UWI students anxious to return to face-to-face class
Published:Saturday | December 26, 2020 | 12:07 AMRomario Scott/Gleaner Writer
In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, some students in the faculty of Science and Technology, University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, have felt tremendous pressure, but their experiences have highlighted major gaps in the delivery of tertiary education in the country.
Science and Technology Faculty representative on the Guild, Daniel Mullings, told The Gleaner that the pandemic has opened her eyes to see how wide the digital divide has been.
Mullings said some students in the science and technology faculty have been braving the disease to attend face-to-face lab sessions. Others have chosen to be engaged from a distance.
“Online learning has definitely highlighted the digital divide. I remember having a student say half of her laptop screen stopped working so she tried to do the exam on the other half.
“Online learning also introduces a heavy reliance on national systems like JPS and Internet service providers, which may have never experienced this level of usage before. This in turn introduces a variability because if Internet or electricity is down today, you are unable to access classes. I’ve had students travelling to other parishes to do their mid-semester exams because they have unstable access during heavy periods of rain,” the student representative told The Gleaner.
However, as university administrators prepare to offer another full semester online, they are also looking at returning to normality in September 2021.
A COVID-19 vaccine set to arrive in the island at the end of the upcoming semester serves as a positive for the administrators, but Mullings is fully aware that any attempt to resume face-to-face school on a wide scale could be an expensive undertaking for the university.
Robust Cleaning System
“I would imagine you’d need a robust cleaning system in place, inclusive of sanitisation of all door handles for classes multiple times a day, installing sanitisation and handwashing stations across the faculty. I do not think the faculty or the university as a whole will be able to do this for the entire student body,” Mullings contends.
Nonetheless, she believes students are eager to return to face-to-face school.
But she worries about the burden that will be placed on regional and international students.
“If we return to face-to-face classes, they would have to find funds to book a plane ticket to return to Jamaica, pay for COVID test, quarantine, etc.,” she pointed out.
She believes that going forward, the university should offer an online stream to students, except for courses which require labs and practical assessments.
It’s an early indication that COVID-19 might have permanently changed the learning landscape at the UWI, once thought of as the melting pot of the Caribbean where there was mingling and cultural diffusion.