Provincial study centres to help students without internet and computer facilities

Source:island

Education Minister Prof. G.L.Peiris yesterday (21) said that provincial education centres would be established for the benefit of students unable to engage in online education due to various issues faced by them, amidst the pandemic. 

 Addressing the media at the Government Information Department, the Minister said, schoolchildren had to cover the syllabuses online as the schools were closed due to Covid-19 and to facilitate their educational TV programmes such as “Guru Gedera”, “Thaksalawa” and through the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation while study courses had been organised for teachers through “virtual classrooms” on the e-thaksala programme. 

E-thaksala has over 6,500 lessons and they are accessed by around 250,000 persons a day and last month the lessons were accessed by 3.5 million. 

 He said, “Gurugedera” programme telecast on the Eye channel in both Sinhala and Tamil medium and it functioned 16 hours a day on five days of the week. 

The programme offers around 5,000 lessons to students from Grade 3 to the Advanced Level. 

There is no charge to access e-thaksala. 

Those e-programmes were conducted by the Education Quality Development National Institute and many such programmes were being conducted under the supervision of directors in charge of the respective zonal, divisional, school and grade levels, the Minister pointed out. 

However, Prof. Peiris conceded that 12% of students had no access to those programmes. 

The Minister said that to address the grave shortcoming, provincial education directors had been instructed on June 17 to establish provincial study centres. They would function strictly according to health guidelines.

The proposed centres are scheduled to function from 7.00 am till 3.00 pm. And each centre will have at least 10 computers, laptops and tabs