While many schools are scrambling to adapt their systems to online learning, De La Salle Lipa (DLSL) is several steps ahead, thanks to the vision of Bro. Dante Jose Amisola, FSC, the school’s president and chancellor.

Amisola also sits as a board of trustees member for eight La Salle institutions, and is chair of the De La Salle Brothers Inc. finance and investment board.

When he came in as DLSL president in May 2016, Amisola, whose “personal byline” is “purveyor of dreams and illimitable possibilities,” envisioned for the institution to become a “truly digital campus.” He initiated a digital summit that allowed employees to dream of their digital campus, and he pioneered an educational innovation framework designed to run on a digital platform.

According to DLSL, “It was a quest for the institution to provide innovative ways to offer a new learning and campus experience to its clients–students, partners (employees), parents and external stakeholders. DLSL embarked on a digital transformation initiative through a digital campus roadmap moving toward a smart campus direction.”

Of course, this came at a price, so Amisola lobbied for “a sizeable budget to secure digital infrastructure and systems,” future-proofing DLSL and “assuring the continuity of learning which is sustainable and tenable for generations of students to come.”

DLSL decided on a Learning Management System (LMS) powered by Canvas that would host all the learning tools, content and assessments moving forward.

Amisola encouraged teachers to unlearn and relearn so they could keep up with evolving digital platforms and face the challenges of educating today’s tech-savvy students. “He challenged them to become curators of knowledge rather than the giver of knowledge, because the access to information is already at the fingertips of students who are digital natives.”

They call it 21st-century education—one that promotes collaboration, creativity, communication and critical thinking. “This transforms the traditional teaching-learning setup to a new model that is borderless and allows an any time anywhere learning experience with the use of their own devices in a local area network, with state-of-the-art server infrastructures. It introduces a new way of learning using a full-featured LMS.”

Students from fourth grade to college and graduate levels were encouraged to bring their own devices. Teachers had their own gadgets, too, which were largely subsidized by the school. Scholars have access to laptops that they can borrow for school work. About 20 percent of DLSL’s students are enrolled as scholars as part of the Lasallian mission.

The school started to see the fruits of their labor: People started to communicate and collaborate across departments, divisions and academic units. Students had more access and freedom to seek knowledge and learning on their projects because of the Bring-Your-Own-Device implementation and 24/7 WiFi internet connectivity anywhere in the campus. Parents, in the Philippines and other parts of the world, were able to track their children’s classwork and engage more actively with teacher to guide the students.

There are still adjustments to be made of course, to get ready for a fully online term, or what they call “border-free education.”

ToBeYou talked to Dean Jorge Bocobo, DLSL’s dean for the College of Information Technology and Engineering, about the pandemic, the school’s readiness and the challenges they’re facing.

What are the biggest changes you’re facing in transitioning from pre-pandemic instruction mode to online learning?

Before the pandemic and ensuing widespread lockdown, DLSL operated a traditional face-to-face educational institution, albeit with the use of the Canvas Learning Management System. School was a daily affair with teachers, students and staff coming to the campus, and meeting in classrooms and other facilities in the manner familiar to us all.

After the lockdown, the school gates were shut, except for the essential personnel like security and groundskeepers. Everyone else was stuck at home. But we knew we had all our educational material and curriculum in the LMS in fully operational servers on campus. Faculty, administration and support staff could continue to work by video conferences and other channels using the Internet and telecommunication networks. Faculty and students could still conduct most of their teaching and learning activities via the LMS.

But it was not an easy transition, and is by no means complete. Working and studying from home is very different from traditional school operations. We are still making adjustments.

Can you talk about the preparedness of teachers and students for transitioning to fully online learning?

Before COVID-19, we were already practising, for three years, our Smiles program (Synergized Mobile Integrated Learning Experience toward Self-Directed education), with Wednesdays as fully online engagements between students and faculty. In fact, full-online school operations really started in February with the Taal Volcano eruption in early January.

Although we could continue school operations despite the pandemic lockdown, we quickly realized we had a big problem. Not all of the faculty, students and staff had reliable connections to the internet in their homes. Although everyone had laptops, tablets and smart phones because of the Bring Your Own Device policy, only around 65 percent percent could reliably connect to the campus computer facilities and with each other.

We had to reach out to the major telecoms to arrange for 100 percent coverage of all our people. It was simply not effective, nor fair, nor just and equitable to conduct online school operations unless we could ensure everyone could participate.

We have, in fact, just concluded lengthy but productive negotiations with the biggest internet service provider to secure internet connectivity and service for all our teachers, students and staff for the coming school year 2020-21, which will begin in late August.

What adjustments are you and the school making to prepare for the next school term?

