Online learning platform would offset the disruption storms and pandemics cause

Mary McCarthy

For various reasons, children are often out of school, but decent resources online provided by the department would mean they don’t miss out. Stock image

December 09 2021 02:30 AM

Storm Barra was like a bomb dropped into family routines, sweeping in and leaving teachers no time to plan virtual learning. Which is fair enough – lessons take time to plan.

But this lack of ability and agility to offer online learning highlights the urgent need for a centralised, easy to access portal with the primary and secondary curricula, clearly laid out with links, videos and worksheets for every topic.

While you can wave away the odd snow day because of the joy of it all, children in counties where schools closed were stuck inside and some engaging online work should have been available.

Sure, parents can curate online learning if they can find a free website that offers suitable material, but workplaces didn’t close this week. It was stressful to be hit with the unexpected days off.

An easy-to-use website with bright, relevant material would also come in handy for those missing school, especially lately with Covid or for those isolating at home (does any parent in their right mind actually isolate a child?) waiting for PCR results.

This week, there would have been thousands off, Barra or no Barra. The latest Health Protection Surveillance Centre (HPSC) two-week data report to December 5 shows 13,005 Covid cases in primary kids, and if you factor in siblings, that’s a huge cohort twiddling their thumbs all day – many literally on the PlayStation.

With vaccines now approved for primary school kids, hopefully parents will rush out and get their kids jabbed, because this will help.

But for various reasons, children are often out of school and decent resources online provided by the department would mean they don’t miss out. It is much fairer to enable all children who need an extra push to access this.

For example, I have senior infant-level Irish – a generous assessment. I never took to it: my mum is from the North and couldn’t help me; the cycle lives on, and now my 13-year-old is way behind.

A secondary school teacher for one hour a week goes over the basics with him on Zoom – one grind costs €40, but is this fair? Surely we need to operate on the assumption many kids need a leg-up and so provide this free of charge through online material.

In the UK there’s a fantastic hub made by teachers, for teachers, but with no teacher log-in required so parents and kids can use it. It’s called The Oak Academy.

It has clear information for every lesson and holds everything needed for each full academic year. It’s resourced by thousands of high-quality, teacher-made slides, videos, worksheets and quizzes. It was set up after the first lockdown by an NGO and cost £4m (€4.6m) to put together.

A friend living in London said The Oak Academy was invaluable during lockdown and is still used extensively by his school. His three primary school kids were off recently, one after the other with Covid, and their teacher was able to direct them to links on the website to show what was covered in class. There’s no Department of Education-led equivalent. Why not? The Scoilnet website is just OK, but isn’t user-friendly and not easy for non-teachers to access. We need a department-led integrated approach between Scoilnet, Seesaw and Google classrooms.

Looking back, why did the Department of Education not ask our teachers during lockdown to submit videos? They could have built up a school year’s worth for each class.

If they had asked our resourceful primary teachers to make and upload lessons, they could have covered the whole curriculum in a few months. We can still do this.

Having an online portal doesn’t solve the problem for disadvantaged kids who don’t have access to wifi or devices or whose parents can’t help, but it’s a start.

And there are signs of more equality of opportunity to address the digital divide. This week, Education Minister Norma Foley announced €50m in grant funding for schools, the first of two major ICT projects.

Schools can “consider innovative projects and programmes using digital technologies in teaching and learning”, including providing devices on loan to students.

This is not something anyone wants to hear, but there will be future pandemics.

This week, one of the creators of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine warned there will be a disease Y that could be worse – and the worst-case scenario should be planned for.

Each child is entitled to the best possible quality of education, and it is the responsibility of the State to provide a consistent experience for all, and making resources accessible online will help with this.

This means that next time there’s a storm or sniffle, we will have access to learning.

Although maybe snow days should be exempt – you get only one childhood, after all.