Online Teaching Strategies during the Pandemic Period

Abstract

The world today is in the midst of one of the biggest health hazards, which has the potential to change the entire world order. The COVID-19 pandemic, which started in December 2019 from the Wuhan province in China, has spread to over 185 countries and resulted in the closure of over 90% of all schools, colleges, and universities, impacting more than 1.75 billion students till the end of July 2020. The speed with which the disease has spread, the closure of higher educational institutions, and the transition to online teaching has been swift. Needless to say, the pandemic has transformed the centuries-old blackboard-chalk teaching model to one driven by technology. This pandemic has critically disturbed the country’s education sector, which has a far reaching impact on the country’s economic, social, technological, and cultural future. Whether online education, as a substitute for the classroom, will be efficacious or not, only time will tell. A number of challenges have emerged because of the pandemic, and subsequent closure of the educational institutions. These challenges in the education sector range from insufficient online infrastructure, lack of resources, untrained teachers, unwilling stressed parents, issues in online examination, quality of course materials, and so on. It has impacted virtually all nations across the globe, more so developing countries like India. The Indian government only spends 4.6% of its GDP on education, which is lower than even some sub-Saharan countries like Kenya, Togo, and Zimbabwe, and hence, the resources required to have a foolproof online educational infrastructure may not be available immediately to a large section of the country’s population. Even at the best of times, access to education is a critical challenge faced by the youth of India, and the current situation has the potential to further aggravate the problem. Perhaps, it is not only just a question of imparting continuous and uninterrupted learning during the pandemic. Today, the most important challenge faced by educational administrators is to focus on the holistic development of the students. Having the right kind of digital infrastructure, developing a purposeful and well-defined online course supporting both the teacher and the student, taking the parents into confidence, creating an online format for testing and evaluating the students, and stressing on extra-curricular activities without being physically present in the educational institutions are some of the key issues that the education sector worldwide is facing. This disruption in the delivery of education is pushing policymakers to figure out how to drive engagement at scale, while ensuring inclusive e-learning solutions and tackling the digital divide. Learning is a continuous and ever-evolving process, and therefore, the educational institutions in India, ranging from schools to universities, can use this present threat as an opportunity to blend classroom education with digital education for all future learners.

Keywords: COVID-19, Impact, Education, Primary, Secondary, Challenges, Opportunities, Threats

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