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Sunday, July 6, 2025

Gopeesingh eyes e-textbooks

by

20140513

The Ed­u­ca­tion Min­istry is start­ing talks with text­book pub­lish­ers on hav­ing text­books pro­vid­ed in elec­tron­ic form, says Ed­u­ca­tion Min­is­ter Dr Tim Gopeesingh.Re­ply­ing to an Op­po­si­tion ques­tion in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day, Gopeesingh said the Prime Min­is­ter had in­struct­ed that the min­istry should work to­wards en­sur­ing this, so that stu­dents' bur­den of hav­ing to car­ry heavy text­books at an ear­ly age will "be a thing of the past."

Gopeesingh said the man­date was de­liv­ered at Cab­i­net. He added, "I've al­ready start­ed talks with the 24 (lo­cal) pub­lish­ers we have and ten oth­ers in­ter­na­tion­al­ly."So far it seems to be rel­a­tive­ly re­ward­ing, but fur­ther dis­cus­sions are tak­ing place and fur­ther in­for­ma­tion will be giv­en to T&T as far as that is con­cerned."Asked by the T&T Guardian af­ter the Sen­ate how the e-text­book pro­pos­al will work, Gopeesingh said, "Dis­cus­sions with pub­lish­ers fo­cus on if they can pro­vide the text­books elec­tron­i­cal­ly, in e-form and as many as pos­si­ble.

"It's not a mat­ter of shift­ing the pub­lish­ing from them, we're sim­ply ex­plor­ing the e-text­book for­mat and full con­sul­ta­tion will be done."

On queries in the Sen­ate from PNM sen­a­tor Camille Robin­son-Reg­is on the late de­liv­ery of text­books, Gopeesingh said when Gov­ern­ment en­tered of­fice there were weak sys­tems and ab­sence of meth­ods to de­ter­mine which text­books to use, and Gov­ern­ment had to es­tab­lish sys­tems. He said some text­books had to be im­port­ed and where some were be­ing brought to T&T by boat be­fore, they are now be­ing brought in by air.

He said there were some de­lays by pub­lish­ers in try­ing to print texts lo­cal­ly, but by 2012 the min­istry had four es­tab­lished print­ers in T&T print­ing texts rather than the print­ing be­ing done in In­dia and Chi­na as pre­vi­ous­ly.Gopeesingh ad­mit­ted there were cer­tain times it wasn't com­plet­ed for one rea­son or an­oth­er, but the min­istry aimed to en­sure all stu­dents got texts in the best pos­si­ble time.

On queries from In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tors Dr Kriyaan Singh and Ian Roach–both of whom use wheel­chairs–about pro­vi­sions for spe­cial-needs stu­dents, Gopeesingh said the PM had al­so in­struct­ed that his min­istry should as­sess spe­cial-needs equip­ment and ma­te­r­i­al for schools.

Since T&T's spe­cial-needs stu­dents com­prised 30 per cent of the stu­dent pop­u­la­tion, he said at­ten­tion is be­ing placed on peo­ple with vi­sion, hear­ing, cere­bral pal­sy and dis­abil­i­ty is­sues. This in­cludes get­ting text­books in Braille. All li­braries have Braille ma­chines too. He added that ramps and fa­cil­i­ties to aid dis­abled stu­dents were be­ing fac­tored in­to the con­struc­tion of schools.


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