Digital Dreams Alone Are Not Enough—The Real Work of Online Education in Guyana Requires Caring Adults

May 11, 2025 Features / Columnists, News, Waterfalls Magazine

By Karen Abrams, MBA. AA. Doctoral Candidate

Kaieteur News- For the past six years at STEMGuyana, we’ve been testing what works, and what doesn’t, when it comes to online learning for children. And here’s the hard truth I’ve learned, just building a digital platform is not enough.

Digital Dreams Alone Are Not Enough—The Real Work of Online Education in Guyana Requires Caring Adults

By Karen Abrams, MBA. AA. Doctoral Candidate

We’ve had some real success stories. Parents paid for live online coding classes for their children, and we celebrated completion rates over 90%. But these students enjoyed some advantages; they had involved parents and online teachers.

Real human interaction made the difference. When we moved to fully self-paced digital courses without live teacher support, we saw a very different picture emerge. It became clear that students, especially those from vulnerable communities, need much more than just access to the internet, a good curriculum and a tablet.

Across Guyana, thousands of students are dropping out of school each year, some as early as Grade 7. Many of them come from rural, Indigenous, and underserved coastal communities. In these areas, literacy and numeracy challenges are not the exception, they’re the norm. Without the foundational skills to read fluently or calculate accurately, no fancy app or video can automatically reach them. We must meet these learners where they are, not where we wish they were.

I often hear the argument that since many high-performing students uses YouTube to prepare for CSEC; online education should work for everyone. But based on my research, those students are the minority. Our own informal estimates suggest that fewer than 10% of any incoming class have the motivation, support, or academic foundation to succeed in online education without guidance.

And while we dream of building a digital future for our country, we cannot ignore this reality. Online learning may be part of the solution, but if we want to reach students who have dropped out, or are just barely hanging on, we need to do far more than upload educational resources and call it education.

The research backs this up. A study published in the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning found that low-income and first-generation learners in online settings are significantly more likely to struggle and drop out without structured supports like teacher interaction, peer engagement, and feedback loops (Park & Choi, 2009).

Similarly, the Brookings Institution emphasizes that successful K–12 online learning requires more than access, it demands a “whole child” approach, one that includes community, family involvement, and human connection (Berg & Osher, 2020).

That’s why, with the launch of our Pathway Online Academy, we’ve made it a point to design for the real Guyana, not an idealized one. We’re studying student engagement data, listening to parents, and adapting constantly. We’ve added live teacher support, built tools for parents to monitor progress, and created visual, interactive lessons designed to engage children at every literacy level. Because the stakes are too high, the students we’re trying to reach aren’t just falling behind, they’re being left behind.

If we’re serious about preparing Guyana’s children for the 21st-century economy, if we really believe in giving every child a chance, we need to move beyond “en vogue ideas and systems” and get to work on support.

Not every child has a quiet place to study. Not every home has a parent who can assist with homework. And not every student possesses the self-discipline to stay focused without guidance or encouragement.

That’s why digital access alone is not the solution. It’s a tool, an important one, but without the support of caring teachers, committed mentors, and engaged communities, it will fall short. The same holds true for in-person education, human connection and consistent support are what truly drive success.

If we want to secure the future of our children, and by extension, our nation, we must build systems that combine the power of technology with the irreplaceable presence of people who care.

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