Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, many schools in North Macedonia have to provide their students with lectures online. As a result of this, the Ministry of Science and Education prepared a platform through which distance learning is made possible. Although, the main problem is that, not every child has access to a laptop or the internet. CIVIL Media’s team decided to do a research on the computers that students need to have in order to follow their lessons online without any obstacles.
We contacted an IT expert, Filip Petrovski, to find out what types of performances should a computer have in order to run smoothly the program of the National Online Platform that the students will follow. Although not recommended, the answer that he had was that a laptop, for example, among other basic performances, would need to have at least a 4GB Ram in order to perform the tasks.
With this information, we went online to check on the price range of the laptops with these sets of requirements. The stores that we chose were four of the major electronics companies in our country. Which are: Tehnomarket, Neptun, Anhoch and Setec.
In all of these stores, the price for a laptop with 4GB Ram that the students would at least need in order to follow their lectures, would range from 15.000 to a little over 20.000 denars. The only problem being, the computers listed within this price range, are not available in stores. All of them were sold. Laptops that were available for purchase were the ones with much better performances than the students would actually need. And of course, they came at a much higher price as well.
With this in mind, we decided to go to the stores ourselves and consult with the people that worked there. It was true. Anhoch had the lowest price on a laptop available in their store starting with 28,980 denars. This company offers an option of getting a notepad that costs 19.480, but they couldn’t provide us with the information on when it would be available. Then came Setec, with laptops available at 32.000 denars or more. We finished our quest by visiting Tehnomarket and Neptun, with both them having laptops available in their stores with prices of 40.000 and up. Needless to say, these are prices that most of the citizens in North Macedonia cannot afford.
There’s also the option of following the lectures through a tablet. We asked about that in stores as well. It came up that, the price of a tablet with the same required performances, would reach the same one as the laptops that were out of stock. That being so, it is understandable why parents would be second guessing buying a notepad over a laptop that is not available in the momment. Even so, it was only two out of four stores we checked that actually have notepads with the 4gb Ram in stock. It appears that they’re going to be all sold out.
When asked, when would they have new computers in store, the answer that would almost always come up was the same, “We don’t know, but maybe after the 15th of October”. With the school year already started, students that are in need of a computer, are left in a highly uncertain situation, which provides them with only two options: buy a highly priced computer with much higher performances than they would use for the program, try to find another solution (buying used computers, borrowing etc), or, simply miss out on school lectures until they can buy a laptop that they could afford.
Jon Ajdini
