23 January 2021

A VIABLE COUNTER PROPOSAL TO E-LEARNING ?


The COVID-19 pandemic has forced students in Malaysia and worldwide to close their schools and for students to attend their classes online through Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and other free of charge of paid videoconferencing services.

However, ample evidence from the field in Malaysia and abroad shows that such forms of computer-mediated, Internet based online learning have their limitations, especially for school students, due to inability of many parents to afford to buy the devices for several of their children to attend class virtually on; lack of fixed or wireless broadband of their homes or lack of sufficiently reliable coverage; their inability to afford the cost of broadband access, even if it is available in their area; not knowing how to operate the relevant applications on these devices even if they can afford them and so forth.

According to The Vibes of 22 January 2021, based upon the real-world experience of students and parents in her state, Sabah DAP Wanita chief Jannie Lasimbang proposed that the government use older, proven educational channels such as educational TV and radio, whether via satellite, fibre or free-to-air, which are relatively easy for most people to use compared to having to set up and operate applications for e-learning on a computer, tablet device or smartphone with its links to click on, logins, passwords and so forth.

She cited problems parents face, such as lack of affordability to purchase enough devices for their school-going children in her state; that according to the Sabah Education Department,  some 52% of students in the state do not have smart devices and internet access; that parents with several children had complained to her that they had difficulty finding the money to buy sufficient access devices for their children to learn on; that many parents were unable to help their children access learning platforms as they lack the knowledge to do so; and that the instructions given to them were insufficient.

After all, before mass Internet access became widely enough available in Britain in the mid-1990s, Britain's Open University broadcast its courses to regular TV sets throughout the country and despite the lack of on-air interactivity between students and lecturers, it worked well enough, so why should Malaysia insist on Internet-based e-learning when students, teachers and parents face so many practical problems?

On the other hand though, parents with several school-going children will most likely have to get a TV set for each one, especially if the courses for their different standards and forms are conducted concurrently, as would be the case with physical classroom attendance.

Then again, there is a difference between a university-aged student pursuing an Open University degree through the TV who we can expect will have the self-discipline to remain focused on the lecture, and the other hand, especially primary school students who would prefer to view something more entertaining on the TV, besides whatever other distractions there are in the home. So there are pros and cons either way.

Malaysia's national and national-type schools began classes on 20 January 2021, for all students starting from Standard 1 to Form 6, with Form 5 and Form 6 students who will be sitting for public examinations allowed to attend class physically during the COVID-19 crisis afflicting Malaysia and the whole world right now, whilst the rest of the students have to attend online via e-learning using video communication services such as Google Meet.

All well and good it may seem, but past experience in 2020 has revealed major barriers to online leaning being lack of devices such as PCs, tablet devices and smartphones for students to learning on, lack of widespread enough coverage of fixed and wireless broadband Internet infrastructure to enable those with e-learning devices to access lessons online - these being the two main problems students face in attending lessons from their school teachers online, according to Malaysia Now of 20 January 2021.

Besides that, Malaysia Now cited a study by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia's (UKM) Faculty of Education which found that student attendance was below 80% and many were unable to focus on their lessons due to an inconducive atmosphere at home. The study also found that about half of teachers are not comfortable conducting online classes, with only 50-60% of teachers with the IT skills needed to do so.

Malaysia Now went on to say:-

Azlin Norhaini Mansor, who heads UKM's Centre of Education Leadership and Policy and who also led the study told Bernama (Malaysia's National News Agency) that the online teaching method was less effective as it did not correspond with the competency and learning levels of the students.

She said even with sufficient devices and good internet access, teachers, students and parents face constraints and difficulties in implementing online learning.

"The students find it difficult to understand what is taught to them online due to the one-way communication… they can't ask questions or seek clarification. "In such instances, their parents have to tutor them and help them to complete their exercises," she told Bernama.


