Philippines: Educational Technology

By: Joseph Seabra
The Philippines is a nation that is trying to rapidly develop itself after its separation from the United States as a territory, and as mentioned before the education system of the Philippines is quite like that of the United States. Though it can be said that there is still a gap between the use of education along with technology to increase student learning within the Philippines. According to the news source the Manila Times “Only 20 percent of the country’s 70 leading companies across all sectors were inclined to hire senior high graduates, according to a study by the Philippine Business for Education (PBED)” (Lugutu, 2018). Though this cannot be directly attributed to a lack of technology within the educational sector, it can be assumed that with an increased usage of new technology Filipino students would graduate prepared for a more technologically intense workload.

(Directo, 2018)

One major technology that is allowing for Filipino student to have increased access to the internet and new technologies is the use of mobile phones as a teaching aid. As mentioned in previous papers people in the Philippines spend an increased amount of time accessing the internet using their smartphones, and therefore they would be able to easily use their phones for accessing educational materials. The program Text2Teach which was launched in the Philippines allows for students to access informational videos and educational materials in multiple subject areas from cell phones that have network connectivity (Bernad, 2018). According to the online magazine UPGRADE the program has been successful since its implementation, creating a drop in the dropout rate in “179 schools from five provinces” (Bernad, 2018). The only major problem that can be seen with the implementation of this educational technology is that wireless access to the internet is extremally slow within many parts of the Philippines. In the online news source, the PhiStar it was reported that “the Philippines has the lowest average internet connection speed in the world and among Asia-Pacific countries with 4.5 Mbps” (Adel, 2017). Looking forward the government of the Philippines should invest into technologies that would allow for better wireless internet access within Filipino schools. If the country wants to increase its educational technologies and develop the countries educational sector, then an investment must be made into the Wi-Fi in the countries educational areas. It can be assumed that the government of the Philippines will focus more on mobile technology instead of increasing the amount of wireless internet access within the educational sector as it would allow for an increase in knowledge of technologies while decreasing overall cost.

References

Adel, R. (2017). Philippines has lowest internet speed, report says. In philstar.com. Retrieved November 27, 2019, from https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2017/05/22/1702506/philippines-has-lowest-internet-speed-report-says

Bernad, M. (2014). How mobile technology has bridged the education gap in PH. In upgrademag.com. Retrieved November 27, 2019, from http://www.upgrademag.com/web/2014/06/20/mobile-technology-used-brige-education-gap-ph/

Directo, J. (2018). Students attend a flag raising ceremony before singing the national anthem at a government school in Manila. In The Asean Post. Retrieved November 27, 2019, from https://theaseanpost.com/article/improving-education-philippines

Lugutu, R. (2018). Reforming the PH education system. In The Manila Times. Retrieved November 27, 2019, from https://www.manilatimes.net/2018/06/14/business/columnists-business/reforming-the-ph-education-system/407929/