THEME 1: TEACHING AND LEARNING

Topic: Learning Outcomes

(Learning environment)

General research question: What factors affect the achievement of learning outcomes?

Possible Title: The Effects of Blended-Learning on the Students of Nueva Vizcaya State University living in
a Rural Area on their level of motivation to Learn during Pandemic.

DEFINITION OF TERMS

Blended Learning

Blended learning, an approach to education that combines online educational materials and
opportunities for interaction online with traditional place-based classroom methods, requires the
physical presence of both teacher and student, with some elements of student control over time, path
or place.

Pandemic

A pandemic is a disease outbreak that spreads across countries or continents. It affects more people and
takes more lives than an epidemic. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 to be a
pandemic when it became clear that the illness was severe and that it was spreading quickly over a wide
area.

Rural Area

Rural area or countryside is a geographic area that is located outside towns and cities.Moreover, this are
areas which has slow internet connectivity. And are areas that are prone to blackout.

REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

Blended-Learning
Classes for basic formal education nationwide, for more than 8.5 million enrollees, begins with the
challenges in blended learning up in many public and private classrooms from Batanes to Tawi-Tawi,
From the start, education officials were aware of the challenges posed by blended learning to both
students and educators. But blended learning was deemed to be better than nothing as the pandemic
forced children to stay at home.The lack of the needed gadgets and internet connectivity for distance
learning was the first major hurdle. Approximately 2.7 million school children did not enroll many
because of this lack, and others because their parents had lost their livelihoods, they are in rural areas
and could not afford even the miscellaneous expenses for putting a child through school. Cramped
dwellings particularly in informal communities are also not conducive to learning.

According to Arnold Custudio 2020 the past year has shown the limits of distance learning in a country
where many families cannot afford the technology requirements for this learning mode, and the
difficulty in coping up specially in rural areas knowing that they have slow internet connectivity.
Custudio also added that among the poor, cramped dwellings do not provide the proper environment
for education, moreover he said that Blended Lsarning also requires greater involvement of parents in
their children’s education, a role that many parents lack the time or capability to perform. Teachers,
meanwhile, have complained about limited support for their gadget needs and the production of
learning modules.

As stated by The Manila Times (2021) distance learning has taken a toll on the mental health of school
children, according to child welfare organizations. Still, with minors not covered by the vaccination drive
due to limited supply, the Department of Education has been left with little choice but to forge ahead
with a second year of blended learning. With more knowledge of the accompanying problems, DepEd
should be in a better position to provide solutions.

Segundo Eclar Romer(2020) said that the focus of implementing this blended learning is on the difficulty
of assuring that students will have the tools (computers or smartphones and internet connectivity) to
participate in e-learning. Many people worry that the unequal access to these tools and connectivity—
the so-called “digital divide”—will aggravate the socioeconomic gap.

He also added that the idea of using television and radio to reach the rural and poor students is good in
theory, but it will require tremendous preparation and expense on the part of the government and the
schools to set up. To make the learning effectiveness and efficiency comparable to those with or without
computers and internet, the DepEd and the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd) and public and
private schools will have to design a flexible and responsive system that delivers equivalency in learning
and teaching results for both sides of the digital divide.

Patricia Arinto 2016 “Issues and Challenges in Open and Distance e-Learning: Perspectives from the
Philippines,” International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning (Vol. 17, No. 2, February
2016), suggests what challenges the Philippine education community might face, based on the UP Open
University experience.

Arinto tells us that, contrary to expectations, teaching approaches in e-learning contexts are not leading
to transformation or positive change as expected. Primary use around the world has been for delivering
pre-digested information that used to be distributed on paper. Also, the expected shift from a teacher-
focused knowledge transmission approach to a learner-focused knowledge contribution approach does
not occur easily.

Arinto’s study suggests the following ways to stimulate and sustain the kind of innovation needed for
effective e-learning. (1) There must be purposive transformation; educational institutions and their
faculty must be persuaded to adopt innovative practices. (2) Their faculty will likely show indifference
and resistance unless they are given the time, tools, and resources for effective design and delivery of e-
learning. (3) The faculty will need professional pedagogical reorientation and training to enable them to
design and deliver effective e-learning. (4) Governance is important—the overarching policy, political,
and administrative frameworks and systems must be established to guide the whole effort. (5) Support-
oriented e-learning program management at various levels should be provided. (6) Finally, a community
of practice and network of experts should be built and nurtured to drive and sustain the effort.

Where there is no internet

From the standpoint of DepEd, “blended learning” or “hybrid learning” is a fusion of online distant
learning and in-person delivery of printed materials to the homes of the learners through the barangays
for those who don’t have internet access and interactive facilities in the comforts of their home. In
localities where this is not possible, DepEd will use radio and television to broadcast lessons, materials
and instructions for the students. Enrollment for School Year 2020 to 2021 started on June 1, with
parents or guardians registering their children by phone, via text messaging or online to avoid face-to-
face interactions rather than exposing themselves to risk even in the observance of social distancing.
While Pres. Duterte said that there shall be no face-to-face classes until the availability of a Covid-19
vaccine and every Filipino is vaccinated, DepEd had set August 24 as the start of classes as long as the
health, safety and welfare of learners and educators are protected.

Briones assured the President and the public that there will be no face-to-face classes and sessions but
formal education should still continue with blended and distant learning.

What is important at this time of the pandemic is that as long as there is cooperation among
stakeholders national government, department and school officials, educators, local executives, parents
and students DepEd’s resolve to continue the formal education of young Filipinos despite this health
crisis becomes all the more relevant and pertinent as they are the hope and future of the nation.