On 22 January 2021, the Malay Mail reported that whilst students on Pulau Aman, a small island of 250 people off Batu Kawan on mainland Penang had the equipment to access online lessons but wireless broadband connectivity was a problem:-

On tiny island off Penang, students struggle with virtual lessons as internet line often on the blink

Distance learning, smart schools, e-learning and so forth was one of the "Flagship Applications" of Malaysia's Multimedia Super Corridor (now known as MSC Malaysia) initiative to develop Malaysia's information and communications technology (ICT) and multimedia content industry, inaugurated by then Malaysian Prime Minister, then Dato' Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad in 12 February 1996 and the Multimedia Super Corridor itself is special economic zone and high-technology business district between Kuala Lumpur, Putrajaya and the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

On 17th May 1997, which coincides with World Telecommunications Day, amidst much pomp and fanfare, Dr. Mahathir officiated at the groundbreaking ceremony of Cyberjaya, Malaysia's first intelligent cybercity and the headquarters of the 6,960 acre Multimedia Super Corridor. I was at this cleared portion of an old palm oil plantation to cover the groundbreaking for In.Tech, then the weekly ICT pullout of The Star.

However, looking back over the years, how did all this distance learning, online leaning, e-learning, smart schools and so forth work out? I don't see much evidence of the computers on every desk in Malaysian schools, knowledgeable, tech-savvy, well informed students. Whenever I visit my old school, the most I see in some classrooms is an overhead projector and I understand that there are not enough working PCs in the ICT lab for the students do do their computing practical.

When I stepped into my old school's science lab for the first time after 50 years. apart from an overhead projector, everything else, including the lab benches and lab equipment was exactly the same as when I was last in the lab in 1969. 

In late 2012, I covered a media event by YTL Communications and YTL company Frog Asia to announce their winning of Phase 1 of the Ministry of Education's 1Bestarinet contract to provide the then 10,000 schools across Malaysia with wireless broadband access using their then WiMAX (Worldwide Interoprability for Microwave Access) technology and provision of their Frog Virtual Learning Environment (Frog VLE) for students to study, do their homework, interact with their peers online, form collaborative teams with fellow students to work on joint projects and assignments online, for students to interact with their teachers online, for parents interact with their teachers online and to check up on their children's progress and performance and so forth, all online.

Wow great! it may seem but how many parents across Malaysia can afford to provide each school-going child with a desktop or notebook PC, a tablet device or a smartphone to access Frog VLE and use it to the full. Also, even if parents can afford to provide each of their school-going children with such devices which they can use within the WiMAX coverage of their school, however how many parents would be able to afford the fixed or wireless broadband connectivity for their children to access the Frog VLE at home. Moreover, would there be fixed or wireless broadband coverage of their homes, especially homes in the smaller towns and villages?

An answer came in October 2015 when Malaysia was blanketed with a thick smoky haze blown over from Indonesia and the air quality was so bad that schools were closed and students expected to learn from home using Frog VLE but it did not work out well as you can see below:-

Teachers' union says 1BestariNet useless for online learning from home

The issue here was not that YTL Communications was only able to connect 89% of schools with its WiMAX broadband due to a variety of reasons including inability to obtain approval from the relevant local authorities to install their radio base stations amongst other limitations. However, this was not much of an issue, since YTL Communications could lease either fixed or wireless broadband connectivity from other communication service providers to serve these schools.

However, the main issue, was that Frog VLE use by teachers, students and parents was very low  at between 0.01% and 4.69%", according to findings revealed by the third series of the 2013 Auditor-General's report, which said that it had been monitoring the contractors' performances and status of the project's implementation in all states and had found that the project was implemented before teachers and students were fully trained to utilise the VLE, according to The Star of 11 November 2014.

Ministry: 1BestariNet project failed due to delays

YTL Communications won Phase 2 of the 1Bestarinet contract which ended on 30 June 2019 and was not renewed, and schools in Malaysia turned to other broadband Internet providers and learning environments such as the Google Classroom learning management system (LMS), which still requires knowledge of how to log in with a Google ID and password and so forth and it works across multiple devices.

