The DEPARTMENT of Education is deep in its preparations to strengthen the capacity of its online educational platform to assist more learners and teachers in distance learning in time for the opening of classes this coming August 24.

Undersecretary for Administration Alain Pascua said that the DepEd is upgrading the platform to double the numbers of learners that can simultaneously access the digital podium known as DepEd Commons.

“We have about 8.4 million unique users in DepEd Commons at this time. We would want to reach out all of the 17 million, or even more than the 17 million learners that we have, including the teachers,” Pascua said.

“In order to achieve this,” he added, “DepEd is in the process of integrity testing the platform to accommodate more users by August, since online will be one of the alternative delivery modalities to be implemented. Other modalities will be modular and television and radio-based instructions.”

Pascua said that the DepEd Commons, despite having multiple users who are simultaneously logging in to the platform, has been durable especially during the early parts of the pandemic in the country.

“When we started last March 17, which was while the fourth grading period was ongoing during the pandemic, the DepEd Commons didn’t crash. This means that the platform is stable. Even when we used what we call the ‘learning management system’ for the webinars wherein there were more than 45,000 participants, the DepEd Commons remained stable and didn’t encounter any problem,” he stressed.

DepEd Commons is an online educational platform created by the department for public and private school teachers and learners which supports distance learning and was developed even before the Covid19 pandemic.

In cooperation with the Department of Information and Communications Technology and the National Telecommunications Commission, https://commons.deped.gov.ph/ can be accessed free of data charges by all subscribers of Globe, TM, Smart, Sun, and TNT.