Project Discovery BOLT Project
Project Discovery – BOLT project – June 2021
Barbados Online Learning & Teaching (BOLT) Pilot Programme
Project Goals:
The primary goal of this project is to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 health protocols on the delivery educational instruction by providing internet access to all classrooms and teaching areas at the pilot secondary school. This enhanced access can be utilized by teaching staff to maximize student/teacher interaction opportunities thereby allowing students to benefit, more efficiently, from the remaining time of an already seriously abbreviated school year.
Why Fund this Project?
Education is a very important social asset in Barbados and should be accessible to all children, equally. Virtual learning has already shown, in Barbados (and elsewhere in the world), that it is more than capable of mortally wounding this egalitarian ideal that has become part of Barbados’ culture and the engine of its economic development ever since 1962 when the Rt. Excellent Errol Walton Barrow made secondary education both free and compulsory.
It is recognized that a number of schools, including the private secondary schools and some of the “older” secondary schools, have been able to mitigate the impact of challenges associated with the Covid-19 restrictions and on-line learning simply by dint of being richer. Students and parents and alumni at these schools have more money and can buy what is necessary to optimize the on-line learning experience for these privileged students. Students, in poorer, underserved schools, suffer.
It is widely anticipated that when schools re-open, the physical distancing protocols will still be in effect and the challenges to the on-line learning/teaching, particularly the “blended” learning that plagued efforts in Term I (2020/21), will still be present in schools which are not rich enough to buy in their own, privately funded, WIFI internet. Given the extreme quantum of teaching/learning time already lost for this school year (added to the time lost at the end of the last academic year (2019/20)) it is even more important to provide the necessary internet access to all classrooms and teaching areas at the pilot secondary school, in order that this enhanced access can be utilized by teaching staff to maximize student/teacher interaction opportunities thereby allowing students to benefit more efficiently from whatever time remains of this already abbreviated school year.
About the Barbados Kidney Association:
Project Discovery Inc. is a non-profit Company registered with the Corporate Affairs and Intellectual Property Office of the Government of Barbados, under the Companies Act of Barbados. The Company No. is 31456. The date of registration is December 22, 2008.
Between 2008 and 2015, Project Discovery operated in Barbados only. In December 2015, Project Discovery Trinidad and Tobago (PDTT) was established, which then led to the formation of Project Discovery Barbados (PDBds.) as the Barbados country chapter.
To date, Project Discovery has an established presence in Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Kitts-Nevis and Trinidad and Tobago. Between December 2008 and July 2019, Project Discovery successfully hosted ten (10) annual iterations of the Caribbean Youth Forum on Environment and Development (CARYFED), attracting participants from the five territories in which we have a presence, as well as participants from the Cayman Islands.
In 2016, Doctor Kay Xuereb, co-developer of Malta’s first National Information Communication Technology (ICT) policy, as well as author of Malta’s national Information Technology in Education Business Plan, an internationally recognized educator and researcher specializing in Information and Communications Technology in education in small island states, reviewed Project Discovery’s youth development model. So intrigued was she, particularly by the Transformative Education teaching methods we employ, that she made the Project Discovery model the subject of one of her research papers.
Project Discovery has grown significantly from an original cohort of nine (9) students and three (3) teachers in 2008. In our 12 years of operation, over three hundred and fifty (350) Barbadian students have been directly involved in the program as members of Project Discovery. An even greater number of students and young people have benefitted indirectly from the program. Across the Caribbean, as new chapters were formed, the number of students benefiting has surpassed seven hundred (700). In Barbados, Project Discovery has attracted the participation of students from seventeen (17) government secondary schools, The Samuel Jackman Prescod Institute of Technology, The Barbados Community College and The University of the West Indies.
Project Discovery has been officially approved as one of the organizations through which participants of the Barbados Government’s Giveback program can contribute their volunteer community service hours.