How Uruguay Managed to Sustain Education with Schools Closed

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The spread of the pandemic led to the closure of schools in most parts of the world. Over 90 percent of students continued learning, to a greater or lesser extent, at a distance. As of June, Uruguay completely resumed in-person classes. It became the first country in the Latin American region to reopen schools and, arguably, in educational terms it was also the nation that best performed during the quarantine.

Its experience is highlighted in a recent international report that analyzes its educational sustainability during the pandemic. The document bears the stamp of the OECD, Harvard – through the Global Education Innovation Initiative -, the World Bank, and the Finnish NGO HundrED.

The reason for its success lies in the Ceibal Plan, which Uruguay turned into a state policy that transcends current governments. The program delivered and continues to deliver notebooks and tablets to all students between the ages of four and 15. Since its inception in 2007, it has aimed to democratize access and reduce the socio-educational gap. In the lowest wealth quintile of the population, these notebooks are the only device available to almost half of households. The CREA national platform, a system of learning management that was greatly “underutilized” since 2013, has also been made available.

These two precedents provided a significant advantage. They unknowingly prepared for the unexpected. The study conducted by the Ceibal Foundation analyzes the “Ceibal at home” educational continuity plan, which was implemented immediately after the announcement of school closures in March, given that they already had an ecosystem of over 173,000 educational resources.

All these resources are found within the CREA, which also added videoconference software, with students in each classroom ready to have synchronized classes with their teachers. Among these resources, there is a mathematics learning platform that teaches through games, 7,000 books, and a collection of 1,500 educational programs and school texts.

“The new features introduced by ‘Ceibal at home’ focused on improving digital interaction between students and teachers, and on the involvement of families as key facilitators in the teaching and learning process,” says María Florencia Ripani, director of the Ceibal Foundation.

“Ceibal at home” used metrics and telephone surveys to understand the use that the educational community made of the platform, with the aim of making the appropriate adjustments based on demand. It also expanded teacher training to guide teachers during the emergency and served as a disseminator of key information for anti-Covid-19 care.

Most of the system within the platform

Uruguay has an advantage: its educational system is one of the region’s smallest – there are only 817,000 enrolled students. (By contrast, the province of Buenos Aires has six times that figure.) Of these, 85 percent attend public schools. This advantage was exploited to its fullest during the pandemic.

The vast majority in the system, teachers, and students, remained in contact through the platform. According to official data, 85 percent of students in primary schools and 90 percent in secondary schools connected to the CREA, and it covered 95 percent of teachers. The increase in access was exponential: it recorded a 2,452 percent increase in March 2020 compared to the same period in 2019.

“The platform’s high penetration was related to multiple factors,” Leandro Folgar, president of the Ceibal Plan, explained. “Firstly, the strategy of establishing a single channel as soon as the schools were closed was crucial. The message conveyed was clear that this was the ideal method for maintaining the student-teacher relationship. In addition, a percentage of teachers were already familiar with the platform and had been working on it prior to closures,” he said.

Folgar added that the reaction was quick. They managed to deliver 100,000 devices, including computers and tablets for this year, despite the pandemic. “Although the use of WhatsApp was there, it was clear that the suggested use was the CREA and it was very comfortable for teachers to have their students distributed throughout the virtual classrooms. And the families who already relied on Ceibal and encouraged the use of official resources cannot be ignored,” he said.

Faced with the abrupt increase in activity, the education authorities had to quadruple the servers’ capacity to prevent them from becoming saturated with attendance. Similarly, they signed agreements with public and private companies – ANTEL and Claro – so that access to educational resources would not consume cell phone data. “These and other actions described in the document were undertaken with 95 percent of the staff working remotely,” the report notes.

Other countries in the region, such as Argentina, had difficulties in guiding the education community towards official initiatives. Research by the Torcuato Di Tella University shows that the incidence is very low for schools in the city and province of Buenos Aires. Less than a third of vulnerable schools use notebooks and only two percent connect through national or provincial education platforms. In better off schools, it is even less. Moreover, none of the 150 schools analyzed mentioned that their students learn through television or radio. Typically, metropolitan schools work with content produced by the teachers themselves and interact through WhatsApp or Zoom.

In Uruguay, one fact eloquently reflects the scope of the national platform: currently, after classes have restarted, it is the fourth most-visited website in Uruguay, behind giants such as Google, YouTube, and Mercado Libre.

According to the telephone survey results, the Ceibal Plan’s resources were the most used (93 percent) to support public education. The data shows that 98 percent of teachers in state schools sent homework to their students through the platform, 90 percent received assignments from their students and 87 percent used it to make callbacks.

The most frequent activities, according to teachers, were submitting homework, uploading complementary documents and videos, coordinating with colleagues, and creating student groups to exchange files.

According to the survey, 92 percent of teachers were pleased or very pleased with the training activities offered by the Ceibal, although 70 percent expressed the need for additional instructions to achieve a more efficient use of resources.

Source: infobae