Home learning unequal, report finds
(CNS): The inequality of access, unreliability of technology and a lack of a strategy to help teachers use online platforms well has made home learning “an imperfect substitute to school-based provision”, according to a new report by the Office of Education Standards (OES). This will lead to problems for schools when they return because there will be significant learning gaps between students, the inspectors found. Schools will also have to contend with a whole new health and safety regime to protect students from the COVID-19 virus.
Following the government’s decision to lock down the Cayman Islands in order to protect the community from COVID-19, schools were closed from 15 March and are not expected to reopen until late August or early September for the start of the next academic year. In April the Ministry of Education asked the OES to begin a review of home learning.
Soon after schools were closed, the Department of Education Services and schools began making provision for home learning, largely via online platforms. Although it has worked reasonably well for some schools and students, there have been numerous problems for others, with wide disparity in teaching standards.
“Teachers demonstrated variable levels of confidence in using technology,” the OES inspectors said in a summary of the report, which was published Thursday. “Students’ attendance during online teaching sessions was noted to fluctuate and this adversely affected their learning and progress.”
A number of teachers did not collaborate with the inspectors and others did not even provide regular online classes, as judged necessary, the report said.
“The irregularity and variable quality of online learning accounts for some inconsistency in progress. Clear guidance is required from the Ministry of Education to ensure all staff provide adequate teaching sessions to promote satisfactory learning and progress for all students,” the inspectors wrote in the report.
While they identified many problems relating to home learning, the most specific was access to technology. Around 750 children did not have access to laptops at all when schools closed. In addition, many more children were not connected to the internet at all or had poor connections. Inspectors said students’ access to technology had to be improved as a result of the obvious inequity.
“An appropriate educational digital strategy is required to maximise learning for all students during this COVID-19 pandemic,” the report said.
But for many students it’s not just during this pandemic that their education will be undermined by poor access to technology. The inspectors said that without a well-resourced digital strategy for all students, they will not be able to compete in an international context.
“Students need to learn using technology and need access to the most up-to-date resources to do so,” the inspectors found.
Although efforts by teachers and charities did get laptops into several children’s hands, when the inspectors concluded this report just over two weeks ago, more than 300 students across the Cayman Islands still did not have access to computers. And as of 8 May, 533 children were still unable to access online lessons, the report found.
Even for some who could get online, poor WiFi connectivity in some districts hampered their experience, as inspectors observed that they “clearly struggled as a result of unreliable or weak internet connection” in the live classes.
The need to switch to online learning also exacerbated the day to day challenges that teachers face with the varying abilities of students in their classes, including those with special needs. Inspectors noted that some teachers struggled to effectively meet the range of students’ needs in the online learning environment.
“Although accustomed to providing for a range of abilities within school, teachers found this more difficult in a remote learning setting,” they stated.
There were also concerns that several hundred more children are described as “unaccounted for” in the report. In other words, students have not engaged in any online learning at all and their parents have not responded to efforts to contact them.
While the report commended the efforts of teachers to quickly come up with a strategy for teaching kids online in the face of the sudden closing of the schools and praised some of the work being done, it found numerous problems that will not be easily resolved. In addition, only around one third of students due to sit exams this summer feel prepared to take those critical tests.
The inspection report sets out a long list of recommendations for the education ministry and schools to contend with and points out that catch-up strategies will be needed.
“The quality of students’ learning and their academic progress is of concern and there will be a need for curriculum content to be revisited and retaught in the next academic session,” the inspector said. “A common national strategy, as well as localised, school-level solutions need to be agreed, planned and financed.”
With students’ progress “not as brisk or as consistent across all subjects and in all classes” as in school, the inspectors warned that students are missing important opportunities to work collaboratively with their peers.
The inspector have set out a list of around a dozen recommendations for education, covering everything from improving access to technology to coherent ‘catch-up’ plans, which could mean lengthening the school day or even lengthening the next two academic years.
