Smart Learning Institute

UNESCO invited to a virtual consultation meeting on 9 July to discuss how to close the education gap in the 20 English and Dutch-speaking Caribbean sub-region during the COVID-19 period, especially in areas with little or no Internet access.

Distance learning, online teaching, virtual seminars.

But what do teachers and students who have no Internet connection do? What if there are no electronic devices to access these distance learning modalities?

UNESCO as the UN Educational Organization, invited trendsetters in the field of digital learning to present their innovative and inclusive technologies for continuing education during COVID-19.

The Global Education Coalition

Dr Faryal Khan, UNESCO's programme specialist for education in the English and Dutch Caribbean welcomed the participants who were connected via zoom technology. She stressed the need to explore distance learning solutions that integrate all students, including those from low-income and resource-poor areas, and that could continue beyond COVID-19.

Her colleague Dr. Valtencir Mendes from UNESCO Headquarters in Paris presented UNESCO's unique partnership to combat educational disruption worldwide: the Global Education Coalition. The Coalition combines the three dimensions of ensuring connectivity, empowering teachers to embrace this new educational reality and ensuring gender equality in education.

Read more here on the Global Education Coalition

The UNESCO education partners

UNESCO's education partners present in the meeting included Microsoft, Lab Xchange from the University of Havard, the Blackboard Academy, Learning Equality and Video Games without Borders.

Alexa Joyce from Microsoft explained to the audience how the company is helping governments create national strategies for hybrid learning through “blended learning”, a combination of online and offline tools, with connection plans, webinars, Teacher-Champion training, learning resources for students and parents.

The Blackboard Academy is dedicated to helping teachers create inclusive online learning. Joel Armando, Program Manager of Blackboard, explained the Academy's three-dimensional approach to continuing learning: providing online courses for teachers, creating a community of practice and providing a learning kit. In addition, the Blackboard Academy will offer online training workshops for 40 representatives of the Ministries of Education of the 20 Caribbean members of the UNESCO Cluster. These "master trainers" will be equipped with the necessary digital skills to further improve the online teaching capacity for educators in their countries.

Robert Lue from the University of Havard presented Lab Xchange, a free platform focusing on the life sciences, which gives teachers and learners the tools to create their personalised classroom with personalised teaching and learning materials. The platform provides a virtual public library with a variety of media files and topics for teaching life sciences mainly to secondary school students. Each teacher can build individual pathways (with resources, videos, documents) and share them with his students, which allows personalised learning and teaching and ensures that the teacher can respond to the needs of his students.

Kolibri is an intelligent technology with a special focus on equity to support quality learning in resource- and connectivity poor contexts. Lauren Lichtman from Learning Equality, the makers of Kolibri, explains how the application empowers teachers during COVID-19. Kolibri teaches educators how to use the technology and how it can be integrated into different learning environments with little or no Internet connectivity. In addition, the offline application also runs on a variety of low-cost devices. Kolibri is already in use in 22 countries throughout the Caribbean region.