The Sir Arthur Lewis Community College and the Ministry of Education, Innovation, Gender Relations and Sustainable Development have collaborated to organize an e-Symposium on the topic: āDigital Education: The Art of the Possible, NOWā.Ā The E-Symposium is scheduled for Wednesday, 6th May 2020 from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. via the Zoom platform with registered participants from Asia, Europe, North America and the Caribbean. The symposium will also be broadcast live on NTN, WVent and the SALCC Facebook page.
The COVID-19 crisis has impacted education systems in an unprecedented way and for most education systems e-Learning has arrived by default, and instruction has become an emergency response.Ā In Saint Lucia, we rapidly introduced virtual learning as an alternative to teaching and learning since the shutdown of schools from 13th March 2020. The e-Symposium seeks to explore the issues emanating from this response from the perspective of different practitioners and agencies in the Caribbean and beyond. President of the Commonwealth of Learning, the OECS Director General and Digicelās Business Development Director will deliver feature addresses with panels composed of representatives from the University of the West Indies, Ministry of Education, OECS and the Creative Industries. Digicel is a partner as a sponsor of this event.
The themes of this e-symposium include:
- Learning in a Digital Context – Psychological Perspectives; Instructional Design Responses; Managing Wider Education Systems.
- Emergency Teaching versus Online Design.
- Predicting the Future: The Impact of ERT on Education Systems.
- Community Learning in the Digital Paradigm – Parents as Teachers; Connecting the Private Sector and Education; The Role of Telecommunication Authorities and Companies.
- Transforming Systems in the Digital Paradigm.
- Resilience of Support Systems in the Digital Age.
New research is showing that this emergency paradigm shift in education is having significant consequences on most countries. Some experts have responded to this as ātriage schoolingā; some focus on the āculture shockā of moving mass education from physical classrooms to the home; others on the psychological impact of over-exposure to technology on young people; and still others have proposed that this was a needed shift, albeit sudden, for education systems that needed a significant reboot.
The Sir Arthur Lewis Community College transitioned to the implementation of e-Learning by rapidly up scaling training of faculty, supporting content development, and connecting other sectors in the enterprise.Ā This has resulted in the development of a unified e-Learning platform, 271 hosted courses, and a 500% increase in student enrolment on the platform.