- Fascinated
- Happy
- Sad
- Angry
- Bored
- Afraid
Category: Education, Government oversight, Local News, Politics
Those adults in charge of edumacation here are not up to the task of providing and education for all the kids. My son went to school here,did online schooling and is almost finished for the year. Because the adults in charge could not give a answer to the question “will the schools be open next year”I sent him and my Wife back to the States 6 weeks ago to find a school,and buy a house to live in for at least the next year so my Son can have an education. I made sure he would have a school to go to. I did what any parent here should do and will do unless you are Caymanian with kids in a government (Juju’s) school. It’s not like they were getting a useful education anyway but at least they didn’t have to pay for babysitting. Your getting what you paid for.
Ask the policy makers to teach for week and see what happens. Many of them have never taught but they are in offices making plans and writing policies for teachers to follow. Having done a BA in education DOES NOT make you a teacher. Having a BA in education does not or should not give you permission to come dictate to teachers. Having taught 10, 15 and 20 years ago does not mean you know what is happening in the class room now. Someone, some people better wake up!!!
REPEAT THE SCHOOL YEAR. enough of the promises to ” assess the kids and meet them where they are at” that never happens and they get pushed through anyway. REPEAT THE SCHOOL YEAR PLEASE. Give ALL our Children a fair chance
Really? And if there is another outbreak we repeat it again… and again.. Groundhog Day was a movie. Real life has to move on. EVERYONE was caught up in the pandemic so all are set back a little. Toughen up, realize life ain’t fair, and do the best you can to help the kids. It is the constant pandering that has created the sad state of the snowflake world we now live in…
If they can do a petition for children to play together then a petition needs to be done to repeat the school year!
What does poor WiFi in some districts mean? That the internet connection is bad or that people don’t know how to set up their WiFi router properly?
I’d say 70/30. With the 30% user issues.
I wish there was some way community partners could avail ourselves. I love math, I am a good teacher. My degree is not in education, but rather economics, I was a volunteer tutor in the States. I miss helping kids ‘get’ math. It can be fun, and will certainly help them with their future.
Let your intentions be known to DES. It would be a great idea to have ppl like in schools. Maybe then we’d be able to have more small group sessions which would be desperately needed when we return to schools to close the learning gaps we are experiencing now.
It’s maths in our language
Anonymous at 12/06/2020 at 10:50 am comments with: “The quality of the internet service available locally is a disgrace. Additionally, with the regulator refusing to enforce the contractual agreements requiring all of the local providers to provide island wide service the capacity was not in place to meet the needs of the community.”
My reply:
This is not a true statement for All areas of Grand Cayman. I’m in agreement to only pockets of areas that are effected by fair to poor Internet connection and stability as well as uptimes.
However, the factor of poor internal (inside the home/premises/building) deliverability of properly setup and configurations of Wireless routers and networking gear must be considered as part of the cause that people complain about, instead blaming the ISP most times, it seems.
From my experience, more times than not, the issue when I’m tasked with troubleshooting Internet speeds/connectivity is poor signal coverage, too many connected Wi-Fi devices (wireless routers/access points), poor to bad internal lines & switches (wired connections), user ignorance or “PEBCAK” (as those in the industry sometimes refer to issues as such) – all play a big part in complaints about how bad an internet service provider performs.
But! Lately, again from my tasks to troubleshoot, the biggest problem is package speeds. Many households have the lowest/slowest priced package for Internet access. These slower & lower priced packages maybe ok/good in normal times, when not everyone living at home needs to be always connected or living in shared apartments/buildings with a single Internet connection feeding all units, where the package from the ISP is usually just adequate for normal, daily, dynamic connections, not the High Availability needed right now, today, as has been for the last 3 months and still for the rest of 2020, so far.
ISP’s need to be doing a better job of educating the public and sending their technical staff out and inspecting locations and making sure their Own equipment and lines, etc are 100% working as intended and when the issue lies at the user’s feet, educate them and help them be able to properly use and have a good/better Internet connectivity and experience. Not ignore and keep charging, because the complaints won’t stop! So an educated public is a wiser public (well, normally, some will be at least).
When a home/building requires a faster Internet connection, the blame will not always be pointed in the right direction and you get what we have here, complaints about “poor wifi in some districts”, not all are equal in with statement.
