The Tribune

By EARYEL BOWLEG

Tribune Staff Reporter

ebowleg@tribunemedia.net

AFTER a recent Learning Management System survey revealed the extent of children who did not attend virtual classes, Bahamas Union of Teachers President Belinda Wilson said changes must be made to improve the delivery of quality education to students.

“I am not surprised by the results of the government’s report entitled ‘Survey of Infrequent and Non-users of the Learning Management System (LMS)’ conducted by the Department of Statistics February 2022,” Mrs Wilson said in a voice note yesterday.

She said it only confirms what has been said for the past two years, that many students did not use the LMS. Not to mention, scores of students were not attending school virtually, teachers used Zoom and Google Classroom for their instruction, and user ID and password did not work, she said.

“Some students were no longer attending public schools. Students did not receive log-in information from the Ministry of Education and no internet service. All of these things were said and highlighted by the Bahamas Union of Teachers over and over and over because we were getting the information directly from our teachers on a daily basis,” Mrs Wilson said. “The objective of the survey was to ascertain why the ministry’s platform was not fully utilised by the children who never logged on or who only logged once. Well the Ministry of Education has the data, now what?

“I have pertinent questions. What changes will be made to the curriculum? What new policy will be created and adopted? What new strategies will be implemented to ensure that these same things will not reoccur if we had to revert fully-to-fully online learning? Has anything been done to improve the LMS since the results of the survey? I doubt it. So changes must be made to improve the delivery of quality education to our students. I implore, I urge the Ministry of Education to begin the work now because the more time elapses the wider the learning gap opens.”

According to the report, whose contents were published by the Nassau Guardian last week, about half of the 499 households questioned in the government survey said there was at least one child in the home who did not attend virtual classes.

According to the report, when asked why students were not using the LMS, those surveyed said that the “teachers used ZOOM (47 percent); their user ID and passwords did not work (21 percent); they were no longer attending public school (19 percent); the teacher used Google Classroom (16 percent); they did not receive login information from the Ministry of Education (11 percent); or they had no internet service (seven percent)”.

Back in January, there were new complaints about the Ministry of Education’s Learning Management System, with issues causing some delays in teaching and reports of users being unable to log on to the system. Mrs Wilson released a voice note about the problems she said were experienced with the LMS at the time, calling it “a new term with the same old issues”.