News
Learn in the Times of Corona
20 May 2020
Right till the first week of March, standing in my classroom, drawing the molecular structure of adrenergic agonists on the whiteboard, I had no idea that classroom teaching as I knew it was coming to an end. Worldwide.
I could not in my wildest imaginations envision a scenario that by March end, smack in the middle of the session, I’ll be home, having being sent by the University itself (with instructions and wishes to stay safe!), comfortably ensconced in my sofa, with my laptop actually in my lap, shooing my kids away (by the way, why are they not at school!), logged into an app called Zoom, about which I had never heard, explaining those same molecular structures by sharing the screen of my laptop (oh there goes gravity privacy), while the binge-watching crowd that my students is, similarly sitting at their homes, sends an econ of a raised hand to ask a question, as I had muted them all to keep that murder of crows silent that was constantly cawing near some student’s home.
I mean, who could have imagined that come March!
Then came the reports of an invisible virus, jumping across lands and seas, bringing terrible death to the weak and statisticians projected infection and death rates of a really horrifying proportions.
As world governments rapidly shut down due to Covid-19 pandemic, so did schools, colleges and universities, impacting over 90 percent of the students world-over with about 250 million students in India itself.
Despite terms like e-learning, digital platforms, MOOCs, ICT-enabled classrooms, smart-boards, Learning Management Systems, remote learning, webinars etc being in vogue for quite some time, they were never mainstream and hardly any educator was equipped to continue delivering his courses without access to physical space that the Universities provide.
To their credit, the teaching community and the students very quickly adapted to the situation and crowd-meeting apps like Zoom and Hangouts helped them complete the syllabus. But that was just about it.
While the uncertainty looms, we need to establish how to move beyond this point. The disruption that arose from coronavirus pandemic has given the educators time to rethink the sector.
The National Education Policy-2019 laid great emphasis on usage of technology in delivery of education and portals like DIKSHA, SWAYAM, NPTEL, NROER and EPathshala are quite known now.
Some may think that we are now ready to go digital with education. The fact is, we have just now started to realize what e-learning entails. Some key factors need to be taken into account before we make that claim.
The Government Sector: Students in Government Institutes face a huge gap in equitable access to learning, delivery of learning, and administrative response. Barring a few premier ones, the institutes funded with public money are notoriously lethargic and its faculty resistant to ed-tech. Unfilled vacancies, tech-averse faculty, heterogeneous learning levels of students are other factors that make the proposition of digital education a mammoth task in these Institutes. It will need a lot of learning and unlearning by the faculty, efficient top down approach by the leadership and change of mindset at each level to kick start the digital learning in this sector
The Private Sector: The private sector is definitely quick to respond and adapt but has often been found to compromise on core academic parameters. It has a habit of jumping the gun and claiming success with half-done measures. This dilutes the learner quality and output. It needs to understand that if it is able to promise a truly holistic learning experience on digital platforms, it stands to gain the most when student mobility is expected to see a decrease worldwide.
The Digital Divide: The educators may give themselves a pat on the back for coping up commendably sans physical infrastructure, the fact is many students simply couldn’t avail the benefit of digital tools. The digital divide is a reality in our country where urban locations are ready for 5G and many rural areas are still waiting for decent bandwidth. This will need heavy investment in infrastructure by the private service providers. Also needed will be policy initiatives by the government. Zero-rating educational content offered by all Institutes, public and private, where data charges don't apply when accessing them could help the digitally disadvantaged. Incentivizing the investment in infrastructure could be another.
Digital Infrastructure: Many of us now realize that the digital education system is not just video lectures on Zoom or uploaded content on Youtube. There are many gaps that need to be filled to make the teaching-learning process equal to the one in the physical classroom. A digital infrastructure that not only ensures equitable and timed delivery of learning content, but also provides real time responses to queries is needed. Mechanism for assessment and evaluation need to be evolved to complete the circle. And then of course there’s the question of laboratory based courses.
A World Bank report states that virtual schools regularly under perform in comparison to the regular face-to-face schools. Another criticism of virtual education is that the kids miss out on the social aspects and experience a high dropout rate in the absence of peers. Also, the onus of ensuring academic discipline and regularity shifts to the parents. What happens when both the parents are working?
In a country where Distance Learning programs from fully functional University like IGNOU still face an inherent bias from employers, will digital education be considered equal and acceptable by them? Will the Faculty be able to overcome the fear that technology is trying to replace them? Questions like these and many more need to be deliberated upon and answered with outlines of policies, procedure and digital infrastructure before we proceed further with digital education.
Nevertheless, this is a chance to collectively reimagine our education systems to be more agile, flexible and leveraging online platforms to facilitate e-learning by recalibrating our action and delivery channels.
We will discuss these ideas in detail in further posts. Watch out for this space.
Further Reads:
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/edutech/brief/edtech-covid-19
https://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/promise-and-challenges-virtual-schools
https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse/solutions
https://www.firstpost.com/health/coronavirus-outbreak-post-covid-19-public-education-systems-must-use-technology-to-ensure-equal-access-to-learning-and-administrative-efficiency-8353001.html
https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=2020042408501836
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/4-ways-covid-19-education-future-generations/
Dr. Abdul Wadood Siddiqui
Dean-Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences
Rama University, Kanpur