Let’s not discount the fact too, kids/teens with constant Internet access, do not make for good learners and being educated over the Internet/remotely via Zoom or other such techniques. Not without proper parental supervision at least. That’s a must, no matter the Internet connection and technology devices on hand.
But this is a wake up call here too, this should foster in better and new protocols for future execution and deliverability, for both the teachers and institutions as well as the ones who need this to work better more times than not, the children.
Their bullshit attempt at retort published this afternoon should be framed and hung in Heroes Square.
At the same time, teachers anxiety and mental health should be considered when they “phase” back into school. Having that many students in a small classroom and regulations will be a nightmare. Let’s not forget the trauma and behavior issues that were already prevalent before the pandemic…educators deserve more credit and recognition. Govt is failing it’s clients and employees.
Repeat the school year
I reached out to the department of education and just got a run around, if it can be done in other countries why can’t we?
My son is supposed to be taking his exams next month, how is this fair? They are just setting our children up to fail!
The quality of the internet service available locally is a disgrace. Additionally, with the regulator refusing to enforce the contractual agreements requiring all of the local providers to provide island wide service the capacity was not in place to meet the needs of the community.
Perhaps, though the quality of mercy is not strained.
I think it depends on your internet provider and which service. Once I went to fibre and upgraded from basic, my internet at home is smooth sailing – no more buffering on Netflix either! And I’m paying no more for it now than I did for absolute crap Internet from Cable & Wireless many years ago.
The internet we have at the office is even better.
However, I agree with you that the regulator should insist on island-wide coverage rather than just cherry-picking more expensive neighbourhoods.
Are you sharing with 15 neighbors to save a few dollars so they can stream movies while your kids’ education suffers the strain on the account and you blame the provider?? I agree there is some crap service out there, but for the most part, even the slowest connection is fine for a single family – especially during the day when the kids are home schooling and the parents working. And I-if parents are sharing the internet for work, the company can be asked to help pay – but if you are then sharing the service with others, you have no one but yourself to blame. It is theft and far too common. Fine when it works, but you cannot blame others when your stolen signal doesn’t meet your expectations…
Remember “ITALIC” Improving Teaching And Learning in the Cayman Islands. Google it. Education Minister at the time of its inception Hon. Roy Bodden had the foresight and vision to prepare the Cayman Islands for the 21st century. Well that initiative was killed by politics of the day. Now how about reinventing the wheel with less money? Sorry children, there were people who really saw what was coming and they tried but politics and power games determine the future.
More buzzword bullshit from Roy and company. No substance.
Yes, 11:10, I have to agree with you. On taking up his responsibilities, he boasted that he was the first Education Minister with credentials but in reality he achieved very little beyond his rhetoric. Roy was one of those politicians, who exist in all countries, who was much better in opposition than in government. Kurt is another.
We were on the right track in 2002. Read
http://infodev.org/infodev-files/resource/InfodevDocuments_598.pdf
Hon. Truman Bodden said in the Educators’ Conference that every child would be issued a laptop. I can’t be corrected on this as I heard it first-hand!
CNS: It wasn’t Truman Bodden, it was Roy Bodden. The statement he made was later corrected to say a laptop for every teacher.
I like that they originally sent an electronic survey to see which households had internet access then determined the ones that didn’t complete the survey couldn’t be bothered. Rather than realise they probably couldn’t access the survey. True story!
The problem exactly. “Let’s try square wheels before we try round ones”.
And the same will happen with this survey. Those most affected negatively will not respond – those with no Internet. Or those so busy with their jobs. So the survey is skewed to those with resources who had it much better.
The problems of internet learning or home learning are not unique to Cayman. The US has the same issues that schools were unprepared, internet access was questionable in some homes or not available and teachers were not trained in online learning. That said, in both the Compass and CNS articles not one word or quote from Ju-Ju on what her plans are to prepare Cayman for the future of online learning. All staff quotes or comments with no strong endorsement from Ju-Ju. Apparently, she lives in some alternate universe on the Brac
If you provide a written question I am sure she will read out the written response provided by her staff.
