LAHORE: An inquiry committee formed by the provincial government has found the project of ‘E-Learn Punjab (Phase-I)’ launched for schools not so successful on several fronts, such as cost and utility for teachers and students.

The Punjab School Education Department launched the project to resolve the issue of ownership, copyright, licensing and balancing of reach with legitimate commercial interests. E-Learning resources include animated, localized topics and self-learning exercises, and digital books.

The project is an open online and offline repository of digital content for kindergartner to class 12 students. Previously, the Punjab Curriculum and Textbook Board (PCTB) were publishing hard copies for school students.

The project was originally approved on Dec 30, 2013, at a cost of Rs61.952 million with a gestation period of 18 months. The project cost was later revised to Rs140.369 million and the gestation period extended to Dec 31, 2016.

Probe finds programme partially successful but not impactful

In the second revision, the project cost was revised to Rs199.175 million and the gestation period was extended to June 2018. In the third revision, the cost was revised to Rs191.935 million and the gestation period was extended to June 2019. The actual expenditure of the project is Rs186.171 million against the release amount of Rs245.837 million.

The Punjab government formed a team of the Directorate General Monitoring and Evaluation to evaluate the project.

The report’s major observations include the needs assessment was not carried out for this project. It is revealed from the school census of 2018 data that 20 percent of government schools have internet facilities and 16pc of schools have a computer lab.

Similarly, the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey of 2017-18 reported that internet access in Punjab is a 26pc at households - rural areas have 18.9pc internet access and urban areas 38.6pc. Ignoring the quality of internet services, these stats do not support this kind of intervention.

The project implementation was not well worked out. Initially, only English books of the PCTB were uploaded to the e-learn portal having voice over in the Urdu language. The voice-over quality was not good. Currently, the voice-over has been removed from the books.

It states that the project is technically not very complex in nature; spending Rs87 million on human resources is on the higher side.

There are many off the shelf software solutions available for the creation of e-books that can create e-books on the fly. Also, the creation of e-books is a repetitive activity in nature, once an e-book is created, you have to follow the same pattern for the creation of other e-books. Revising a project based on different grades seems not a good idea.

Because of this, the project has been revised three times, increasing its cost from Rs 61.95 million to Rs191.935 million and project durations from 18 months to 66 months.

It states that offline content was not introduced through DVDs, USBs and memory cards for students/teachers so that they can use them for personal devices. Some of the tablets given to staff and in the labs for students of eight selected schools were found broken and non-functional at different schools.

When the schools were closed during Covid-19, E-Learn was not used to continue the educational activities online. The main reason is the lack of coordination among the different stakeholders of the project and the lack of required resources at the teacher and student end.

The evaluators observed that during the visit and from beneficiary surveys, most of the students do not have internet facilities available at their homes.

It was observed during beneficiary surveys that most of the students (approximately 76%) were taking coaching classes, so it indicates that E-Learn is not very effective for students to act as a replacement for coaching classes.

It states the selected schools where E-Learn classrooms and labs were established, also do not have technical resources. The E-Learn system user interface is not classroom friendly while using LEDs. It is hard to navigate back and forth on the LEDs. It is observed during school visits that teachers bring their own collection of videos and run from USB.

The SOPs were not prepared for the proper usage of the provided gadgets for students, teachers and also there was no maintenance plan for gadgets. Although the recurring cost of the project HR is included, details of the posts are not given.

Published in Dawn, March 28th, 2022