Fancy a little light calculus after dinner this evening? Or perhaps a slice of world history? Does your son struggle with his Maths homework ? Did your daughter miss a key Biology class? Help is, quite literally, at hand.
In the Caribbean, immersed in our localised squabbles and daily life struggles, we are liable to overlook or ignore the significance of some of the immense changes taking place on the world stage. The interface between education and information technology has long been touted as one such area of change and many smaller, poorer countries are now engaged in manoeuvres (some might say contortions) to develop a knowledge-based economy using both.
Education in the Caribbean is in need of a radical overhaul. In fact, education worldwide is in need of a radical overhaul. A few months ago, in recognition of this, Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary General launched a global plan to improve education standards called ‘Education First,‘ saying: “In our knowledge-based world, education is the single best investment countries can make towards building prosperous, healthy and equitable societies.” The initiative has a $1.5 billion budget and aims to put every child in school, to improve the quality of learning and to promote civic values such as environmental responsibility. It, somewhat optimistically, puts the onus on governments to initiate and coordinate change.
In the Caribbean, while there is significant change in some areas of education, there is no evidence of a coherent philosophy of education underpinning these changes, and no sign that a similar approach will be taken in all aspects of education. Change is piecemeal: we read recently of medical students at the Mona facility in Jamaica enjoying state-of-the-art facilities and receiving tablets (handheld computers) with all of their required medical texts in electronic form. The Jamaican technology company involved in the provision of the tablets and e-texts mentions that they “are also working on tablets for e-reader for the primary school and high school system.” Surely this type of initiative has some significance for the whole region? The Caribbean is certainly not alone in facing the challenge of how to co-ordinate these changes, of how to harness the technology and adapt it to our needs. Perhaps though, with a bit of planning and regional collaboration, we are uniquely placed to benefit from new methods of teaching and new educational resources.
We now produce large numbers of under-educated students and graduates who lack basic skills. Dr Kenny Anthony, St Lucia’s Prime Minister, recently summarised the problem thus: “We are facing an employment crisis. Economic stimulus alone is not the answer. We need to restructure our agencies, laws and curriculum to place greater emphasis on developing citizens who can make a contribution.” In any case, free education in many territories has been a bit of a myth from its inception. A few weeks ago, a letter from the Red Thread collective itemised the multiple ‘hidden costs’ of free education in Guyana and suggested setting up community internet centres to help to combat this. According to Dr Anthony, we need to go a step further and focus on ways to devise ‘dream factories’ to enhance the life chances of our people.
What, though, is the starting point for a recalibration of our regional education system? Dr Didacus Jules, the Registrar and Chief Executive Officer of the Caribbean Examinations Council tried to analyse this question in some detail a few years ago. Does our current system of education significantly enhance the life chances of (all of) our young people? Does it create a workforce with marketable skills and experience? In a normal economy, only about a fifth of the population requires a university level education; is there adequate provision in our education system for teaching other technical and vocational skills? Are our teachers trained and equipped to deliver education in a way that is relevant to today’s world? Part of the advantage of being relative latecomers in the field of educational innovation is that we can take a long hard look at what has been done elsewhere and try to customise some of the more promising initiatives to suit our local circumstances.
What are the educational opportunities available, at no cost, right now? Well, supposing (and for many it is a large supposition) that you have access to a computer and an internet connection, there is a wealth of expert tuition available. A primary or secondary school student could start with the Khan Academy, feted by Bill Gates, where tuition takes the form of short You Tube styled video clips and exercises for each subject and each stage of learning. There are 1500 videos in the Maths section alone: topics include algebra, probability and calculus. The Khan Academy was the brainchild of a 36 year old hedge-fund manager who started by tutoring his nephew and niece via video. Over five million students have used the site since it was developed a few years ago.
A university student with access to the internet can study free courses from Udacity (set up by Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford university professor), Coursera (set up by two other Stanford academics) and edX (set up by Anant Argrawal, a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), which will include courses from MIT, Harvard and Berkeley. Argrawal says this cluster of initiatives is “going to reinvent education. It’s going to democratise education on a global scale. It’s the biggest innovation to happen in education for 200 years.” He plans to reach a billion students in the course of the next decade. Daphne Koller, of Coursera, points out: “We had a million users faster than Facebook.” The revolution, though, is still in its early phase; accreditation is one of many areas to be resolved.
Even so, the possibilities are intriguing. As a parent, why bother to send your child to ‘lessons’ when they can receive free expert tuition online? As a regional education provider, why stop at offering lectures and course work online? Why not design your own course material (in subjects such as English, History and Geography), your own educational resources and your own electronic textbooks and make them available online at no cost? E-texts can be copyright-free and could be mass-produced by any means available (on newspaper printing presses for example). They can also be updated regularly. Or, as a school, why not install a handful of computers in a dedicated room as a sort of ‘digital study’ facility? Teachers could use them to download lesson plans, worksheets and class activities. Students could earn study time on them via a credit system. Parents and others could pay a token sum to use them in supervised evening study sessions. Our culture has always had a reverence for learning but has suffered from a deficit of learning materials. Perhaps we now have the means to remedy this.
Education is one of the meta-challenges that the Caribbean (and thus Caricom) needs to tackle en groupe. Change in education systems requires sustained and collaborative work in all spheres (curriculum, teacher training, conceptualising and designing educational resources for each age cohort, etc). This work is well beyond the scope of a single country’s strategic plan for education. It also requires a change of mindset: from commissioning copyright bound texts to coyright-free e-texts, from positioning the teacher as the fount of knowledge to the teacher as the facilitator of learning. These tasks are, quite simply, too important to be left to politicians who tend to think in terms of election-based time frames. This is a regional challenge and a long-term one. We need, collectively, to rise to the occasion.
