Gov’t in partnership to fast-track learning in Math, Chemistry

By Lakhram Bhagirat

The Education Ministry and the Roraima Learning Trust have launched a new micro- learning pilot project targeting 70 schools, with more than 150 students in the area of Chemistry and Mathematics.
The project seeks to disseminate the CXC syllabus into small modules that can be used on an Information Communication Technology (ICT) platform. The programme will be developed by the University of Innsbruck, Austria and is being introduced to Guyana by Honorary Consul to South Africa Kojo Parris, who is also the chief executive officer of the Roraima Learning Trust.

Speaking to Guyana Times International, Parris said he was introduced to the programme by a colleague from Austria where it was developed to continue higher education.
“I heard about micro-learning from an Austrian colleague from the University of Innsbruck and Professor Peter Brook who developed a project called Knowledge Pulse. And they used micro-learning programmes to… [allow] people to complete their education and it occurred to me that we can adapt their standard Knowledge Pulse platform and use it in the context of schools in Guyana,” he said.
He said that the project replaces the “reinforcement stage” of learning. He explained that learning starts through the absorption of information that needs to be reinforced through testing and various routines and to develop insights into the students’ performance.
“The middle part of the learning process, which is reinforcement, usually takes up a lot of teaching resources, a lot of education resources. It is estimated anything over 40 per cent of the resources used in the education sector is spent on the learning process in that reinforcement stage. The great thing is that bit of the process you can put onto an ICT platform and you can create programmes and systems, which allow you to use ICT to test people and to help them to reinforce that knowledge; and all micro learning does is to take that little bit and the consequences are pretty impressive,” he explained.
Parris added that the benefits of the project includes students learning faster, because people tend to absorb information in small bits and the programme provides just that and they can do it repetitively.
He also said that it allows teachers more free time, because the need to invigilate tests is reduced, thus they have more time to help the weaker students come to par and also concentrate on their administrative works as well.
He added; “I am absolutely gratified at the response from the Ministry of Education and beyond the ministry, our colleagues at OLPF (One Laptop Per Family) who have embraced this. The OLPF programme will actually deliver the system preloaded onto the machine and also retrofit the system to all the existing machines and the 150 students who are part of the pilot.
“E-Networks has agreed to provide highspeed Wimax Internet to the seven schools who have been selected, so that they can access the relevant information and if they don’t have Internet at home, they can work offline,” an excited Parris said.