An official of the Department of Education (DepEd) on Monday assured that the agency continues to exhaust all means to ensure that self-learning modules and other learning materials used by students at the basic education level will be error-free.

“We are doing everything that we can to minimize, eliminate, and eventually eradicate all these errors,” DepEd Undersecretary for Curriculum and Instruction Diosdado San Antonio told the Manila Bulletin in a phone interview.

San Antonio said this after Senate Committee on Basic Education, Arts and Culture Chairman Senator Sherwin Gatchalian urged DepEd to revamp its quality assurance process in the production and distribution of learning materials for students.

Gatchalian, in a statement issued Sunday, Feb. 7, urged the DepEd - particularly its  Bureau of Learning Resources - to conduct a “nationwide assessment of all learning materials produced by divisions to identify and correct erroneous materials before they are even distributed.”

“We appreciate the reminder of Sen. Gatchalian,” San Antonio said in a mix of English and Filipino. “We want to assure him and the public that this is what we are doing already,” he added.

In order to ensure the production and distribution of error-free learning materials, San Antonio said that DepEd has tapped experts from various regions to help in the Quality Assurance of SLMs.

“There was a significant decrease in the errors reported to us,” he said. Compared to the First Quarter, he explained that 80 percent of the SLMs for Quarter 2 were quality assured by its Central Office to ensure that these are appropriate for students for various grade levels.

San Antonio added that DepEd has also reached out to the academe and private sector for the production of SLMs in the coming Quarters. “Our ultimate goal really is to eradicate all the errors in the learning materials,” he said. “Realistically speaking, it is not happening now because not all materials go through us,” he added.

Unlike the SLMs, which are considered the backbone of distance learning, San Antonio said that there are other supplementary learning materials that are used by teachers at the school level that do not need to go through QA at the Central Office.

For instance, San Antonio noted that the controversial “Igorot” learning material is not a module but a learning activity sheet. “Like the quizzes and other tests, the learning activity sheets do not undergo quality assurance at the Central Office, the teachers take care of it,” he added.

Despite this, San Antonio urged the public to report errors found in SLMs and other learning materials to its “DepEd Error Watch” which is an initiative launched last year to monitor and rectify the errors found in modules.