education

With the onset of the economic crisis and the pandemic, education in Lebanon changed dramatically with the distinctive rise of e-learning, whereby teaching is taking place remotely on digital platforms. This abrupt shift to the digital realm has significant academic and social implications.

Because of the pandemic, India has been under lockdown since March. What does this mean for rural communities, only 20% of whom have access to the internet? Community networks established by organisations like Digital Empowerment Foundation are bringing critical services to 100 villages of India.

Students are facing infrastructural challenges in attending online classes, which are mandatory. The unavailability of quality access to the internet is causing massive challenges for students who are solely dependent on online platforms for education during COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed how citizens become vulnerable when governments do not protect and promote human rights in the online environment. The pandemic has critically affected the global education sector, potentially compromising the right to education.

Cracks within the Namibian education system have been exposed by COVID-19, and the detrimental effects they pose to the right to development and access to knowledge, as set out in Principle 7 of the African Declaration on Internet Rights and Freedoms, have increasingly become apparent.

Realism’s been gaining ground, but anyone who reads the literature knows that hype’s still hot in digital discourse. Education’s been one of the battlegrounds, and coronavirus has brought it to the fore again.

The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg is launching the third iteration of their online course Media Freedom and Freedom of Expression in Africa. The updated version includes a session on African media in the time of COVID-19 as well as the impact of the pandemic on journalists.

The Centre for Youth and Development (CYD) is working with the community of Mzuzu, in northern Malawi, to build a low-cost wireless wide area network architecture for providing access to local digital resources and services and later to the internet.