Schools Online

 

Gone modern by going online?

As a child, I often heard white-haired elders proclaim that studying is the hardest job to do and further advise that one should do it with all seriousness and dedication when they were being given the opportunity. I would think as children we had just one job to do – study, so why not just do it well.

Now I wonder if they could see into what is now the present for children. Stuck inside their houses, their eyes glued to the screens which till two summers ago everybody warned them against, children live their half-lives.

I am merely talking about students studying up to grade 12 in Indian schools. I wonder how the society would have tackled it had Covid-19 come a few thousand years ago when students lived with and served their gurus in their ashrams to attain education.

Online School or progressive learning needs an electronic device, a spot big enough to park your butt on,  good net connectivity through wi-fi or data connection and somebody or something on the screen telling you how to go about learning what you want to and hey presto, you know it.

Offline or traditional/historical learning needs a designated classroom in a school, and everything that goes with running it.

Both systems charge fees to pay for teachers and study material. In both the systems the teacher and the taught need time management and breaks.

Just like anything new attracts positive and negative reactions from users and all-knowing non-users, online learning which we have been forced to adopt due to Covid-enforced isolation, has thousands of words written and spoken about it.

People have been telling me how their children feel empowered due to online learning since the schools had to be closed due to the pandemic and how well the young students learn through downloadable material, videos, and podcasts and can refer to it any time of the day later. Couldn’t they read their textbooks again and again?

Do I feel as confident as they do seeing how things are going on?

While little kids enjoy sitting alone undisturbed for hours together to watch cartoons and animated movies, they get bored sitting alone to study. Some parents say they even sit with their little children during the class to know what is being taught.

In the absence of repetitive classroom practice of the three Rs and drawing, will these children suffer poor hand-eye coordination?

Remember when every parent was concerned about their child going to school after the summer break, having forgotten what they had learned before the holidays, like a clean slate?

Students are not following the exact routine of a school day and are not exposed to the time schedules, habit-forming discipline and collaborative learning so do not feel it ungodly if a parent laments –when will the school open again!

The very ‘evil’ of the internet that the parents warned them against, is now open to them all day. Unless somebody keeps a watch, how can you ensure what they  have found and are watching or sharing; their new-found variety of knowledge could be anybody’s guess. 

Young children seldom have a sense of time management. It is always mothers calling them (or the fear of fathers returning from work and scolding them) or it getting too dark to play outside, that they put their football or cricket paraphernalia away and move indoors to reluctantly take out their school bags and finish homework.

They were taught to follow teachers and text-books, now suddenly they have been let loose and are expected to do most things on their own, isn’t it tough for them?

They miss their informal social interactions - the sharing of food, playing pranks on class mates, whispering secrets into friends’ ears, complaining about their siblings or parents, liking a schoolmate of the opposite gender, the relief of the strict teacher being on leave and celebrating birthdays of classmates, some of the daily little joys of going to school. Today, they sit in isolation, with a little exercise and being the target of their parents’ own feeling of frustration at not being able to get any time to themselves.

Meanwhile, the teachers find it tough to move from the years-old comfort of doing most of the talking and then testing the retention power of students through traditional tests. Also missing is the portability of the testing material and submissions. Used to following lesson plans and worksheets, they are forced to fend for themselves as they struggle to find novel and interesting ways to retain the students’ attention.  

In the classroom they kept a watch if the students were paying attention or not, now they cannot have too many students with their video on the screen lest it should affect the bandwidth. How to ensure students’ active participation on a screen is a challenge for these educators.

The students suffer due to their teachers’ lack of training and knowledge to source workable teaching material in such conditions. Most of the teachers had been taking their work as a job to be done for nine months a year because it paid well. Now they have to share all that they know with the screen of an electronic machine. No wonder then that most of them feel lost.

Agreed, that the schools are still working and students are attending classes, those students whose parents have transferable jobs can enjoy the continuity of curriculum, but how many such students are there in our system? 

You do not have to be an authority on education to pronounce that a mix of online and offline learning would have been the best solution, but also that we have never been prepared for this new normal style of education.

Most schools are hoping to go back to their tried and tested method when they open.

The Central and state governments’ initiatives too have not caught the right kind of attention. The 2020-’21 budget of the Ministry of Human Resource Development saw  a two-third cut from Rs 604 crore in 2019-’20 on digital e-learning.

In spite of the Government’s Saubhagya scheme claim that 99.9% of households have electricity connections, its own Ministry of Rural Development 2017-’18 the nationwide survey of villages Mission Antyodaya, reported that electricity for more than 12 hours a day was available to only 47% of households in our countries. 

https://www.cbgaindia.org/blog/indian-education-cant-go-online-8-homes-young-members-computer-net-link/

has more startling information for us:

While 24% of Indians own a smartphone, only 11% of households possess any type of computer, which could include desktop computers, laptops, notebooks, netbooks, palmtops, or tablets.

It cited a 2017-18 National Sample Survey report on education that out of the 66% of India’s population living in villages, only a little over 15% of rural households have access to internet services compared to the 42% among urban households.

It also talked of the digital divide across class, gender, region or place of residence.

And we are not even talking of regular and predictable internet connectivity in spite of the efforts of internet service providers’ announcements of free internet and data services for subscribers.

What school are the children whose parents lost their source of income during these two years and are struggling to feed the family, going to?  

So how accessible can digital learning be?

Sitting on my chair I also wonder when the government had a year and a half to chalk out a plan and thousands of educationists, educators besides stalwarts in software, then how come we still do not have an examination plan till date.

                                                                                            - Anupama S Mani