And praise Jesus and talk about how “her” children must learn…
Cayman islands goverment public education system is a disgrace dont blame technology blame the failure of our leaders. Any nation that put education in the back seat must fail.
You need to be educated to build a block wall.
Facts.
You would think that a place that experiences hurricanes would have home learning as a contingency and already identified these weaknesses right?
Longer school days won’t solve anything. There’s a reason why math and English are taught before lunch.
Summer school will also be a joke because parents are barely answering teacher / school calls as it is and it’s a daily task to get students engaged online and submit work.
Having this inspection done in the midst of a pandemic showed a complete lack of care or respect for govt teachers mental health and well-being. Families and educators were doing their best to address the”whole child” and now data and numbers are the focus and priority.
Teachers struggled with technology yes, but then again govt never helped with offering ideas or online platforms for teachers to use. Teachers found new websites and systems and got families engaged. Then, were asked multiple times to change to something new. Not only did teachers struggle, but so did families facing various challenges.
Amen 5:24 am
Thank you. When this thing started teachers were using online platform combined with zoom …
CNS: The rest of this comment is posted here.
Cayman once again is going down a very dangerous route with its education system. Throwing out one system and adopting what has already failed in the UK is a travesty. But what would you expect when you see who the Minister of Education is and her giving all educational decisions to the Education Council.
This is nothing short of a national emergency. Many of our children (and their parents) were already struggling and this pandemic has made a very bad situation even worse.
Teachers are not people? They have no families? They have no children? They have no life? What about those teachers who have been doing it all around the clock everyday? When school is kept throughout the summer burn out will happen. It is a sad state but we need to understand that many students are not interested in being educated and thats a fact. What about holding parents accountable? So many students have laptops and internet access and did not log on to classes. Parents dont care because the system supports them in everything they do. What a sad state of affairs.
So parents are not people? They do not have families? They do not have other children? They do not have jobs? Parents had to choose between keeping a job and therefore being able to provide food and shelter over doing taking on an additional job – teaching multiple children at different ages. What a sad state of affairs indeed.
There is no desire to educate our children properly and there never will be. The poorly educated don’t question things.
Wasn’t internet access declared to be a human right by the UN back in 2011? How’s that coming along?
Well it’s a recipe for disaster from the get-go.
It’s hard enough to get a 6 year old kid to pay attention, not be disruptive and follow the rules in a classroom. So you think it’s going to be easier to do it from a tiny box on their computer screen with who-knows-what happening in their home around them?
And it’s not much different for older kids and teens as well.
The teachers have an enormous uphill battle.
No shit! Who the hell needed a report to figure that out?
LOL! Big fail!🤣
Even if the schools provided the best online learning consistent across the board there is a huge discrepancy of being able to teach it at home. Not all parents can help their young children for various obvious reasons. No one should be punished because of this. Stop stressing parents out government and let’s work hard when regular school resumes.
Who on earth would think to inspect schools at this time, or teachers on line. Do these inspectors know anything about ordinary folk? Oh thats right they dont!
What seems to be the big issue surrounding the evaluation of a system put in place to support remote learning? Why look at it as inspecting teachers and inspecting schools rather than evaluating the effectiveness of the provisions. Are we concerned about what our children are receiving? And are we interested in making it the best quality possible? We need to get to a point where we are comfortable with others looking at what we do and providing constructive criticisms in order to do better. We are too closed-minded and reactive. Why can’t we be open-minded and proactive? I read the report and there were a number of good practices highlighted. Why are you blinding your eyes to that? Yes, there are things to improve but what’s wrong about knowing that? Why can’t we think of how the recommendations can help DES, Ministry, schools, parents and students to make better provisions for future? I welcome constructive criticisms; we all should. I can only get better when I embrace a growth mindset -understanding that we don’t always know everything and that collaboration and partnerships can only make us stronger and better. Feedback is important to students to help them get better and likewise it is important to schools and other stakeholders to help them improve . Let us embrace the OES report, share and adopt the good practices and actively brainstorm to implement the recommendations. We ought to make the very best provisions for delivering the highest quality home learning for our children in the event of another lock down.
