ONLINE TRANSITION
Every day, from Monday to Friday, Malhar Mazumdar, 13, a Class 9 student at the Mother’s International School in New Delhi, is ready to go to school at 9 am sharp. Except that he doesn’t step out of his room. He gets dressed in his school uniform, puts on his headphones, switches on the webcam and logs in to a digital classroom. It’s a restless, animated grid of faces—his classmates and a teacher. The classes are 40 minutes each and the school day ends at 1.50 pm, after which he spends a few more hours online to complete assignments. Malhar could make himself invisible in class by switching off the mic and camera, a privilege he never had in a physical classroom. Yet, he longs to return to regular classes. He misses his friends, the activities between classes and the focus a physical classroom provides. “At home, I get distracted often,” he says.
Welcome, Malhar Mazumdar, to the brave new world of online education in India, where necessity has become the mother of innovation. Education experts in India have long recommended replacing the blackboard and chalk with the screen and keyboard, but with little progress. COVID-19, however, has fast-tracked digital education in India. With social distancing becoming the new norm, physical proximity in a brick-and-mortar classroom suddenly poses a mortal danger. School managements and teachers, therefore, are scrambling to board the online bandwagon, and computers and connectivity are fast replacing desks, chairs and pencils in the education lexicon.
The coronavirus pandemic has created an unprecedented situation for education not just in India but across the world. Unesco estimates that more than 1.2 billion children in 186 countries find themselves outside the classroom, compromising learning outcomes and the academic calendar. In India, as elsewhere, it has precipitated the shift to online education. To avoid a complete breakdown of the learning process, schools, colleges, technical institutes, universities and even coaching centres have launched online classes to ensure continuity in curriculum and seamless resumption at the end of the lockdown.
And it isn’t just well-to-do private schools in urban centres that have moved online during the lockdown. The central government-run Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNV), for instance, are exploring the possibility of providing one pre-loaded tablet to all students. “We are building an application that can not only deliver content but also make interactive assessment,” says Bishwajit Kumar Singh, commissioner, JNV. The central government and many states are seeing the pandemic as an opportunity to expand the scope of online education exponentially. ‘The country, which is struggling with schools, teachers and lack of good education, should take advantage of
