[WATCH] Coronavirus: Government’s lack of e-learning strategy has created a digital divide, PN says

The Nationalist Party said that Malta did not have an e-learning infrastructure in place before Covid-19 swept Europe and that this was creating a digital divide since students could no longer report to school.

“The pandemic has revealed the government’s difficulties in implementing an e-learning strategy. The pandemic is exposing the exigency of online learning but we are not prepared for it,” Clyde Puli said in a press conference on Tuesday.

Puli, the party’s Family Spokesperson, said that the closure of schools was necessary but due to the government’s unpreparedness when it comes to digital learning, hundreds of schoolchildren stand to suffer and lose time on their education.

“Despite knowing the pandemic was coming, the education ministry had no contingency plan, not even a short-term strategy, especially due to initial resistance to close the schools down. For example, a 2012 white paper suggested that internet be guaranteed as a right in the constitution. This hasn’t happened and a digital divide still exists.

From left: Nationalist MPs Ryan Callus, Clyde Puli and Claudette Buttigieg

“There are students out there who still don’t have this facility. The same thing happened with the tablet-per-child strategy where it was only partially implemented. Years 4 to 6 have them, but Forms 1 to 5 don’t. A number of teachers were not granted a laptop either,” he said.

Puli praised the teachers who were, on their own initiative, communicating with students in innovative ways and keeping the classroom environment alive through digital means. Luckily, he said, there are many committed teachers out there.

Puli made reference to the Malta AI Project, a Budget measure announced in the previous year, that included a number of proposals that would have helped diversify and facilitate teaching, including allowing teachers to provide feedback on students’ homework through digital means. However, Puli said, the implementation of such proposals was either slow or never took off.

“The Malta Digital Innovation Authority has not yet even allocated the finances to implement certain proposals. The digital divide still exists. We already have a high rate of early school leavers and the pandemic will exacerbate this situation,” he said.

PN MP Claudette Buttigieg added that 4,000 students are to sit for the Maltese Advanced Level exam while another 6,000 are to sit for the Ordinary Level Maltese exam on 25 April, less than four weeks from now.

“These students and their families are still not informed whether this exam will be taking place. I mention Maltese because it arguably involves the largest cohort of students. Thousands of students and their families are not as yet informed. To top it off, there are students who have not yet finished their syllabus,” Buttigieg said.

She added that a digital divide between students and between teachers still existed and that while a number of teachers and lecturers were going out of their way to find innovative systems to still keep in contact with their students, others did not find the necessary help to do the same.