This Monday millions of students returned to classes and although this new school year comes with the option of returning to the classrooms, the truth is that a large part of the activities would remain in hybrid or 100 percent online.
This is what recent surveys show where a considerable group of parents affirmed that, despite the fact that various government and health authorities assure that the conditions are in place for their return, they would not send their children to classrooms.
According to information from the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), 32.9 million students are enrolled for this school year; while 2.3 million did not register due to some affectation due to Covid-19 and 2.9 million did not register for economic reasons.
In this line, a survey signed by the Human Rights Commission of Mexico City, seven out of 10 minors wish to return to classrooms in person.
However, a few days ago, the National Coordinator of Education Workers (CNTE) released the results of a survey of parents in the country, which was carried out from August 16 to 21, online, and in In which 60 thousand people participated, 81.7 percent of those surveyed said they did not agree with the 2021-2022 school year beginning in person.
Along the same lines, 50 percent of the tutors affirmed that the school in which their children study does not have all the sanitation materials, permanent hygiene personnel and the adequate infrastructure to return to face-to-face classes.
With these prelude figures, many parents decided to keep their children in distance classes with what the demand for services such as internet and broadband, will surely remain, although clear, far from the levels reached during the past year.
In this sense, the data provided by IDC is highly relevant, which indicates that internet traffic, essential for hybrid classes and one hundred percent online, reached 16 thousand total petabytes so far in 2021, which is equivalent to seeing about 13 years of uninterrupted streaming movies.
When this traffic is read by type of connection we have that the ranks remain in the lead with 87 percent, while the mobile phones were left with the remaining 13 percent.
With this in mind, it is clear that digital tools will remain as great allies of consumers and in this game there seems to be a clear winner, at least if the reading is done from online searches.
According to the aforementioned source, during the month of August, searches around technology in Mexico were oriented to distance classes and meetings. According to the data provided by IDC, Google Clasroom, Zoom and Google Meet were the most searched technology terms in the country during the last month.
The interest is evident once the data from the last week is reviewed in the search trends within Google Trends, the truth is that in this graph the phenomenon can be read by winners, where Google’s ClassRoom leads with a special advantage.
Although for a year there has been a lot of talk about the way in which the pandemic will change education and work in the country, the truth is that Mexico is far from being able to embrace one hundred percent digital classes in general.
In principle we have the lag in access to the connection that is evident in various regions of the country.
The health emergency made the problem evident. Data from INEGI indicate that in Mexico, with a student population of 38 million people, 16 million homes do not have an internet connection.
To this must be added how expensive it is for many homes to maintain an adequate connection or at least sufficient to meet this new need. According to information from a report delivered by VPN Surfshark, Mexicans need to work on average 9 hours 53 minutes per month to pay for the cheapest broadband internet connection.
Although it is true that we are talking about little more than a working day understood by the law (8 hours), the reality is that the indicator becomes relevant if we consider in Canada, for example, the average working time to count this service is barely 7 minutes .
In this way, considering the countries studied by the provider, Mexico is the fifth country in which citizens must work the most time per month to pay for a connection to the network. The Mexican market is only surpassed by Bangladesh (9 hours 56 minutes), Colombia (11 hours 5 minutes), Kenya (14 hours 21 minutes) and Nigeria (33 hours 42 minutes).
To this must be added the few training that both teachers, students and parents have around the correct use of these tools now essential for returning to school.
It is enough to review the related searches around services such as Google Clasroom, Zoom and Google Meet, where almost a year and a half after having adopted these resources as part of education, the bulk of the queries have to do with how to use the services.