The COVID-19 pandemic started in the Chinese city of Wuhan in November 2019 and spread rapidly around the globe within a few days. Almost every area of human life was affected, including the education sector. With the number of active infection cases and death rates increasing, the global lockdown led to the lockdown of the conventional classroom educational system. The closure of schools, colleges, and universities created a distressing situation, with the only limited option remaining of switching to virtual classrooms.

To ensure the safety and security of Indian students in such a stressful situation, the Government of India announced online classes to avoid hampering the learning process for every educational administration. This unplanned shifting from traditional classroom education to the virtual model of learning affected the delivery methods of the courses for students as well as teachers.

Through this post, let us try to understand in detail how this happened.

How 2019’s pandemic impacted the educational machinery

With classrooms going virtual, students were introduced to online teaching with video lectures and computer-based online exams for the first time. Though the setup started as an experiment initially, online instructional methods proved to be efficient for learning during critical times.

With the help of synchronous technologies, students were allowed to participate in live interactions with their teachers through audio conferencing, video conferencing, web chats, etc. But while this was the positive side of the coin, on the other hand, virtual learning systems became a challenging issue because of the limitation of the nonverbal modes of communication and things like lack of internet accessibility. Additional hurdles that soon came up included scarcity of digital learning material, time management, and excessive screen time.

According to some studies performed on the assessment of students’ performance in online courses, it was found that it was worse in online courses as compared to classroom teaching. Needless to say, this was enough to concern both course persistence and end-of-course grades.

What the road ahead looks like

The pandemic of COVID-19 has amplified the focus on the online mode of learning in the education sector. It is anticipated that in the future, this shift will prove to be an ongoing trend in the educational process at different levels. In some courses, online education will lead to much better dispersal of detailed information, even under uncertain global situations.

Undoubtedly, this pandemic has proven our increasing reliance on digital technologies. It has been serving as the lifeline for many sectors, including education. During times of uncertainty, it played a vital role for every learner.

Key benefits online education promises

At this point, it can be said with confidence that students can gain a lot of information from around the globe while spending time in the digital space. That is why online education will stick around in some form or another for quite some time.

Some benefits we can expect online learning to continue to offer include:

• It provides an excellent opportunity for collaboration even at a far distance. Individual students can work together virtually as a team which is an effective learning practice.

• Technology has enabled the learning process for every learner at anytime and anywhere while seating in their comfort. This has increased flexibility, allowing students to learn without any barriers of time and location at their own pace, with the support of in-person engagement.

To sum up, we believe that every institute in our country, be it a school, college or university, should strive to be a model institute to demonstrate the successful implementation of online learning in the education system of our country. The emergence of study oriented platforms like virtual classrooms, scholarship portals, and the like, only further emphasize this need.