In the Philippines, schools will reopen on October 5th after months shutdown following the spread of coronavirus in the country. However, this year’s school reopening will be different, unlike in other years.
For the first time in the country’s history, the schools will be reopening the academic year through distance learning. School reopenings will also be in October for the first time, and not June, as it has always been the norm.
School reopening in the Philippines
A total of 22.44 million public school students have registered for school reopening across the country, and the government has promised that it will support the students to continue with their education. To do this, they have implemented measures that students should take for effective distance learning.
Among such measures is online learning, where the government anticipates that millions of students will be sitting in front of their laptops, desktops, iPads, or smartphones as they listen to teachers in class.
However, the ministry also realizes that this may not be untenable, and hence they have created a modular system that will help students to continue with their studies. The Department of Education(DepEd) indicated that they had so far printed a total of 739,372,098, and of this, they indicated that they were ready to start distributing over 730 million copies of these modules.
This would help in situations where students who are under-resourced require materials to continue with their learning. Self-learning modules have grown in popularity due to this fact, becoming the top preference for public school students who will continue with their education through distance learning.
The DepED has also indicated that it has trained over 620,000 teachers and over 7 million parents in order to help students continue their distance learning. The department argued that this would make the distance seamless for all involved and the biggest beneficiaries will be students.
Education Secretary Leonor Briones, however, indicated that, since distance learning was something new, they had experienced challenges and were still anticipating more challenges as learning continued. However, she expressed confidence that the process will work out fine after students and teachers get used to the method of learning.
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