WhatsApp is a well-established and very widely communication tool among refugee communities. About two thirds of the families in the Syrian camps in Lebanon own a smartphone. Jusoor’s initial decision to use WhatsApp for remote learning was simply a case of making use of what was already there.
At first the idea was to keep teachers connected to their existing students. As school closures continued, new students were enrolled and joined the WhatsApp classroom.
In order to assess the impact of the programme, the team observed some of the WhatsApp lessons by joining the class WhatsApp groups. Teachers were scored on things like their lesson plans, the videos they created and the feedback they gave to the children. These observations confirmed that the majority of teacher’s were delivering effective remote learning.
At the same time, we conducted a review of the existing research and evidence on the use of messaging and virtual learning environments. We found that WhatsApp provides all the key functionality needed, with the notable exception that children cannot be observed during assessments.
Our next priority was to investigate the varied engagement levels. One hypothesis was a simple lack of devices; another that parents in refugee households weren’t making children’s education a priority. As always, the reality was more nuanced and complicated than that.
An initial survey revealed that 68% of households did have a smart phone. Yet, this did not automatically translate into children having access to that phone. There were also many who owned a phone that had to be shared between parents and several children. And some families that owned a phone, but struggled to afford data packages from phone service providers.
As for prioritising education: in many cases, children who were missing out on education were doing so because they were expected to find work to boost family income. We found ourselves thinking about these problems, most of them symptomatic of the daily reality of living in a refugee camp. What could we do to alleviate them?