The teachers are prepared, online classes are about to start, but not every student is ready to log on. Some families can’t afford internet at home, pushing students to find creative solutions to continue learning.
One student who got stuck in a lockdown while visiting family in Hubei province, the epicenter of the epidemic, had to set up a desk on his balcony so he could connect his phone to his neighbor’s Wi-Fi, Yangcheng Evening News reported. In Xichuan, Henan, another student took his phone to the rooftop where he said his neighbor’s Wi-Fi signal was the strongest, according to Pear Video.
As the coronavirus epidemic keeps Chinese campuses shut for weeks, grade schools and colleges alike are turning to virtual classrooms to keep classes going. Students are asked to tune in to live-streamed lessons from phone apps, type out queries in real-time messages, and submit homework by WeChat. But this is harder for some than others as a result of China’s stark digital divide.
“In the class that I teach, there are three students who still can’t attend live-streamed lessons because they don’t have Wi-Fi at home,” said Wu Danhong, a professor at the China University of Political Science and Law who blogs with the pen name Wu Fatian.
A student watches a math lesson on a phone in Yinchuan, in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, on February 17. (Picture: Feng Kaihua/Xinhua)
Online classes have become a quick solution for teachers grappling with the results of a deadly contagion that hit the country hard and fast. China’s Ministry of Education encourages schools to adopt internet lessons to keep millions of students occupied amid indefinite class suspensions. It also launched a “national cloud learning platform.” But some people are now questioning whether the fervent drive to push classes online might leave some students behind.
One teacher on the outskirts of the port city of Tianjin described her challenge in trying to make sure all her students can attend online classes.
“We are a rural school, and when we decided to do online classes we looked into everyone’s situation,” she wrote on Weibo.
