Georgetown: The Guyana Learning Channel, which is a non-commercial, apolitical educational television broadcast network, has focused on education, and only education, since it started up on April 1st, 2011. Individuals and companies who assisted in setting up this station did so willingly and without the thought of personal gain. Across Guyana, and indeed across the world, persons have been finding ways of helping the Guyana Learning Channel with open resources and open access, according to Head, Multimedia Unit/ Guyana Learning Channel, Seeta Shah Roath.
“When it comes to education and finding the means of educating all students including students at risk of succeeding, as educators, we pursue all possible and available means of teaching the classroom curriculum, a multitude of formal and informal subject areas, and generally meeting the minds of learners in an entertaining way to hold their interest as we teach difficult concepts. We continuously receive feedback from students, teachers, and parents alike about how much students continue to benefit from the Guyana Learning Channel. Teachers have indicated that when they teach certain topics now, students take the discussion beyond just information gathering, they are actually adding critical and higher order thinking to classroom discussions. Simple topics like ‘mammals’; ‘the digestive system’; ‘acceleration’; ‘Supply and Demand’; ‘acids & bases’ to mention a few topics, are now part of viewers long term memory. An example: Students of the winning school of the Guyana segment of the Sagicor Visionaries,” she noted.
Underscoring that for the Learning Channel to have set up a commensurate service for uplinking video signals to a satellite, she said it would have required an equipment capital outlay of US$150, 000 plus April 24, 2013 monthly recurring costs of over G$4M in bandwidth rental and associated services plus infrastructure, construction costs, the cost of expatriate technical resources and staff training, separate staffing, maintenance, and utility costs.
“To date, there are still no other video uplink services available in Guyana. The seemingly deliberate move to discredit the station and tarnish the image of all whom have whole-heartedly given all the assistance in the mission of educating the nation’s youth by whatever means possible, is causing a major problem with current projects and those still on the drawing board. Persons are afraid that their assistance may be construed as something else other than their genuine efforts to help in the drive of decreasing the number of young adults who enter the job market unprepared and unqualified. People don’t want to get involved in something that is being unjustifiably made controversial. We are loosing support, much needed support in our deployment process.” She said. “In the interest of educating our children, giving students, teachers, and parents access to the kind of educational resources they need to compete in today’s world, let’s leave the Guyana Learning Channel to education and educators, and politics to the politicians. We plead with you to support us in keeping the Guyana Learning Channel on air with quality programming and to support us in our efforts to take our content to children all over Guyana. We are all Guyanese with the future of our Nation’s children being our top priority.”
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