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Amid lack of guidance, teachers chart own path to tackle online learning obstacles
Lack of access to technology and digital illiteracy among teachers still complicate online learning, pushing some innovative teachers to find ways to improve distance education methods on their own.
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Teachers at Sekolah Alam Qur’ani kindergarten and elementary school have a discussion before working on student academic reports for the first semester in Tapos, Depok, West Java, in this file photo taken in 2021. (JP/P.J.Leo)
H
is voice is crackly as it echoes and hisses on screen, and there are no subtitles to aid in hearing. But the information he shares is kept short and simple.
The bespectacled man, dressed in full camel-brown garb, is obviously superimposed over a video of a nondescript valley with mountain views. But he delivers his lesson plan succinctly, using his face and body language to capture the attention of his supposed viewers.
His idea of breaking into song to demonstrate tempo in music is nothing revolutionary. But for his pupils’ sake, it should be enough to help them understand the basics.
Mansyur, 45, may seem like a small-town state elementary school teacher from Bekasi, West Java, but what he is doing with self-made videos for his housebound students could be exactly what Indonesia’s struggling education sector needs to progress in digital education.
With the recent COVID-19 case spike threatening to send students nationwide back to exclusively online learning, teachers are keen to use their two years of experience instructing under pandemic conditions to innovate and come up with ways to improve distance education.
For Mansyur, he decided to tackle a common problem in online learning: the lack of engaging instruction. This has led him to produce videos of bite-sized lessons to share with his students at SD Pejuang 7 state elementary school.
“I found a lot of educational videos online and thought to myself, ‘I can make this too.’ So I began producing them on a daily basis, since I know I can’t simply hand out assignments to my students,” he said on Thursday.
