Educational institutions must be given autonomy to take decision locally to conduct physical classes. The continuous online education is leading to learning loss among students who have no or limited access to digital infrastructure. A centralised decision to keep schools shut for longer duration is not favourable for students. This will pose a serious challenge to streamline offline education in 2021. An independent body is needed to streamline school education. Decisions related to education must be taken by educationists and not administrative officials.
–
CB Sharma, professor of Education at the School of Education, IGNOU
Campus learning is core component
We have developed systems and processes to provide high-quality learning experience online if need be. Nonetheless, we are hoping that we will continue to onboard students on campus in a phase-wise manner. We have done serious thinking on this limitation and we believe that campus learning is going to be the core component of management education. Given that these are extraordinary circumstances, institutes need to regularly have dialogues with students. For instance, we learnt about the obvious fatigue caused by increased screen time so we decided to ship hard copies of reading materials to our students.
– Janat Shah, director, IIM Udaipur
Show must go on
Some of the institutions are ready for online teaching and learning for one more year if the situation created by the pandemic does not improve. During the pandemic, the institute had procured and created the additional infrastructure required for conducting online classes and the faculty and students have also got used to it. The faculties have tried and tested various new modes of assessment. Practicals are also being conducted through live classes and by recording videos and making them available for students. Placements of final year students are also being conducted online. We believe that the show must go on, come what may.
– Pradeep K Sinha, director & vice-chancellor, IIIT Naya Raipur
Uncertain to get back to normal teaching
2020 had been a year of learning and we learnt that our pedagogy system should be based on a blended learning method which was not followed so far. Through this sudden outbreak, we have learnt how to continue the system through online medium. As per the current scenario, it is uncertain that when we can get back to normal teaching. This year maximum colleges and universities are prepared to conduct classes, assessment and placements online. Education institutions are conducting practical classes and workshops of vocational courses through software to avoid disruption in studies. Colleges are in talks with the corporates to arrange online internships for the students for making them job-ready.
– Taranjit Singh, managing director, JIS Group