The Gauteng Education department’s plan to introduce a paperless education programme is ill-conceived, as there will simply not be enough funds to provide each pupil with a tablet or a laptop, says Christopher Riley, CEO of The Notebook Company.
Riley’s comments follow yesterday’s statement from Gauteng Education MEC Panyaza Lesufi, who said a number of schools in Tembisa are set to pilot a paperless education programme. He said the school would receive state-of-the-art Internet connections at no expense to government. The schools were also supplied with tablets and training to conduct lessons online.
“It is noble attempt, but I just don’t see how the government can afford all the tablets. Most students’ parents will certainly not be able to pay for tablets or laptops,” says Riley.
All text books are available online but, again, students need to own a laptop or tablet – as well as have an Internet connection – to access them.
“Introducing a paperless education system would certainly help to end the embarrassing non-delivery of school textbooks which have been plaguing the country for some time now. But it remains an unobtainable goal simply due to the cost of implementation. This could be summed up as a case of covering the problem of textbook delivery, rather than finding a solution,” he adds.
This is wonderful sentiment indeed, yet alone the costs of giving each learner a tablet or laptop. what about day to day challenges like when Eskom cant even keep the lights on how on earth are these devices and their networks going to stay alive? Even Telkom on their call centres are complaining that many faults are being caused by area power outages. Containers with backup power equipment are being pillaged for the copper and content of the batteries.
How are the rural area’s going to be integrated they can’t even get fibre or ADSL, what’s going to happen when a device needs to replaced, due to damages, loss, theft etc.. who will foot that bill?
Unless these device are going to be kept at the schools its going to make kids easy soft targets for muggings.
I don’t see (non-delivered) text books going the way of the dodo soon sadly, although this is a wonderful initiative I just don’t see it being a practical one for SA unless we do something about the current circumstances and quality of education. Giving a learner even a state of the art laptop will not mean anything if the Teacher is not able to give the lesson, or the device cannot be powered or connect to the internet.
I totally agree – imagine these kids go home after school, carrying their tablets, and their tik-crazy friends/neighbours see them, take the tablets and sell em for R50…now where are they?
No text books and no tablets…worse thatn before.