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eLearning — the devil in the detail

The eLearning website was launched in January 2014 by the government of Punjab with great fanfare. Full page advertisements appeared in major newspapers, informing the public about a revolutionary educational initiative of the government of Punjab. The advertising claimed that Punjab had made a giant leap in disseminating education through the internet. Under the Media tab, the site makes a lofty claim that “the first government e-Learning initiative in Pakistan has revolutionized the entire education of the country”.

Unfortunately, a review of the website tells a different story. While the concept of developing such a website is valid, the implementation has a lot of gaps and omissions. The website is organised by subject, with submenus taking the user through the grades and teacher’s guides. Supplementary material is presented under the headings of Animations, Videos, Simulations and Assessment. Oddly, these topics are not shown in the top level tabs but appear separately on the main screen. On the Home screen, the first tab from the left is for Chemistry. The table of contents indicates that the material is for Grade 9, Grade 10 and O Level. The chapters are listed below. The material is in English only. It is all scanned textbooks.

The next entry is for Practical Books and contains scanned material for chemistry laboratory work. The presentation format changes when O Level material is presented. There is a confusing mix of videos and chapters there. The material is attributed to the likes of Mr Chung.k and Joyce23liu, BBC and a number of others. Finally, the teacher’s guides are presented. Again, these are nothing more than scanned books. There is a mismatch between the chapters in the textbook and the chapters in the teachers’ guides. For example Chapter 15 in the text book is Water while it is Acids Bases and Salts in the Teachers’ guide, which is actually Chapter 10 in the text book. Chapter 15 Water is nowhere to be seen in the Teacher’s Guide. Clearly, there has been no effort to check the content for consistency in numbering the chapters.

Some strange things happen in the final tab, titled Miscellaneous. The text books in this section consist of Quran eLearning and stories. Under Quran eLearning there is only one chapter (which is actually just one page), titled Man Superiority and Dignity. This is indeed revolutionary since it has compressed all the knowledge into one page. The Story Books section states that “eLearn Punjab has launched the story books for entertainment”.

More surprises follow, there are no text books for English but there are teacher’s guides for every grade from 1 to 10. The teacher’s guides, under Resources and Material, call for a text book that is non-existent. The last section of the grade 1 teacher’s guide is titled Self Reflection, which seems rather ambitious. There are no text books or teacher’s guides for learning Urdu. This is rather surprising, as many children cannot read or write Urdu. Maybe, the omission is because Urdu is only useful for servants and servants do not have computers.

The main part of the website ends here. The rest of this wonderful learning initiative consists of Animations, Videos, Simulations and Assessments. These sections had the potential to be useful, as animations and videos are far more interesting that plain text. Unfortunately, in these sections as well, no real effort has gone into bringing in quality. Chaos reigns in these sections. The information is poorly organised and the navigation is totally confusing. Sometimes the animations stand alone and at other times they are embedded in the text. Some have sound but some do not. None of the animations have titles. Clicking on the first animation starts a video on enzymes. The sequence shows blobs of something hop about without any explanation of what is happening or what is the intent of the animation. The animation goes round and round and there is no indication on the screen of how to get out of it. All 10 animations on the screen are equally arcane. There is no help screen to assist the user.

To make things further confusing, the tabs at the top take the hapless user inside text books where there are some embedded videos and sound clips explaining the material. It is clear that the internet has been scoured for anything useful to put on the website, without any effort for providing a consistent look and feel. In the videos section, there are videos without any picture to indicate what those videos contain. Clicking on the play icon on the black rectangle starts the video. Here, our poor, neglected step-language of Urdu makes an appearance and all the videos are in Urdu! There are a total of 27 videos in this section to cover the entire science curriculum.

Finally, it is time for assessments. In the Assessment section, modern technology has been abandoned. Online exam papers and online responses to multiple choice questions are the norm in any serious eLearning program, but here the test papers have to be downloaded and printed. This would be an issue, since not many schools and homes have printers available. Also, there is only one question paper for each subject, so it is not clear how more questions can be made available.

Overall, the eLearning site is poor in content, organisation and presentation. The site is mainly a collection of digitised text books with some videos and animations throw in as an afterthought. The aesthetics are poor and the user interface is cumbersome to navigate. The taxpayers have a right to ask the government of Punjab how much money was spent on this project, what criteria were used to measure the achievement of objectives and how the site has performed according to those criteria. If these questions are not answered and steps are not taken to rectify the deficiencies, the whole project will become another white elephant sucking up resources and providing nothing in return.

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