Mapping digital poverty in PH

The COVID-19 pandemic has further exacerbated existing inequalities accentuated by the widening of
the digital divide. As the pandemic continues to reinforce the need for social distancing and continued
lockdowns, the need for quality digital access and connectivity that is efficient, inclusive and sustainable
where users including the poor and marginalized have access to sufficient internet connection even in
remote areas has increased in importance. Achieving universal access to high-quality internet is an
important public policy goal, but despite an accelerated shift to the digital space enabling service
delivery, over 700 million people around the world remain without digital access.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) and other development partners call on the need to expand
investments in digital infrastructure and ensure equitable access to technology as economies recover
from the coronavirus disease pandemic.

In the Philippines, connectivity remains higher in urban centers and weak digital infrastructures persist
in more rural areas. The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) cites that a
higher incidence of urban households have internet compared to rural households, with Metro Manila
households having the highest access at 32.3 percent. The digital landscape has made productivity a
privilege and those without sufficient access are left behind, losing out on opportunities from basic
amenities and quality education, to decent work and reskilling. In a post-COVID world, the challenges to
the Philippines and other countries in delivering availability, accessibility and affordability of reliable
internet have never been greater.

As part of a joint series by ADB and Thinking Machines on Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Machine
Learning for Development, we map digital poverty in the Philippines. Using advanced machine learning
techniques, we estimate poverty combined with big data (e.g. from Project Bandwidth and Signal
Strength or BASS and Speedtest by Ookla) to analyze spatial patterns of digital inequality to better
inform and target strategic investments for digital development.

For our work, we use open crowdsourced information from Project BASS which shows the approximate
location of cell site towers, triangulated from user devices. We complement this with Speedtest by
Ookla for Q3 2020 which records the download speed, upload speed and latency on fixed broadband
and mobile internet connections. For Speedtest by Ookla in the Philippines, we observe for both urban
and rural areas, over 80 percent of devices running tests for Q3 were on fixed broadband, while just
under 20 percent were on mobile.

This is consistent with the recent 2019 National ICT (information and communications technology)
Survey which shows that the majority of households use fixed broadband internet versus mobile
internet, and that this is the case for most regions across the country

Access to sufficient internet speeds shrink in rural areas.

But even for those with internet access, is there sufficient bandwidth for remote work or learning? For
popular video calling platforms like Zoom and Google, the minimum requirement to conduct quality
group calls ranges from 3-3.2 megabytes per second (mbps) for upload and download speeds. Using this
as a benchmark for “sufficient internet speed,” we analyze the population for each region in the
Philippines cross-referenced to the Speedtests from Q3 2020 to see how many people have access to
the minimum required bandwidth for group video calls and how many do not.

From our research, we see that only 83 percent of the Philippine population live in areas with sufficient
fixed broadband speeds, while only 70 percent for mobile. Unsurprisingly, highly urbanized and dense
Metro Manila has the largest percent of the population with sufficient access to both fixed broadband
and mobile. Whereas the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao has the largest percent
of the rural population without sufficient access for both fixed broadband and mobile internet. The
decline in access for rural populations not only shows how many are left without the means to fully
participate in this shift to the digital space but also indicates the disparity of quality infrastructure
between more central and urban areas versus more remote and rural areas.

Poorer areas have less access, slower internet speeds and fewer cell towers.

In drilling down further, we wanted to check whether we see similar patterns when looking at this
through the lens of poverty measures.

Comparing the average download speeds for five of the wealthiest versus five of the poorest cities in the
Philippines, the disparity is stark. The average download speeds in the wealthiest cities are up to 21
mbps faster than the average in the poorest cities. Up to 100 percent of the population in wealthier
cities have access to sufficient internet speed of at least 3.2 mbps, while as small as 6 percent of the
poorest cities do. The location of infrastructure (e.g. cell towers) is also key in understanding how access
is distributed across the country. We see clusters of cell towers in urban areas like Cebu City, Puerto
Princesa and Davao City, but none of these compare to the breadth and density of towers in Metro
Manila with the largest concentration of cell sites. Meanwhile large gaps can be seen in areas with more
geographical constraints, such as the mountainous region in northern Philippines.
At the last mile, only 15 percent of Filipinos have access to sufficient internet speeds and only 9.5
percent live within the serviceable scope of cell towers.

For the population considered to be part of the “last mile,” access reduces even further. To measure
this, we looked at the population living more than 2 kilometers from a major road network and found
that, of the 9.4 million Filipinos at the last mile, only 15 percent actually have access to sufficient
internet speeds on fixed broadband. For mobile, this is just 6.5 percent of the 9.4 million population
group.

The pandemic is catalyzing innovations in work, learning and access to resources and services, but these
are centralized in wealthier, urban areas. We risk further entrenching socioeconomic stratification as
communities on the margins continue to lose out on the means to recover and adapt in a post-pandemic
world. Why is internet access in the Philippines so disparate?

The insufficiency of digital infrastructures in the country is a result of multiple factors, including stringent
restrictions in the telecommunications market leading to a lack of competition and high barriers to
entry. With predominantly two major service providers that own and control the entire broadband
infrastructure, it is extremely difficult for new firms to compete. In addition, the Philippines is one of the
top business process outsourcing destinations in the world, further concentrating demand for
telecommunication services in Metro Manila. A whole-of-government approach will be needed in
identifying and implementing both legal and regulatory reforms and policy measures to bridge the
digital divide. —CONTRIBUTED INQ

This is a condensed version of the final blog in a series by the Asian Development Bank and Thinking
Machines Data Science, Inc. which explores ways to use big data, artificial intelligence, and machine
learning to craft development solutions during the pandemic. Stephanie Sy and Anica Araneta are from
Thinking Machines while Hanif Rahemtulla, Bruno Carrasco and Stella Balgos are from ADB.