Be wary of e-technologies

Letters

THE Government should be mindful of the growing use of electronic learning applications and platforms in schools and tertiary institutions across the country.
While the use of such maybe convenient to enable learning under the prevailing circumstances, it’s also important for the Government to ensure the correct and tested applications and platforms are used to maintain integrity, consistency and uninterrupted continuity.
Experiences around the region and the globe shows that many such applications have failed to deliver the desired objectives in education systems where such applications have been trialled out without government control and oversight.
As soon as the state of emergency controller gave the green light to start schools on April 27, many schools struggled to go online to use one of the many technology enabled learning platforms such as Moodle, Google classroom, e-learning, Blackboard, etc.
Does the Government through the Department of Communication and Information Technology, the Education Department and the Department of Higher Education, Research, Science and Technology have the coordinated and collaborated supervisory platform and the necessary legal framework to control such untested learning applications in our schools?
Obviously, many of these platform and applications who are mostly offered through the cloud will fail for non-compliance of license conditions, nonpayment of lease payments, lack of technology based experts on the actual use etc.
It’s going to be very costly for this country in the future.
The departments named have been complacent in their respective roll out plans.
Fear continues to remain that PNG is on a disaster mode in the forced used of untested, money scooping technology enabled learning platforms.
The Government must come up with a clear policy and reform the ICT legal landscape to accommodate these emerging trend of different technologies.
The question the prime minister and his government should be asking is: who is administering the overall role out of these so many e-technologies?

Kumbaolkal Kep,