Internet Education: Every Room's a Classroom

Last week was a pretty rainy week, and as a result there was much jubilation over the suspension of classes which followed. I won't talk of the difficulty in ascertaining whether or not announcements have been made as to class suspensions, and the numerous fake CHED Twitter accounts put up by cheeky students. I'm more interested in the possibilities of online education, and how, among others it could make class suspensions a thing of the past.

In my humble opinion, Internet classes are the best answer to 2 classic problems: the lack of classrooms and books. The Internet is one big library that everyone can use. Also, any room can be a classroom as long as a computer that's online is present. It does away with the need to build more classrooms, the need to print more books, and the need to suspend classes due to floods, since classes can be held practically anywhere.

The bottleneck here is principally infrastructure. In a country where we can't even put one phone in every home, internet access is an even bigger obstacle. In a country where the last attempt at a countrywide broadband project ended up in controversy, the chances of such an infrastructure going up is even thinner. But I sincerely believe it's preferable to building additional classrooms--there is only so much land to go around, and weather is always a concern.