The pandemic of 2020 forced educational systems into a unique social experiment with technology that would never have been conducted or even contemplated in this all-encompassing manner in any single country, let alone on a global scale. With schools and college classrooms emptied by the pandemic, both rich and poor countries were forced to move students and teachers into virtual classrooms. What was originally expected to be a short term measure likely to last weeks has continued for over a year with no clear end in sight.
It is too early to draw a conclusive or final picture of this astonishing and disturbing saga. Researchers, policymakers and educators are likely to spend the next decade teasing out the short term and long term impact of this period and the details of the way in which students, teachers, households and school systems responded to and coped with the upheaval. This analysis needs to be conducted at multiple levels of educational outcomes ranging from the micro level of classrooms and households to national and international contexts. In addition, a related but intersecting level of analysis needs to be conducted on the social, economic, political, and technological factors that have influenced these outcomes.
Technology has been the factor most proximate to the experience of the student and the teacher and most prominent in the discourse of educational policy making in this period. Let us pause for a moment to recognise the enormity of this development. Technology companies have announced the arrival of tectonic change to education frequently in the last twenty-five years. Gurus have waxed eloquently about the myriad ways in which technology would enrich, democratise and make learning available on tap. In the bargain it could be expected to render the teacher somewhat superfluous, a mere shadow in the background as opposed to the central role she occupies today. But not even the most ardent technophile would have hoped for an opportunity as radical as the pandemic wrought. That the educational world was profoundly unprepared, would be an understatement.
In fairness, we should accept and recognise that technology has saved formal education from being totally eliminated from the life of students during the pandemic. This itself is a great accomplishment. If the pandemic had arrived in 1990 instead of thirty years later, the impact on education, not to speak of the rest of society, would have been far more stark and total. Millions of students did receive some form of educational input and had consistent contact, albeit virtually, with their peers and teachers. While the complex question of effectiveness remains open, there is no doubt that communication and instruction technologies made at least some education possible.
It should come as no surprise that the ease with which education systems moved online and the effectiveness of the process have varied dramatically. The usual fault lines of unequal resources, capacities and policy action between countries, communities and households played out its inexorable logic here too. While the struggle to learn through an unfamiliar medium is a common motif for rich and poor, that has been compounded by loss of health, livelihood and opportunities for the poorer countries and households in a way that foreshadows years of added burdens.
Strangely enough, the pandemic also presages the world that awaits us when the impact of climate change is fully on us. Like climate change, across the world the pandemic affects all social strata: everybody is a victim. There is no personal enemy to fight, just an inexorable force of nature, indifferent to human concerns. The impact too, as mentioned earlier, is filtered through the inequities of the human world, not the result of the intrinsic nature of the virus. Solutions can only be global, but the lesson is poorly accepted and responses have been piecemeal and fractured. The science of coping with the pandemic progressed far faster than anyone could hope for, but socio-political and cultural worlds have struggled to keep pace. Culture and politics have clashed with science, leaving everyone worse off. We are nowhere near the final chapter of this real-life drama.
This India, that is Bharat
The rest of this essay will focus on higher education based on a set of observations from my vantage point, in Azim Premji University. Needless to say, the impact on school education has been profound too, and there are credible reports of large scale loss of learning and distress around the country, especially outside big cities.
The observations and ideas presented here are those of a small group of faculty members in the university who used all the ingenuity in their command to adapt to the situation. I will, in the last part of the essay, link these experiences to the challenges faced by our educational systems at the macro level and the reasons for scepticism that adaptive responses have been robust enough. The following aspects, again at different levels, are key to understanding the situation.
- Local responses – in the classroom and university
- Socio-economic influences
- Politics and policy making
It is not possible to address or completely analyse all three of the above themes in this short essay. I will focus instead on the first, with some reference to the other two as contributing influences on the actions that individuals and institutions have adopted.
Altered Realities
The classrooms that students and teachers entered last year, after the first national lockdown, was nothing like the one they left a few weeks ago. A new vocabulary full of references to Zoom, Teams, bandwidth, signal strengths and computers took over everyone’s conversations and consciousness. No one was fully prepared for the situation. We do know that the story repeated all over the country. The administrative and policy responses needed to start classes online would not have been possible swiftly for a majority of colleges. The process was even more complicated for locations where communication networks are patchy or even missing.
