Covid-19 exposes digital divide

34m pupils across province struggle with internet access, connectivity issues

LAHORE:

The academic future of 34 million students across Punjab is at stake after the education system went online during the year.

Examinations and results were marred due to the Covid-19 situation and a lack of proper measures to maintain internet services at the government level.

As per estimates, about 80 per cent of the province’s students complain about internet services, while the remaining 20% do not have access to the services. As a result, the educational future of almost all these students is at stake.

At present, 11.1 million students are studying in 54,000 government schools and 20.6 million in 80,000 private schools across Punjab.

Moreover, 70,000 students were studying in 600 government colleges and 500,000 in 1,600 private colleges across the province.

Over 600,000 students were studying in 30 public sector universities, while more than one million students were studying in 17 private universities, while two million students were affiliated with certain universities in one way or another.

However, reportedly all of them were connected to the online education system at a time when 60% of these students were from underprivileged areas. In order to adopt the online education system, one had to acquire knowledge sitting at home and examinations were also conducted under the same system.

In this situation, the government had started educational activities on Pakistan Television and Pakistan Radio for the promotion of school education.

According to government officials, in the light of these complaints, the government had directed the Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan to pay a special grant of Rs10 million to each government university to maintain the continuity of the online education system, while no funding was given to the private education sector, including schools, colleges and universities.

The real issue remains the improvement of internet services for the online education system, which has not been addressed yet. Punjab Information Technology Board spokesperson Ammar Chaudhry commented, “Providing or improving internet services is neither the job of the PITB nor its responsibility”.

Rather, it was the responsibility of the private companies that were providing internet services across Punjab, he added. “These companies were getting less data capacity from the satellite and distributing more, which increased the load on the services.”

Shehryar Mohammad, a student who takes online classes, said that this online education system had deprived students of academic abilities. “Educational activities at the level of school education on radio and TV is not being provided according to the mental capacity of the students, nor is any question or answer repeated on it.” Mohammad Anish Razia, a college student, stated that higher education students have a lot of reservations about online lectures. “Sometimes, the audio gets disrupted while sometimes the questions asked by the students are responded to out of context, which is very frustrating.”

A teacher named Shahana Samina Yousuf remarked that online lectures were practically useless unless there was a direct academic interaction between teachers and students. “Teachers cannot judge the overall performance of all the students online. Students do not ask the key questions out of hesitation, which makes the academic interaction regressive.”

In this regard, parents said that they work hard to provide the best educational facilities to their children. “Even after this, the online system would become useless if all the efforts and education flow were disrupted due to the flawed online system. Today no parent has enough time to check their children's education for four hours continuously.”

When educational institutions were open, many student-related matters were immediately covered in the weekly or monthly parent-teacher meetings but the online system had severely affected the traditional education methods, they added.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 6^th, 2020.