The Ministry of Education has been been assigned the role of installing systems that monitor covid-19 in schools in Uganda that will help them track the spread of the novel coronavirus when they decide to reopen fully. The National Council for Higher Education recently released a statement with advice from the Ministry of Education that non-candidates continue with e-learning classes for at least 3 months.
The installation of systems that monitor covid-19 in schools in Uganda will help them identify those who are infected with the virus and track them to curb the spread within schools and universities. With such a system in place, it is easy to carry out tests and place the infected in isolation.
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According to NilePost, cabinet resolved that the Ministry of Education should update the (SOPs) Standard Operating Procedures to communicate the current epidemiology situation in collaboration with other stakeholders.
Currently, only candidates have returned as this has been the system of controlling the spread of the virus in the meantime. However, it is essential to plan for the rest of the classes as many students will be left lagging causing several to drop out of school entirely if proper plans are not in place.
In the National Council for Higher Education’s recent letter, it highlighted that there wasn’t a proper plan by the Ministry of Education as yet to allow schools to reopen fully even though some universities and schools implied they were ready to fully reopen.
Systems that monitor covid-19 in schools in Uganda will restore physical classes
It looks like the Ministry’s new task is part of the plan to ensure that other students can return to school for physical classes which are more effective than the proposed e-learning.
E-learning requires that students own laptops or at least smartphones that they can use to access the internet but such gadgets are not owned by a majority of Uganda’s population. This directly excludes those that can’t access them from studies hence lagging as other students progress.
Online classes fail to cover certain areas fully for example practical lessons that require students to study in a laboratory. It cannot be ascertained whether the students have understood the concept fully without studying it physically.
When schools reopen fully, Standard Operating Procedures will be difficult to follow for example because of the limited space in schools. This increases the need for the installation of systems that monitor covid-19 in schools in Uganda.
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