The academic year 2020-21 will be unlike anything in the school’s history. With the disappearance of face-to-face school operations, we are having to adjust to a radical change in the delivery of our educational content. All aspects of the school operation are affected—financial, enrollment, personnel management, payroll, sports and community activities, and of course, teaching and studying.

In late April 2020, a task force was convened to concretize the school’s learning continuity plan that integrates learning delivery, extended student and faculty services and support mechanisms that will define the next school year. The main goal, given that a fully online learning delivery will be deployed, will be to interpret into digital space the student services and support mechanisms of DLSL.

Training for faculty on strengthening student engagement on a digital platform has also been scheduled and is being conducted. We are all busier now than before the lockdown!

Are the teachers ready for a fully online term? What have they been doing to prepare for this?

No longer is the teacher a Sage on the Stage. Now he or she is more like a Guide on the Side, because now the medium or channel of instruction is the online telecommunications infrastructure and the LMS. Teachers must prepare their whole courses of study ahead of time and upload them as payloads in the Canvas LMS for “asynchronous delivery” to our students. The latter must now access this material remotely. Their contact with the teachers creating this material is indirect and “asynchronous”

Given these radical transformations, and the need to adapt to them, we have been putting our faculty and staff through massive training programs (online, of course) that address their needs to understand what works and what doesn’t in this new normal. We are exposing them to theories and disciplines intended to awaken them to the challenges that lie ahead as teachers and educators. We are supplying them with software tools and applications that will equip them to design, produce, test and evolve our ability to deliver high-quality education online.

Do you feel that home-based learning can be just as effective as school-based learning?

We have, of course, stepped into terra incognita. Even though educators, students and the general public have relied on the Web for information and knowledge for several decades, the internet has always played a secondary or supplementary role in face-to-face instruction. Virtually no one has had any experience with a school system that delivers all its curricular content online and remotely.

Everyone is concerned, and many are even skeptical, about how effective it will be. How well can teachers deliver their knowledge to students? How well can students learn? They will be interacting through a medium that may be familiar to them all, but which has never been used quite so extensively for this purpose.

It is the biggest experiment in education in our lifetimes, and those of every generation before us!

At DLSL, we are acutely aware of the radical transformation that our business model itself is undergoing.

As a result, we know that we have to adapt or fail, pivot or perish, we have to be creative and innovative about how we do everything if we are to ensure the same high quality of educational outcomes that distinguish Lasallian education.

The content of our courses, the degrees we will grant and the professions for which we are providing preparation and training will not change. The message is still the same, but the medium is very different.

As Marshall McLuhan so presciently observed a generation ago (in the ’60s), “The medium is the message”. The subtlety and profundity of his observation cannot be underestimated. His philosophical insight must now be realized in practice.

How are you helping the kids through this transition? What do you want to tell parents who are concerned?

Our student population spans the age range from kindergarten (five years old) to grade school (tweens), to high school (teenagers) and college students in their 20s. We have graduate programs in several areas, including a College of Law, also going online. As such, their needs are clustered and markedly different.

On top of the change in school is the broader context of being stuck at home because of the pandemic. Many fear being out of school can do serious, even irreparable harm to their personal development. Aside from their academic needs, we have to be aware of their psychological, social and spiritual needs. Even in the “new normal” online regime, we are redoubling our efforts and services, from the guidance counselors to the student discipline offices to the community service action department and of course, our mission commitments.

As a school that’s more advanced in terms of online learning, what advice would you have for educators from other schools?

There are many smart people in all other schools, but as they say, chance favors the prepared. No one could have possibly foreseen the grim events of this pandemic. What we are learning is that there are many moving parts and significant challenges to creating an effective and fully functional online learning system. Among the most important are a fully enabled device-agnostic telecommunications network and robust server infrastructures, a truly capable LMS as the front-end delivery system, operated and controlled by the school’s information management department.

This LMS can only fulfill its mission, however, if all students, faculty and staff have stable and affordable internet access, with ample bandwidth, as well as the hardware and software to operate from home: laptops, operating systems, applications and other tools.

The faculty must also adopt an entirely new approach to the development of educational content at all levels. They have to see that each course of study is now an engineered product in its own right. This means that on the back end of the LMS must be teams of subject matter experts that perform comprehensive design on each course of study.

Then the manufacturing and production of each payload must be executed with professionals and specialists that are not only academics but also interactive multimedia experts who understand delivery vehicles like videos, audio lectures, powerpoint presentations, graphics, virtual and augmented reality systems, and many more.

Finally, there must be extensive and continuous quality control testing of the courses of study involving the students and parents, and a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement.

We are looking forward to serving ever greater numbers of students from our border-free campus. Since online is not limited by geographical location, and our technology-enabled delivery system offers a superior value proposition at lower cost and greater accessibility, we can fulfill founding brother St. John Baptist de la Salle’s vision with greater confidence, even in the face of a deadly pandemic.