Now I have recently seen some real world problems parents and their children face.

A neighbour's son started Standard 1 at a Chinese medium vernacular school on 20 January 2021 and under normal circumstances, the parents would go to the school and collect the relevant physical text books and workbooks for the subjects to be studied throughout the year but due to COVID-19 containment restrictions, a list of PDF softcopies of the books were sent out and in the evening of 18th January 2021, I received the list with the links below forwarded by this parent via WhatsApp with the request that I download them for him from the Pandai.org e-book portal. 

  

Thankfully, the list does not require one to log in with their Google ID and password to download the books for all subjects from Standards 1 to 6 and Forms 1 to 5 and these e-books are available in Malay, Chinese and Tamil for all languages and also in English for relevant subjects such as Science and Mathematics.

I was visiting my aunt at the time, so had no time to download the relevant e-books required and then nine PDF e-books were forwarded to me via WhatsApp, with the request to print them out. These e-books had been posted via WhatsApp to the relevant parents' WhatsApp group which also served as a parents' support group.

Based upon advice from the parents' group, my neighbour's wife had managed to install the Google Meet app on it and she would copy the relevant meeting IDs from WhatsApp on her smartphone into Google Meet in the iPad. It would have been simpler if it was an Android tablet. 

I downloaded the books to my phone and tried to e-mail them to the iCloud e-mail of his son's iPad which he would use to virtually attend his classes but each of these books was between 99 and 148 pages long and their file sizes ranged from 22 to 44 megabytes which was too big to send as an e-mail attachment. Gmail's attachment limit is around 25 megabytes.

When I got home, I connected my phone to a PC via its USB charger cable and copied all the books out from the WhatsApp>Media>Documents folder to the PC's hard disk.


Another way would be to log into WhatsApp Web in a browser on the PC and download the nine books one by one directly to the PC's hard drive.

However, each of the e-books was too big to print out on a home printer, so I wrote them to a CD, intending to pass it to my neighbour the next day for him to take to the print shop.

Thankfully, some of the more tech-savvy parents in the group found a print shop to print them out and my neighbour went over to the print shop to buy printouts of the nine text books and the related workbooks all nicely bound, so it seemed that the problem was solved.

Then yesterday 22 Jan 2021 I got this request forwarded to me by WhatsApp. To which I replied in light green.



The message was sent by a teacher in another class and it clearly shows that parents of children at this school in a fairly vibrant, middle class residential and commercial area of "sophisticated" and "affluent" Petaling Jaya face such problems of "without gadget", what more parents in the smaller towns and villages of Malaysia, such as in Sabah or even the remoter areas of Selangor, said to be the "most developed", "most sophisticated" and "most affluent" state in Malaysia with the highest level of Internet penetration.

Now many parents of children starting Standard One must be pretty young and supposedly more "tech savvy" than senior citizens but from the looks of it, even they face problems with using smartphones, tablets or PCs for more productive uses than for messaging and for social media.


Whilst admittedly, today's PCs, smartphones and tablets with a graphical user interface are easier and more intuitive for people to use compared to their text-based command line predecessors of my time, however they are still not that simple for most users to operate beyond simple messaging and social media functions, and this is true, even of young users.




So that being the case with e-learning which many students, teachers and parents have problems operating, proposals such as to instead deliver lessons by TV or radio, such as made by Jannie Lasimbang, would likely be a more viable, though a less "sexy" solution for a real-world problem on the ground.

But then again, as stated at the beginning of this post, parents may need to buy a TV for each of their school-going children to attend TV learning concurrently, so which would be more affordable? That's a tough question to answer.

With the COVID-19 crisis still raging in Malaysia, I suppose students, teachers and parents are faced with a situation similar of having to eat canned and packaged food to survive when fresh food is not available. It's not an ideal solution but perhaps the best substitute.

Yours truly


















IT.Scheiss