With the growing fear of COVID19, many facets of life and
livelihoods have come to a
standstill. Educational systems
are not exempt. COVID19 has
hit Higher Education Institutes
(HEIs) in India at a time when
they were going fullswing to
complete the last quarter of the
semester and conduct the endsemester exams. Rescheduling
these unfinished tasks must be
done as soon as possible, as an
inordinate delay would affect
the future of outgoing students.
Recently, the media has
highlighted that the occurrence of similar episodes in the
future cannot be overlooked.
Thus, this requires both the
teacher and taught in all segments of educational systems,
in particular HEIs, to be prepared to adopt an online system.
Preparation
Children and the youth:
With the advent of computerbased learning across the globe
and in particular among toddlers who are exposed to such
gadgets, it should be easy to implement some of the learning
modules in school education.
Coming to those in colleges,
and how effective ITbased education could be fostered among
the youth, this is the right way
ahead as colleges and universities are locked down. The modules suggested ought to be
carefully thought of and implemented in a phased manner to
give desired outcomes.
Capacity building, a necessity: Higher education in
India and the world over has
seen a paradigm shift with regard to its pedagogy and application. While computerbased
education has been introduced
in most colleges, it needs to be
finetuned in certain essential
areas to ultimately make it effective. Mere availability of
equipment, gadgets and broadband connectivity will not
bring the desired results. The
most important aspect is to
provide adequate training to
professors and students on the
use of online education and to
familiarise them with the apps
and nuances of the available
material. Strong Internet connectivity, either through cables
or Wi -fi, is fundamental. In future, colleges should embark
on a system wherein onethird
of the syllabus content will be
handled online. This approach
should be made mandatory so
that there will be a smooth
transition from offline to online
teaching models. Teachers, at
the moment, do not have suffi
cient exposure and training to
handle online classes, and the
approach to this endeavour
should be serious as its impact
will have farreaching
consequences.
Pilot study is a prerequisite: At least in most autonomous colleges across the country, experts should conduct
regular pilot studies to assess
the efficiency of digital learning
so that there are no major hiccups during implementation.
Based on such studies, online
procedures can be tweaked appropriately by the teachers and
students. Feedback can also be
obtained from those concerned to refine the platform Institutionindustry connect
could be established with well known agencies, who have
commercialised online education templates, besides seeking
support from government organisations who have specialized in these areas.
Online assessment, a viable alternative: Since multiple online assessment modules
are available to gauge individual performances in several
areas (for example, psychometric tests), it should not be
difficult to create a robust platform to help understand the
learning outcomes. Exam systems in universities and autonomous colleges already have a
methodology in place to generate outputs pertaining to consolidation of marks and related
terrains. All that they have to
be involved in is to frame questions and probes available
through online systems, evaluation templates, awarding of
marks, and computation of data generated. Integrating this
recommendation may not be
cumbersome as exam offices in
colleges are already
computerised.
MOOCs such as Coursera,
Educity, and others can be referred to or consulted while developing online modules. Indisputably, online higher
education systems are going to
reign in the future, as it is easier, faster, cheaper, reproducible and with less personnel
engagement.
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