E-learning
In poorly performing educational systems as within the country, online learning might not inaugurate a revolution. Equality of opportunity to all or any is one among the essential principles of our Constitution. From an academic point of view, Dewey , American philosopher, psychologist, and academic reformer, strongly argued that “[A]n environment during which some are limited will always in reaction create conditions that prevent the complete development even of these who fancy they enjoy complete freedom for unhindered growth.” Another point he makes equally strongly is that permanently education, one must lead the child’s current interests and skills organically to logically organised human knowledge. This second point is an indicator of the standard of education.
The key issues
Our education system was never very efficient even within the better of times. The COVID-19 pandemic has rendered it extremely biased and faulty. The most focus of providing learning opportunities while schools are closed is online teaching. Numerous guidelines and plans are issues by the Govt., the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and therefore the Central Board of education (CBSE) for this purpose. The web mediums is teeming with many innovative learning schemes, teaching videos, sites and portals for learning opportunities. The content of all government sites and schemes is primarily the NCERT-issued Alternative Academic Calendar videos of teaching, digital editions of textbooks, and links to other such material.
There are three pertinent issues during this whole effort of online education and schemes that require serious consideration. One, an exacerbation of inequality; two, the pedagogical issues resulting in bad quality education; and three, an unwarranted thrust on online education, post-COVID-19.
Exacerbation of inequality
It is worth repeating a truism that calamities, be they natural or man-made, affect the underprivileged the hardest; COVID-19 is not any exception. The plight of many migrant labourers, many of who walked thousands of kilometres right within the beginning of the lockdown, proved the purpose adequately. An identical but less noticed deprivation is being visited to children of an equivalent people, which can push subsequent generation during a direction of even greater comparative disadvantage.
In our society there’s no large movement which will generate any hope of an improved situation in terms of equality and social justice. Therefore, any positive change which may happen are going to be a cumulative results of the event of capabilities and grit in individuals. The COVID-19 shutdown has affected this chance for the poor even harder than their counterparts from well-to-do sections of society. The plans themselves were the standard glib talk always served to the poor. These plans assume semi-literate or illiterate parents teaching children, community involvement, mobile pools, and so on. Anyone with an understanding of rural India will immediately note these to be imaginary. As a result, whatever online or digital education is out there is for college kids with only online access. As such, digital India education may become even more unequal and divided than it already is.
Even if one takes it as an emergency measure (that ‘something is best than nothing’) and also accept ‘for some is best than no one’ despite it being against the principle of civil right, the standard of online teaching-learning leaves much to be desired. The NCERT declares in its Learning Enhancement Guidelines or LEG that 60-70% students, teachers and fogeys consider learning satisfactory. However, its survey asks one question on the sensation of scholars using the standards of ‘joyful to burdensome’. The happiness or otherwise of the scholar while learning is, of course, important, but it says nothing about the quantum and depth of learning.
Listening to lectures on the mobile, copying from the board where the teacher is writing, frequent disconnections and/or having blurred video/audio can hardly and organically connect the youngsters.
No specialise in concepts
If one sees videos of teaching mathematics, science, history, and therefore the English, one can hardly avoid noticing problems with them. Within the science and arithmetic videos, especially, there are many misconceptions and ambiguities. The strain is more on ‘tricks’ to recollect for fulfilment in an examination than laying the stress on conceptual understanding.
The higher school students are during a better position still due to their relative independence in learning and possible self-discipline. The lower primary can get nothing in the least from this mode of teaching. As Michael Joseph Oakeshott who also wrote on education would say, it requires well-connected, regular efforts that are incrementally building to assist the kid focus his attention and to impress him to differentiate and to discriminate, and develop a habit of staying on task. And this needs help from someone who knows the kid also as understands the target of education. Food packets and newspapers within the hands of even ‘guided’ semi-literate parents are going to be ok to present an idea on paper, but are going to be completely useless for the child’s learning.
The thrust, Post-COVID-19
IT has been presented as a harbinger of a revolution in education for quite three decades now. However, all reliable studies seem to point that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) within the classroom helps in already well-functioning systems, and either has no benefits or negative impact in poorly performing systems. As such, it doesn’t indicate much hope from IT in our education system. The NCERT’s LEG states that “COVID-19 has created a situation which demands transformation in school education and this mechanisms in school education may go through a drastic change. Therefore, even if the pandemic will get over, its traces will be there and school education needs to remodel itself….” It recommends that “alternative modes of education for the whole academic session including Internet-based, radio, podcast, community radio, IVRS, TV DTH Channels, etc.” should be developed.
Institutional Environment
The importance of an institutional environment can’t be overemphasised when one thinks of online teaching. Even when the institutions function sub-optimally, students themselves create an environment that supports their growth morally, socially and intellectually in conversations and interactions with one another. The web mode of teaching completely forecloses this chance.
In conclusion, our democracy and public education system of e-learning have got to specialise in most neediest way which are far behind since many long years and there’s equal got to provide the IT enabled educational services to usher in main stream.