There is ntn wrong with the OES report or it’s intention to assess the platform used……if that was it’s only purpose. Remove your blindfold, if assessing the platform was the intent there would be no need to mention the schools initial response or the delivery/structure of live lessons. Also, if assessing the platform was the intent it could have been done at the end of online schooling, utilizing more structured surveys with targeted questions and data could have been gathered from the platforms used regarding collaboration time, down time and so on. There was NO existing guidance document on what to do in the event of forced online schooling, everything schools did was reactive so what exactly is the report using as a benchmark to speak on school response and give recommendations? How is doing a report in the middle of online schooling proactive when the metric you claimed was the target was hardly mentioned in the actual report? The manner in which the report was publicized is also far from encouraging one to have a growth mindset. In my opinion it should have been discussed on a school level first then publicly at the press conference, then finally made available online to those who wish to see it for themselves. If the report was aimed at being proactive as you claim, I hope all students will receive a laptop and all homes will get free internet because isn’t that the purpose of being proactive….putting measures in place to mitigate risks?
Even though you been aimlessly hammering with your response, you hit the nail on the head with your last point. And to answer the question, yes, you are absolutely correct; proactive means putting things in place to mitigate the risks. I’ll put it another way (which was already done), acting on the recommendations which you seem to have a problem with. By your tone, it appears you are not convinced that all students receiving laptops and internet access is achievable. I think it is and that it will happen. By the way, what other purpose do you think the OES report served? From what you have said, it appears you are thinking of another. Care to share?
I strongly believe that all students can receive a laptop and free internet. It really shouldn’t be too huge of a mountain. There was no scarcasm in my final statement. But given the current preview of CIG, will it happen? When the main aim is make the system or process look good, to showcase aesthetics, things that can and should happen will never happen simply because the focus is not where it should be. As to why the report was done, I cant say. However with the type of data gathered and the information published I can say that it’s more than just assessing the system.
Everything in this report will directly mean that all teachers will have ten or twelve more folders of papers on each child. They will have to spend an extra 3 more hours at school although some seem like they already live on the school compound. Teachers do so much planning and paper work that they are exhausted when its time for teaching. I can say for a fact that that my wife starts her school day at around 6:30 am and up until 11 pm she is still working on school related documents. This cannot continue. There must be a more efficient way of educating our nations children and keeping track of everything. The ministry asks for one piece of information in 10 different ways. If you think i am joking, someone needs to send a survey to each teacher and read the feedback. The surveys that are send to their government emails are a joke, the poor teachers are afraid to be truthful because they know that their email is attached to the response. I dare the Ministry to send out surveys that can be anonymously completed by teacher and see. The ministry would be shocked to see the responses and hear what teachers have to say.
1. Check and mandate internet speeds in all student homes – from the education budget (having fired teachers who have not showed up).
2. Free Laptops for every government school student (and for private school students where needed)
3. Have lessons throughout the summer holiday to catch up and fill gaps.
Come on Cayman! This is not brain surgery.
Delusional
For the price of this report, they could have bought all those kids a laptop
What was the price of the report and how much do we need to provide laptops for all students who need? Show us some some figures to support your argument so it is believable or desist from posting unsubstantiated claims. Don’t embarrass yourself!
LOL do you live here?!…
Government actually fixing the schools after the 100th recommendation LMAO
The Minister of Education has been missing this whole entire time. Where is Juliana?!
Can someone go get her please and ask her what the plan is?
Alden is going to be like ‘Well we can’t help all the kids, only the ones that have pretty hair.’
@ 8.22 LOL!!!
Well “its not meant to be fair” remember. And these kids missing out on good education and havings issues working later on in life, “thats the next governments problem”.
Let the kids go back to school as covid has next to no effect on them. The under 15 death rate is 1 in 3 million.
And what of the aging/aged population that teaches them or will have to interact with them while at school? Fire them and hire individuals under 15 right? Just following your logic.
Thanks China