CASE STUDY
Tertiary students, too, are suffering from learning loss due to online classes. President of the
Jamaica Union of Tertiary Students, Christina Williams, is calling for a revision of curricula used
for online learning as tertiary students are falling through the cracks as much as their primary and
secondary counterparts.
“There is a knowledge gap happening right now in our schools and it is widening and I am
terrified,” Williams said at yesterday’s National Youth Consultative Conference.
“We have the (UN) Sustainable Development Goals and we talk about Vision 2030 but those are
at risk. They are being compromised as we speak because aside from our students feeling
disengaged, they are on the platform but they are not really connected to the material. There is also
the matter of missed classes and there is no real accountability, particularly at tertiary institutions,”
added Williams who was also one of the panellists.
The former University of the West Indies, Mona, Guild President also said that while the Ministry
of Education, Youth and Information has launched a ‘Yard to Yard’ programme to track errant
secondary school students, no such undertaking exists for those at the tertiary level. “If you are
missing from classes, no one cares. So you have tertiary students who are falling behind by months
and you have those who, even while attending classes, still don’t get it,” she claimed.
Yesterday, state minister in the education ministry, Robert Nesta Morgan, in responding to
Williams’ point, said the issue was one which needed to be explored.
“The other issue is that everybody in the education sector needs to recognise that we have been
talking about a digital society for 10 to 20 years. We have given it a lot of lip service. We have
had tablets in schools for 20 years. When we went to the ministry, we saw a whole warehouse of
tablets that were damaged. The time has come for Jamaicans to take digital literacy seriously and
move forward as a digital society. If we do not do that, we are going to have questions such as the
one which was just raised about the distinction between remote and online learning. We should
not be having that discussion in 2021,” Morgan said. He further commented that at the onset of
the pandemic an uncomfortable realisation was that a lot of educators “were not digitally literate”.
Dunkley-Willis, A. (October 7, 2021). The Jamaica Observer – Excerpt
A. Explain the term, Sustainable Development Goals. (4 marks)
B. To what sustainable development goal does the article refer? (1 mark)
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21/12 The Council of Community Colleges of Jamaica Page 3
C. The author argued that “The time has come for Jamaicans to take digital
literacy seriously and move forward as a digital society.” Describe
FOUR (4) preconditions for successful technology transfer and diffusion
in the Caribbean. (10 marks)
D. State what ‘knowledge gap’ is and comment on the extent to which the
COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on it in your country. (5 marks)
(Total 20 marks)
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