Yet, amid the difficult time of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools have had no choice but to make do with the virtual learning platforms available in order to maintain children’s and teachers’ health.

One of the schools that continues to conduct its classes online is Sinarmas World Academy (SWA) in Bumi Serpong Damai (BSD), South Tangerang city, Banten.

SWA board chairman Anton Mailoa said that although the BSD area was a safe zone, but the school had students from various areas in Greater Jakarta, including those that were red zones for the coronavirus outbreak.

“We need to be careful with this. So, we have to find new ways of delivering our teaching materials remotely and to design distant-learning models that will work for the students,” Anton said on Wednesday during an online talk show themed Educating the Nation: 2020-2045.

The talk show, organized by The Jakarta Post from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on Wednesday, also featured three other speakers focusing on the issue of education: World Bank senior social development specialist Dewi Susanti, SMERU Research Institute researcher Shintia Revina and Federation of Indonesian Teachers Association deputy secretary-general Satriwan Salim.

The webinar also discussed strategies that schools could use to turn online learning into a success, a subject area where Anton shared his expertise.

“We have to modify our teaching materials and timetables to fit in with the current online learning context. [Before the coronavirus outbreak], when students still came physically to the school, they had to attend their classes from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.,” Anton said.

“While the school hours mentioned above might be OK for much older students, the younger ones might have a hard time with it; it’s much harder to command their attention since they still like to run around and get distracted,” he continued.

Therefore, he said, in online learning, the quality of the material delivered mattered more than the quantity of hours spent: “our school team has successfully shortened the classroom periods for the smaller kids, while making the teaching process more interactive to engage these younger students so that they won’t lose their attention”.

According to Anton, thankfully the school has a lot of advantages in transforming all its teaching activities online, at least during the pandemic, because it was among one of the first schools in Jakarta to quickly decide to shift all learning to virtual platforms after the government announced the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia on March 2.

“For instance, we had already set up an online library system where we subscribe to a lot of materials online, covering a lot of current affairs in Indonesia and around the world,” Anton said.

He added that the school had also developed an adequate online assessment system for its students.

Beyond technical matters, close communication with parents as one of the school’s main stakeholders has also become an essential ingredient in ensuring online classes are a success, since during these virtual classes parents play a bigger role than ever in supervising their children’s studies, according to Anton.

In order not to neglect children’s socio-emotional development at a time when people are stuck in home quarantine, SWA has also actively involved its students in social activities related to the COVID-19 context, such as making face shields and donating them to those most in need of this protective gear.

SWA is also collaborating with several public schools, such as SMA 6 and SMA 28 state high schools in South Tangerang, by sharing online learning videos and promoting friendship among students from all three schools.

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