Impact Of Nationwide Lockdown On School Education

“XYZ is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting” sliding into my mail whenever my professors wish to take a lecture never fails to abruptly remind me of how much the world has changed and that I have been under quarantine, along with the whole country, for the past seven weeks, something which I tend to forget from time to time have become so accustomed to it already, though in my defense, there is nothing very memorable about the quarantine or the “entity” that made it necessary, the coronavirus pandemic.

Infecting more than a million people across the world, and taking the lives of more than a hundred thousand, the coronavirus pandemic can be considered one of the most devastating and unfortunate events in human history. With lockdowns being announced, almost all corporate offices, private and public sector companies and educational institutions have been forced to pull down their shutters.

Consequently, most official enterprises, be it meetings or seminars, have moved to online platforms, with teleconferencing applications like Skype and Zoom experiencing a swarm of new users. These new “migrants” also include university professors and school teachers, along with their students.

While the idea of online teaching is not new, with many online educational platforms have been in existence for the past few years, the manner and the magnitude at which colleges and schools have unanimously adopted it recently is unprecedented. There are mainly two modes of transmission – sharing pre-recorded videos of the teacher with students or the teacher video-conferencing simultaneously with every student. The latter tends to get preferred over the former as it allows students to put forth their doubts there and then, along with the fact that the teacher can change the direction of teaching according to the prevailing line of thought going around his/her class.

Online teaching has its benefits. Since it allows the teacher and the student to be a part of the classroom from the comfort of their homes, it cuts the time and financial costs of house-to-school or house-to-college commute, as well as allowing sick students to attend their classes, which they otherwise wouldn’t have. “I was bedridden due to minor surgery for a few days last week but I still didn’t miss any teaching as all my classes were being held online”, said a student of a prominent senior secondary school in North Delhi.

Commuting to one’s college or school every day and staying there for 5-6 hours undoubtedly causes fatigue which hinders one’s attention during offline lectures, something which doesn’t happen in the case of online ones.

However, the online system comes with its own share of problems. Not every student is privileged enough to have a laptop or a stable internet connection and thus they are deprived of any access to their teachers in this system. There is also a lack of seriousness due to the absence of a disciplined classroom environment. Also, an online class is still considered less in value than a proper offline class and thus parents raise concerns about the fact that they are still paying the same tuition fees for a less valuable product. Some parents having children studying in the lower grades have even gone one step further and withdrawn them from the school rolls.

While schools have done well to keep the show running through the arrangement of online classes, it is evident that they are only a pale shadow of actual classroom lectures and are only half as efficient as them. Hopefully, the pandemic shall subside in the coming weeks and the students shall get back to their classrooms.

Read | A Complete Guide On The National Education Policy 2020

Stay Tuned, Stay Relevant!