Daily Times

Now when educational institutions are closed and students and teachers are relying on distant and online learning, it is heartening to see that Pakistan is moving successfully towards digitization of education. Though it hit the road to online classes due to the coronavirus pandemic, it is experimenting new things which is pretty encouraging. Recently, Prof Dr Nabi Bux Jummani has introduced radio schools that will function in different parts of the country. Prof Jummani is a name to reckon with in distance learning. Unfortunately, our mainstream media does not warm to our true heroes because they focus on solutions while the media needs problems to highlight. Our universities were already having successful experiments of online classes despite the fact that the Higher Education Commission (HEC) proved itself to be part of the problem. No effort was made to solve the problems research students were facing due to interruption in their learning process. As a result, its main office became a venue of constant protests by research scholars and faculty members.

To run salt into the wounds, they were treated in a cold bureaucratic manner.

However, committee of the vice chancellors headed by the visionary Dr Muhammad Ali Shah was always out to facilitate students and enhance quality of research and learning process. The online system that has been adopted by our universities shall be delivering results even after the pandemic. As per vision of Dr Shah, this system will continue to be used for recording lectures and relaying them online. Hence, a student will be able to have many lectures on one single topic of his or her interest, as is the case in most developed countries.

However, there was a need for innovation in primary education. The number of out of school children is a constant concern and developed countries have invested heavy donations to contain this number but in vain as un-qualified people have exhausted all such efforts.

Now the initiative of radio schools seems to be a big breakthrough in this direction. If we succeed in containing the number of out-of-school children and enhancing the quality of education in our schools through such initiatives, we can be sure of a bright future. There, however, is a need to form one single body to treat digitalization of the education process as a whole and that body needs to be kept aloft by bureaucrats who can never replace professionals.