Bhagavad-Gita - Self Awareness and Self Regulation

 

 EFFECT OF COVID  ON EDUCATION SYSTEM

The global pandemic and its impact has created a havoc in the normal living of the individual, no matter in what jobs they are, and in which places they are. The announcement of lockdown on March 2020, made way for abundance of reports on the daily influence of COVID-19 on trillions &millions of lives. It made every country to make sure their crucial responsibility and job was to curb this spreading of virus in their respective countries and its effects, especially upon the most endangered people of the society.

That pandemic which blew away the whole globe by its virus left no space untouched. They indeed have given us some memorable impact in the field of education which paved way for some new learning for both teaching fraternity and student fraternity, both sectors of individual became more tech savvy each day by conducting and attending soft technology, webinars, virtual classes, teleconferencing etc. The education system slowly accelerated the staff and the students towards blended learning, which was indeed very difficult &real task for many people living in India as many of them reside in areas without internet &govt run colleges were short on the technology and needed equipment’s to adopt themselves to the new mode of blended virtual learning.

When we have some thought on the negative side of the pandemic effect on education system we can visualise, respecting the decision of government many renowned Higher Education Institutions (HEI) like IIM, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Symbiosis International University, and Delhi University went on to put their efforts on usage of technology in assisting the e-learning, matchbook course and many other forms of online learning during COVID-19. But the sad part of the online learning is our HEI’s are average equipped with institution supportable technology like MOODLE, BLACK BOARD, ZOOM CLASSES, MICROSOFT TEAMS etc. but the higher authorities made it compulsory for the whole teaching fraternity to make use of online mode of teaching which is leading to unpredictable outcomes with many uncertainties attached with them. When this online mode is used for teaching or assessing the student’s behaviour through online exams it is helping no one but those companies which are offering the software.

 

I can say this by strongly supporting the quote “empty mind is devils’ workshop” I as a faculty working in one of the reputed colleges has faced lot of difficulties in conveying the concept and topics to my students. The mode teaching was easy, but the hard time faced was by the students who aren’t used to this online mode anytime till date of their academic history. This definitely had its own issues with students too mainly being network connectivity and bandwidth problem.

When asked the students they preferred more of offline learning as it builds a different rapo between the student and the faculty, the learning can be made more fun, easy and effective if it is offline. The students also opine that there is loss of interest after certain period of time. As the system screens emits the radio frequency waves which are proven to have adverse effect on the functioning of the human cells & nervous system. The wave from this radiofrequency is said to emit800-2000 Mhz which is deadly if used for long hours, chances of nerves weakening is also possible. Keeping students engrossed for a longer duration is also difficult for us as teaching faculty, psychologically it is said that an average human being listening capacity lasts upto 25% which is around 30-40mins approximately.

The studies have shown that online teaching has developed & addressed a lot of barriers in developed countries like Germany, Japan, & Luxembourg. But there are very minimal studies has been done on developing countries, because the online learning & teaching is adequately new concept for these developing countries, which indicates that barriers were relatively more than those developed countries.

This COVID-19 has brought the Indian education system into jeopardy situation. The provocation that was demanded by the government had to be received by the Educational Institutions to make the most use of allochronic method of seeking knowledge which is best suited for digital formats. Virtual teaching was real challenge for the teaching fraternity as it was completely different from traditional or offline teaching, it was in fact a great shift from conventional pedagogy in higher education to online mechanism, to teaching family.

Becoming tech savvy, learning new software’s, &adapting themselves to technology was the major challenge for the Indian teachers within short notice &period of time, this further led to conducting the assessments, tests & even exams in many education institutions online which further escalated the prevailing issue.

The students became less regular to attending the classes, on the other hand those who wanted to attend regularly fell shot of internet facility, and likewise the online coaching of students has grounded the self-efficacy of the student and effectiveness of the teachers. This so happened because India hasn’t achieved that level of technological infrastructure to provide sound delivery of online classes to students. Many of the studies & blogs has concentrated only on the problems faced by students due to online classes but there is very minimal articles that talk about the difficulties faced by faculty.