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Colleges prefer being online to keep students in line : Classroom struggles!
Colleges prefer being online to keep students in line
Karachi, Jan 23, 2008: Usman Ganny runs a small
school in Gulistan-e-Jauhar but ensures that the school website is instantly
updated on happenings around school.
"It is no use having a school
website if it isn't updated regularly. The Internet is a facility that must be
availed by the masses to acquire minute-to-minute details," he said.
Another school that regularly updates its website to facilitate parents
and students is L'ecole for Advanced Studies. The school also has a good email
database through which their programme coordinators can notify the students.
"All undergraduate students are required to check their email every morning so
that any change in schedule can be notified to them," said Maheen, who
coordinates their undergraduate programme.
Students at SZABIST are also
required to check their email regularly for updates on events, courses and
off-days as there are e-groups for all their programmes. Teachers and students
are members and can easily share information from uploading presentations and
sharing links to journals to cancelled and rescheduled classes. "It provides a
decent enough alternate to a website that is hardly ever updated despite having
a whole CS department," said Faraz, who has just begun his undergraduate degree
at SZABIST.
Websites for IBA, Greenwich University and Indus Valley
School of Art and Architecture were found to be most up-to-date and that
students at these colleges accessed the websites on a daily basis.
"There
are so many things happening at Indus Valley all the time and with the extensive
coursework we have, we can't keep track of every event. That is why we
appreciate that the website is in-house and can be accessed for any change.
Class schedules, upcoming courses, exhibits, submissions, everything is
available on our website," said Uzma, a third-year graphic design
student.
IBA also hosts an in-house webhosting server and makes good use
of their website. Azhar, an employee at IBA, said that students accessed the
website frequently for updates and to access the online library. "Students can
access any department and get the particulars from a long history of assignments
and mock exams," he added.
While most colleges make use of either email
or their websites, schools are not so well organized in the online department.
Most schools claimed that the reason their websites were outdated was that they
did not have access to the school's webhosting agents.
"Our website has
been under construction for a few months now so there we can't access any
information online unless it is from subsidiary websites that host posts and
blogs from our students," said a student council member of Karachi Grammar
School.
According to the school administration, their website is taking
so long because they are aiming to make it an online utility for KGS alumni
worldwide. "The website will not only host news, circulars and other
extracurricular activities but also provide a forum for previous, current and
future Grammarians to interact with each other," said administration member
Mukhtar. He said that they had IT professionals on their team and also
outsourced a multimedia firm for hosting their website.
Ayesha, a teacher
at Links Primary School, said their website was focused on information regarding
admissions and helping parents decide whether their school was the best choice
for their children. "We deal with the younger lot more so the website does not
need to be updated."
However, students do have communities on online
social networking websites such as Orkut or Facebook where they put up whatever
information they have. "We even have our teachers on our Facebook group and they
usually leave a post on the wall for students whenever there is something that
has been changed," said Fatima Nasim, a seventh-grader at Bay View Academy.
Some schools have managed to find an alternate to the Internet in order
to communicate last minute occurrences. One such instance is Frobels
International School, which relies on a very good parent teacher networking
system.
"At the beginning of each school, teachers ask a number of
parents to volunteer who are then delegated the task of informing other parents
of any last minute changes in the following school day or other change in
plans," explained Uzma, a senior teacher at Frobels primary section. Daily Times
Classroom struggles!
Jan 23, 2008: IT defies the imagination
that today's world still has areas where education is not only slave to poverty
but also perpetuates it. Large scale educational reforms sweeping across most of
the developing and the developed world have done little for a place such as
South Africa, which may be the continent's largest economy, but 43 per cent of
its population lives below the poverty line and over seventy per cent of its
schools remain inoperative. The country clearly has not recovered from the
apartheid regime, which allocated funds according to the ethnic identity of a
school. Nelson Mandela's affirmative action has failed to rescue the educational
system which remains plagued by not just infrastructural problems but a huge
lack of teachers. Although Pakistan has no historical legacy of this kind to put
up with, its case is not very different in that its educational quagmire results
from institutions being victims of poverty and neglect, and largely
class-driven.
According to a Unesco report, last year Pakistan was second
amongst countries with the highest number of non-school going children. The
primary reason is the government's failure to provide good education to children
who live in abject deprivation and cannot afford the high-fee private schools -
the only ones providing good education to our children. As a result nearly forty
per cent of boys and over sixty per cent of girls are out of school.
State-sponsored schools are a shambles as are low-end private ones.
Unsurprisingly attendance remains negligible because, even though education is
free, there are related costs that prove too much for poor families to bear.
More importantly, the poor state of education fails to hold children in the
government schools and the drop-out rate is high. Good education is the most
effective way to break the poverty wheel as it equips people with skills and
knowledge to qualify for employment, which in turn contributes to the betterment
of people's lives and enables them to break out of the poverty barrier. The
vicious cycle of lack of education and poverty, with each feeding on the other,
needs to be broken. Only the government can help by making good education
accessible to all. Dawn
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| Education News | | Updated: 24 May, 2012 |
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