Bridging the Education Gap Through the Division Network Academy

The pandemic broke the normalcy and status quo of the country resulting to lockdowns and quarantines leading to the closure of schools. The Schools Division of Surigao del Norte responded through the utilization of the Division Network Academy to aid learning continuity particularly in the asynchronous part of the online distance learning. For this study, ten purposively sampled teachers from schools with learners preferring Online Distance Learning were considered participants. In-depth interview was used to gather data, while the six-step thematic analysis of Braun and Clarke (2006) was employed to analyze qualitative data resulting to four emergent themes namely: Strength of Advocacy, Issues and Challenges, Beneficial Influence, and Propositions for Improvement. Common among the responses are the challenges on internet intermittency and gadget insufficiency and the lack of mobile application support, poor user management, lack of features and interface capacity. This study has proven that the Division Network Academy had bridged the learning gap in one school of the division, but had failed to serve the rest. It is then recommended that a version 2 of the Division Network Academy must be conceptualized on top of the intensification of advocacy on the use of Division Network Academy.