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WhatsApp, Google Hangouts, email — schools, colleges go digital to beat COVID-19 disruption

Schools and colleges across India have been shut down until at least 31 March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with several institutes calling off or postponing exams.

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New Delhi: Parents generally advise their children to stay away from phones, especially chat apps, during study time. But the closure of schools and colleges on account of the COVID-19 pandemic has turned conventional wisdom on its head, with teachers now relying on video calls, WhatsApp, e-learning platforms and email to keep students in step with the curriculum remotely.

In an advisory issued last week, the central government asked teachers to keep in touch with students over phone calls, emails and messages. 

The Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) has released a list of government-devised apps and learning platforms that students can make use of. These include DIKSHA, which allows access to school syllabus, and E-Pathshala, an NCERT innovation that hosts thousands of educational audios, videos and e-books.

The ministry has released separate lists for schools and colleges, with the institutions and teachers also deploying several other apps, including social media, to take learning digital.


Also Read: At current rate, India can see 30,000 COVID-19 deaths by May, no hospital bed by June: Data


Board students need more help

Schools and colleges across India have been shut down until at least 31 March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with several institutes calling off or postponing exams.

While some Class 10 and 12 board exams were carried out before the closures kicked in, the remaining have been indefinitely postponed.  

School teachers around India say their focus is currently centred on students taking their crucial board exams this year.

“We have asked our students to study online from resources like E-Pathshala because it has most of the content provided by NCERT. We are also keeping in touch with them through phone calls if they need to ask doubts,” said Anil Verma, a Delhi government school teacher. “Board students are the ones that need more help right now.”

Samridhi Gupta, who teaches mathematics to Class 12 in a Delhi private school, said, “I am constantly in touch with my students through WhatsApp, calls and even video calls, if someone needs help. I have also suggested that students and their parents look up the online learning platforms suggested by the government.”

Meanwhile, some schools said they are adopting a “wait and watch approach”. 

“For the time being, we are waiting to see how the situation goes… if the schools are closed beyond 31 March, then we will have to go for an alternative approach, because learning cannot suffer,” said Jose Kurian, regional director, DAV Public School, Western Region.

“Until then, our teachers are working on developing an online method of teaching. Once we have more clarity, we will resort to online teaching,” he added.

IITs, JNU etc shift online

Higher education institutions, both private and government, have been holding online classes, with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) using Google Hangouts and other video-conferencing apps to build digital classrooms.

Among private institutes, the Sonepat-based Ashoka University took classes online on 18 March.

“As Covid-19 has been declared a pandemic by WHO, Ashoka University is taking all precautions for the safety of our students, faculty and staff while ensuring that there is no disruption in their academic schedule,” Ali Imran, the vice-president for external engagement at Ashoka University, said in a press statement.

“Hence, we have moved all classes online, and the faculty is lecturing and making study material available virtually.”

A communication from Shiv Nadar University in Greater Noida, issued 13 March, said it would “all courses to online mode… (through) Blackboard (a teaching app), Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other means”. 

Central govt suggests e-learning platforms

The other apps and online platforms suggested by the government include the National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER), which has over 14,000 files, including videos, audios and e-books, and other study material in multiple languages.

The ministry has also suggested SWAYAM, an open-online-courses platform that caters to students at graduation and post-graduation levels.

SWAYAM PRABHA, another government initiative, allows students to access classes and lessons from teachers at IITs and the National Institutes of Technology through 32 channels telecast on DTH.

“At the time of a lockdown, something like a SWAYAM PRABHA will be most useful to students preparing for competitive exams because it has many online classes for engineering entrance preparations,” said a ministry official.

Meanwhile, faculty members from higher education institutions have been asked to use the work-from-home period to develop online content for teaching and evaluation.

Through a letter sent by the University Grants Commission on 21 March, teachers have also been asked to prepare lessons for the next academic session, write research papers and articles and prepare innovative question banks.


Also Read: India’s perfectly-timed lockdown & wartime efforts to find Covid-19 cure


Online platforms offer free content to help out

Several private online learning platforms like Coursera, Byju’s, upGrad and Vedantu have allowed free access to their content to help students affected by the shutdown. This seems to have helped, with the portals claiming an uptick of 50-60 per cent in activity and queries since then.

upGrad offers courses in higher education, dealing in subjects like big data analysis, deep learning, block chain technology management, and AI and machine learning. Its ‘live’ feature, which seeks to recreate a real classroom experience, was made free for institutions on 13 March.

According to the company, in the days since, the website has seen a 50 per cent volume jump over the preceding weeks.

“We have received intent from universities largely for undergraduate programmes. We have also received queries from executive education programme providers. The subjects range from liberal arts, general management to specialised fields like law, engineering, etc,” said Mayank Kumar, upGrad co-founder and managing director.

Coursera, which works in collaboration with colleges and universities across the globe, claims to have an estimated 50 lakh Indian learners using their platform.  

Raghav Gupta, the managing director for India and the AsiaPacific at Coursera, told ThePrint that they had to scale up their operations before they made their platform free, to be able to take the load of extra users. 

“Because we are an online platform, we were able to scale up quickly and our teams are still working very hard to ensure that learning takes place as per schedule,” he said.

He added that the platform had received a strong response since the courses for college students were made free. In India, over 500 campuses have reached out to Coursera, he said, adding that the courses on data science, business and technology were the most sought-after.

Srishti Shekhar, a 24-year old Delhi University student, said she had been relying on Coursera ever since her college shut down. Apart from the college curriculum, she added, the portal offered her access to courses from Ivy League colleges, which were earlier only accessible through paid subscriptions.

Byju’s, a popular online learning aid for school students, has made downloads and access to learning programmes free until the end of April.

Byju’s co-founder Divya Gokulnath said they had seen a 60 per cent increase in the number of new students using the app since free access was allowed. 

Queries from students and parents for Byju’s home-learning programmes, she added, had more than doubled in the same period.

Renu Bhargav, a homemaker with two school-going children, said she turned to Byju’s because she didn’t want the shutdown to affect their learning. “It helps with managing them since, with so much free time at hand, it is difficult to keep them engaged,” she added.

The visualisation of concepts proves to be a great learning aid, she said.

Vedantu, an online learning platform for classes 6-12, has also expanded its bandwidth after the shutdown in order to offer free access. Bidisha Das, a project manager at Vedantu, said they were “starting a free learning platform for students studying in classes 1-5”. 

“Since creating content for primary-grade classes needs more detailing, a team of 30 content designers is in the process of making it,” she added. 

Vedantu is planning to launch this platform by the end of March. They have also added tutorials for olympiads, so that participants do not fall behind on preparations. 

Das added that in the week since the platform made its content free to students, they had received over one lakh queries from schools and parents.

This report has been updated with additional information


Also Read: India’s COVID-19 fight needs a new social and economic behaviour. It’s easier said than done


 

 

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