The Promise and The Challenges Of Online/ Virtual Schools

According to UNESCO, there are 262 million children out of school, mostly in low and middle-income countries. And of those who are in school, too many are not learning, according to the World Bank Global Development Report of 2018. There are many difficulties, including a shortage of schools, incapacity to go to school due to conflict or disaster and not having enough trained teachers and not having teachers at all.

What do you do when there are no schools or not enough teachers? Or even when you don’t have enough funds to build the schools and hire the teachers that you need? In the face of a global pandemic like the COVID-19 where students cannot move or go to school, what is the alternative? Could the so-called ‘virtual schools’ play a role? How? 

Several countries and organisations have sought answers to such questions through the development of ‘virtual schools’, where students get all (or most) of the time online, and never close to a physical school building. Virtual schools are in some ways a natural extension of many longstanding ‘distance learning’ initiatives around the world that have utilised technologies such as radio and television, updated for the Internet Age. 

A recent European report on virtual schools observes that ”Increasingly, daily life provides numerous examples including banking, travel, higher education, shopping, services and commerce, where people can choose a virtual environment if they wish.” Can ‘virtualising’ the school increase education service delivery? Can virtual schools contribute to solving some of the intractable challenges facing education in the developed and developing world today?

Virtual education has been around for several decades, developing from correspondence schools that sought to assist isolated or rural populations to today’s fully online schools. Driven by advances in Internet access speed and coverage, virtual schools (sometimes referred to as ‘online’ or ‘blended’ schools) are growing and can now be found on every continent. 

However, there are a few primary drivers for the increase in virtual schools: Not enough teachers and Reaching distant populations. These problems are endemic in low-income countries across Africa.