Emergency Remote Education: Experience from Sri Lanka during Covid-19

Digital Divide

This piece of work looks at Emergency Remote Education (ERE) in Sri Lanka during the Covid-19 first lockdown in March 2020. With Prof. Shirley Williams I worked on this project trying to reach grassroots experience of lockdown homeschooling both in the UK and in Sri Lanka. 

The research used an online questionnaire to gather data and as expected the data showed that these came from an affluent group of Sri Lankans as the computer penetration is low within the country. We reached out to school teachers from various schools in different parts of the country to balance out the lack of response from people who did not have ready access to the internet and or the digital literacy to take part in an online survey.

This research showed how important it is to reach all groups of people that represent a study and if researchers are not able to reach them directly how indirectly you could reach them. For example, due to lockdown restrictions, we were not able to reach people face-to-face or distribute questionnaires. But by reaching out to school teachers from various settings we were able to represent, at least in part, the group that would otherwise have been excluded.

You can read the full paper from the Asian Journal of Distance Education.