students to do more, in ways that are akin to positive re-enforcement.
As I understand it
from the approach of Dr. Mitra, students would no longer need classrooms
either, because they could use any space where they could come together and
learn together, and that could either be inside any room or under any tree for
that matter. To put it in another way, it is now the virtual content in the
internet that becomes more important, and not the physical space of a
classroom.
There is really a thin
line between teaching and learning, but the approach of Mitra intensifies the
difference between the two, as “teaching” drifts away from “learning” because
the former functions more like pedagogy, the science of teaching. Conversely,
learning drifts away from “teaching” because the former functions more like a
process of “discovery”, actually more like going into exercises of
self-instruction, or self-teaching if you please.
Mitra first became
famous around 1999, when he placed a computer in a hole in a wall in India, and
because of that, he was able to prove that kids could learn how to use a
computer on their own, and not only that, they could also teach themselves
English and other subjects without anyone helping them, meaning to say without
any teachers around. Years later, he was able to prove that older people
halfway across the world could help these kids through positive re-enforcement.
Mitra’s latest
advocacy is to promote what he calls “schools in the cloud”, meaning to say
distance learning websites that are powered by the internet cloud. His idea
comes at the right time, because there is now plenty of hardware and software
that are based in the cloud, just waiting for some useful applications. In the
final analysis however, the issue is not really what is available on the server
side, but the availability of affordable devices at the user side.
It came sooner than we
expected it, but internet capable cell phones are already in the market, and
are already affordable, especially with the instalment plans that are offered
by the telecom companies. Conversely, tablets and other handheld devices are
now being sold at about the same price as cell phones, so there is no doubt
that internet based learning is already a reality, a real opportunity that we
should now take advantage of.
Fortunately, the Department of Education
already has an Alternative Learning System (ALS) in place, and its systems and
procedures actually fit the idea of “schools in the cloud” to a tee. It is
multi-grade, and instead of teachers, the course delivery is assisted by tutors
who could actually function like the “cheerleaders” that Mitra has suggested.
The newer handheld
devices are probably the best to use for educational purposes, but as I see it,
even older desktops are still good to use. The machines at the user side could
vary depending on what are available, but what is important is that the
educational content at the server side is available and accessible by any
student at any time, using any available means. All told, what is really
important here is the availability of the right bandwidth that could support
the systems requirements.
I believe that there
are many private companies and civic organizations that could help in making
online education more available to more students in many places where they are
needed most. These could be children in the ancestral domains or in distant
islands. Do not be surprised, but these could also be children in urban poor
communities who are so near the schools, but are too far from them in terms of
real access.
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