24 Jan 2011

Cooks outer islands schools in pilot online programme

9:12 am on 24 January 2011

Students from some of the Cook Islands outer islands will take part in a pilot online education programme this year.

The Ministry of Education developed the programme as a result of declining school rolls in the outer islands.

The Secretary of the Ministry, Sharon Paio, says initially each school involved in the pilot will only be offering one online subject out of maths, english, science and information technoloy.

"We have four schools in the pilot and they are all current students in schools. And currently our IT division is working with the principals in those schools, how the students will access. So what they will do is go online and they will access the resources and they will be able to talk to their tutors via skype, and your email of course. We have four tutors that we have employed to deliver these programmes."

Sharon Paio hopes the pilot programme will be launched early next month to coincide with the beginning of the new school term.