I will present and discuss some of the issues involved under five broad headings. These are not comprehensive. They range from the structural to every day practice to policy. Many regions in the country could have entirely different experiences based on local factors. However, these issues are general enough to find some resonance with most audiences.
It is a new world
Students and teachers entered a new world after the first wave of the pandemic. Many of us could be excused for thinking that practices that work well in the normal classroom can be transferred with little change to the virtual classroom. All you need is the technology to work as advertised. Both these turned out to be poor assumptions. Teachers soon realised that they are confronting a different reality altogether. Old pedagogical approaches do not work well in this new world. Usually attentive students disappear from the teacher’s field of view, as it were. Teaching and learning slow down. And videos, many of them rich content, do not get viewed at all. Secondly, technology never works as advertised; computers, networks, software and bandwidth are all unpredictable. The students’ homes are often in turmoil.
The instructors soon reached the conclusion, individually and in discussions within the university, that an entirely novel approach has to be evolved to make the online experience effective. Unless institutions and instructors recognise this, a lot of time and energy may be spent in struggling with the challenges instead of rethinking and inventing new approaches.
There is one area where the virtual classroom fails entirely. In the early days of techno nirvana, in the 1990s and early 2000s, this aspect was not recognised by the technologists. Today there is greater recognition of this dimension, at least among educators. It is this. Education happens within a complex social context. The relational element, that between teachers and students and among student peer groups, is not an optional dimension. It is central to educating and learning. Aspects of everyday interaction that we take for granted, such as visual contact, tone and tenor of voice, interactions that involve mentoring, care, play and disciplining are all crucial elements that are the necessary backdrop to the activities of teachers and learners. In one stroke, the virtual classroom erases most of these. While some elements can be recouped, albeit imperfectly, some others are lost irrevocably. Teachers and policy makers can and must try to compensate for these.
The conclusion is that the physical classroom and the virtual one are not two ends of one spectrum. They can be thought of as intersecting planes that can inform and aid each other, but one is not a replacement for the other.
Changing our practice – Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment
We recognised early on that significant changes to the curriculum are needed. The University quickly constituted committees that went into and proposed changes to curricula, courses and also to the academic calendar. Our faculty members have significant autonomy to define course content, readings and assessment schemes. Instructors quickly reviewed their courses and presented revised specifications to Course Review Committees within programmes for peer review. Content was lightened, and assessment schemes were adjusted. Programme coordinators worked with administrative officers to restructure the calendar. The undergraduate programme quickly shifted to a trimester mode in 2020-21. The trimester permitted students and faculty to take on fewer courses and credits in a term without sacrificing rigour.
What happens in colleges that are part of a large public collegiate university? Decision making is often more centralised than in our context and infrastructure budgets are stretched tight. Unsurprisingly, faculty members may have less autonomy to change courses and assessment, and less incentive to adopt alternative pedagogies.
Innovative pedagogy, however, is the single most important factor that made the learning process less of a burden for our students. Hopefully our faculty will publish reports of the various steps they took to construct more inclusive and vibrant virtual classrooms. Here are examples of innovative pedagogical responses by our faculty members.
Science courses and learning are especially hampered by the move online. Observation, experiment and theory building are integral to the scientific method. Our science programmes, right from the first course, attempt to involve students in these activities, both in the laboratory, field and the classroom. The pandemic put an end to that. What ensued was a series of attempts by science faculty to ensure that students are able to do experiments and observations from home. The science faculty devised experiments that could be conducted at home by students. Students were asked to take photographs and send in their lab reports as pdf files. Equipment kits required for experiments were couriered to students all over the country by the University. The University ensured that all students had access to laptops and those who needed financial help for internet access were provided that assistance.
Biology students were asked to make systematic observations at home. In one Introductory Biology course, students had to isolate bacteria from their surroundings, make observations and report. In the Electricity & Magnetism course, students were asked to calculate the temperature coefficient of resistance by estimating the colour temperature of a lighted filament. Connection boards, multi-meters, batteries and lights were couriered to student homes. In Mechanics, students were asked to set up a simple home setup to investigate collisions. The set up involved a table, some boards to hold objects, a cell phone camera and a free open-source software to track objects.
I cite the above examples to illustrate the idea that tremendous ingenuity and organisation are needed from the instructors and institutions to sustain the learning process in the face of the disruption caused by the pandemic. The resources, including and most importantly the availability of faculty capable of such innovation may not be easily accessible outside a few educational institutions. What of the rest of the country, the silent majority? This perhaps is the biggest and sobering lesson from the pandemic, that there is high likelihood that we will face a long silent crisis of lost learning at all levels of education.
