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Jamaica Union of Tertiary Students President Christina Williams is calling for a revision of the curricula used for online learning as tertiary students are falling through the cracks as much as their secondary and primary counterparts."There is a knowledge gap happening right now in our schools and it is widening, and I am terrified," Williams said at yesterday's National Youth Consultative Conference."We have the [UN] Sustainable Development Goals and we talk about Vision 2030, but that is at risk. It is being compromised as we speak because aside from our students feeling disengaged, they are on the platform, but they are not really connected to the material; there is also the matter of you have missed classes and there is no real accountability, particularly [at] tertiary institutions," added Williams, who was a conference panellist.The former University of the West Indies, Mona Guild president also said that while the Ministry of Education has launched a 'Yard to Yard' programme to track errant secondary school students, no such undertaking exists for those at the tertiary level."If you are missing from classes, no one cares. So, you have tertiary students that are falling behind by months and you have students that, even while they are attending classes they still don't get it," she claimed."I want to say this for administrators from tertiary institutions, the curricula that you have is not meant for online learning. Remote learning and online learning are not the same concept and so what we have as curricula needs to be revised. While we are waiting for the inoculation levels to go up for students to resume face-to-face [classes], until we have the percentage that we need, we have to start having this conversation. Until we have face-to-face learning, how can we still have engagement in a meaningful way through the revision of the curriculum?'' she stated further.The emergence of the novel coronavirus last year forced the education sector to move to online classes as COVID-19 cases started increasing across the island.Yesterday, state minister in the education ministry Robert Nesta Morgan, in responding to Williams' point, said the issue was one which needed to be explored."Ideas like the ones she just posited are very important; we cannot think about everything. The distinction between online learning and remote learning is something I never really contemplated. Intellectually it makes sense, and we could have rationalised it but we never thought about it. So, it's important that we have engagements so we can get ideas like the one we just got so we can take it back to the centre and say listen," he said."The other issue is that everybody in the education sector needs to recognise that we have been talking about a digital society for 10 to 20 years, we have given it a lot of lip service, we had tablets in schools for 20 years, when we went to the ministry, we saw a whole warehouse of tablets that were damaged. The time has come for Jamaicans to take digital literacy and move forward as a digital society seriously. If we do not do it, we are going to have questions such as the one which was just raised about the distinction between remote and online learning. We should not be having that discussion in 2021," Morgan said further, noting that at the onset of the pandemic one uncomfortable realisation was that a lot of educators "were not digitally literate".