Bertolt Brecht said “Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon”. Unfortunately, it is often poverty that separates men and women from their books. So what we really have is a forced transition to a virtual platform in the middle of an economic meltdown. The dispossession of education, especially higher education, will be severe. That is where we have to think about the moral choice underlying this transition.
Covid-19 decimated supply chains, economic systems, and close social interactions. It also had crippling effects on educational institutions and systems worldwide. For an education-driven economy like India’s that produces the highest number of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) graduates worldwide, the situation is particularly dire. One of the fundamental components of these courses is laboratory experiments, which may become difficult, if not impossible to conduct safely in absence of a vaccine for Covid-19. In this article we outline a number of free, open-source, curated, verified, physics-based simulation resources that can be used to design virtual lab courses for introductory or advanced undergraduate physics curricula.
Although many think so, classroom teaching cannot be replicated in online teaching – the virtual classroom is entirely different. A virtual classroom makes it difficult to assess and measure the teaching learning process and its efficiency. Maintaining a good teacher-student relation (or any relationship!) is a challenge as well. A student while in college, learns not just the subject – it opens to them a new world of experiences.
Examinations need to be decentralized, with teachers given autonomy to frame syllabi that would be based on their experiences with the student body of their institutions, independent of the University Grants Commission (UGC). It is time the UGC realized that a centralized system of education cannot work, especially in the middle of a global crisis.
Shifting online is more than converting class-notes into PDFs or a collection of video lectures and e-books. Digitized learning content has to be contextualized and ‘byte-sized’ to make it crisp, engaging and understandable. Although there is no replacement of the field trips, social and cultural interactions during academic exchanges it may be possible to make the e-learning more user friendly through customization.
As it is, our young urban population has screen-addiction that contributes to many of them lacking in social skills. Now we are asking them to observe social distancing and to communicate online and this can only encourage screen-addiction! I am afraid that this will diminish real communication and social skills further, reducing tolerance in general.
SWAYAM and NPTEL are seen as the ideal platforms for online learning, but much of the content on these platforms run asynchronously, i. e. with pre-recorded videos that the students watch at their leisure. This process deprives the students of the benefit of live interactions and feedback from the teacher. Viewing of study material created for a general audience works only for self-learners. One needs to remember that not all students are equipped to be self-learners and most of them report that they benefit from a teacher.
There are no courses for history in the India-based Swayam portal. Harvard University’s online courses are on China. The Department for Continuing Education of University of Oxford has online history courses that is predominantly British history. Thus, to learn Oriental history (excluding Chinese history) especially Indian History, there are no MOOCs.
What is the purpose of doing academics? What ought to be the ethical values which guide teaching, research, supervision and mentoring? How is academics relevant (or, how can it be relevant) in contemporary socio-economic, socio-political and cultural contexts? What is the ‘vocation’ of a teacher/researcher in contemporary times? Can we think about reorganizing and restructuring […]
Online classes are not capable of substituting classroom lectures. The former is very seldom able to generate the interaction that is needed in a class. Moreover, the teachers’ body language, which is a part and parcel of the classroom lectures and is imperative for their success, is also missing in online classes. The use of technology will not only lead to more discrimination, but also will create some practical problems. It will also lack the desired interaction in the class.