Students and their responses
Policy makers, and we may add, tech evangelists, often naively assume that classrooms are static spaces full of eager but faceless students waiting to absorb “knowledge” from the teacher or the helpful video. This understanding is tested to the limit by the virtual classroom. The effect of the pandemic on household wellbeing complicates matters even further.
While a bit dramatic, I would not be far wrong to paraphrase the pre-Socratic Heraclitus to claim that no teacher ever steps into the same classroom twice. The students, individually and collectively, could be more attentive or less, some troubled, some alive and excited. Moods and feelings ebb and flow. Strategies to gauge and respond appropriately to the energy that students bring to class on any given day are part of every adept teacher’s repertoire. All kinds of cues, verbal, non-verbal, facial expressions and signs of distraction serve as signals that the teacher is alive to. The virtual classroom throws a spanner in these works. There is huge loss of information and contact, and the teacher-student relationship is at risk of becoming more transactional.
What about the student who refuses to ever turn their video on? And what about those who seem troubled, whose father has lost his job? We had students, once they returned home when the campus closed, had to take up MGNREGA work to sustain the family. Can we force that student onto the screen?
Our instructors tried to enrich the process by producing asynchronous content – lectures recorded in advance, that would help the regular class to be a “flipped classroom”. In many cases this worked well. But it would be a mistake to assume that students eagerly lap up the videos. Organising time and work efficiently is not a major strength in late adolescence, let alone adulthood. Many instructors may have wondered why all their hard effort to produce rich multimedia content was not getting the traction that it deserved.
Policy and administration
My colleagues and I are fortunate to work in a University that is well funded and nimble footed. We could pull together multiple groups in the University, academic review groups, infrastructure and technology teams, academic administration and student support teams to rapidly adapt to changed circumstances. This is a luxury for a large part of the educational system. It suffices to point out that teachers and students who are poorly supported by institutional leadership and policy makers are likely to struggle. When these students and teachers succeed, to whatever extent, we should gratefully remember that they do so at great personal cost and after relentless struggle.
It is not all doom and gloom
Is there a silver lining at all? Like I mentioned earlier in this essay, the fact that most students did encounter their peers and teachers virtually counts as a success. Even if learning suffered, it is likely that significant learning took place. In addition, the experiments that this crisis has triggered are likely to be a rich source of insights in the years to come. Conversations about technology and virtual learning need not be conducted under adversarial circumstances. Researchers, once they produce peer reviewed research on effective pedagogy and use of technology during the pandemic, can help policy makers make sensible decisions. The explosion of online learning may have faults and imperfections but it produces one unmitigated good; that is the access it provides to students who probably had no access to higher education at all. Faced with a choice between no education and an online version of it, we should choose the latter any time. However there is a risk. Harried policy makers who are constantly on the lookout for opportunities to whittle down budgets may be seduced into not allocating money for brick and mortar colleges and living breathing teachers, with the claim that they can be replaced with videos on the internet. This, in the light of our experience during this pandemic, will be to the detriment of education and the future of our youth.
I will end this essay with a few comments on what we began with. Has the brave new world of technology overtaken education too? Are the prognostications of techno-evangelists and the venture capitalists who fund them about to come true? Are all professions of care to be populated by humanoid robots? Not so fast. The upheaval in education during the pandemic, and the successes and failures of technology have demonstrated that good teaching and learning do remain quintessentially activities predicated on healthy mutuality and supportive relationships. Information technology has indeed proved itself a worthy contender to be among the most useful educational resources, along with books and laboratory equipment. Technology may even automate learning when what is learned are easily taught skills that depend largely on self-learning by adult or expert learners. But in the elementary school, or in the undergraduate classroom, there is no alternative to the richness of human interaction and all the muddles and challenges that teachers and learners encounter. Even when such classroom environments are found wanting or imperfect, the alternative is not replacement of people by technology, but a consistent effort to improve and reinvent the learning space and its vital relationships.
Venu Narayan is Professor of Education at Azim Premji University. Views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect those of Confluence, its editorial board or the Academy.
This article is part of a Confluence series called “Still Online: Higher Education in India”. The remaining articles of the series can be found here.