Our grand designs may fail, but we mustn’t plan to fail.
Online education has been proved to be an effective learning medium only when it is ingrained in the learning ecosystem duly interlaced with formal learning routines rather than using it as a surgical strike to counterbalance the situation emanating out of an emergency situation. All developed nations have successfully remodeled their teaching-learning practices through consistent and planned interventions with concerted support from technology capacity-building exercises in terms of making budgetary provisions for resource mobilization and infrastructure augmentation.
By Prof. Debarshi Mukherjee
We erred once; we erred twice; let’s not make a hattrick out of how we are managing the teaching-learning practices under the gradually reducing pandemic fear. Let’s split our interim time frame pandemic period in three portions of first, second, third wave. During the first wave ie., from March 2020 to February 2021, we could see that the entire world was reeling under severe spread of Corona virus and the entire education system completely crumbled, sending a distress signal to every nook and corner of academia.
Depending on their availability technology infrastructure, universities across the globe switched to online teaching. The voice of dissent among the students and guardians soon started populating the media and other digital spaces.
Even for an ardent advocate of online teaching like me felt somewhere deep inside that something wasn’t right! The comedy of errors just began. A severe misunderstanding of the difference between emergency remote teaching and planned online learning followed by infrastructural bottleneck earned online learning a terribleand negative publicity which certainly it didn’t deserve. For a simpler analogy, will you shoot the car you are traveling by for reaching the airport late and missing the flight to your destination?
Why didn’t you start early? You may fire your driver, buy a new car or may choose to buy a new airline but never would it undo the mistake of not being able to prognosticate. Teachers across the institutions tried a hold a grip on technology-mediated learning practices that many of them had never heard of ever, slogged day and night only to learn how to communicate with their pupils, content, and engagement to be talked the least.
As institutions started retrenching the teachers across academic institutions, the teachers were facing a double whammy; if the first one was of pandemic fear, the second would obviously be the lack of skills to hold online classes. It’s a predicament to think that a teacher who was an asset to the institution just a couple of months ago suddenly handed over a pink slip or a generous management sends them on a long unpaid vacation only to return none knows when.
The plight of the graduating students was worse. The students who got awarded their degrees in 2020 and 2021 were stigmatized byetching their hearts as batch who escaped the hard grind of the physical examination. During my long interaction with the students and their families, it surfaced that financial constraints coupled with poor technical skills managed to foster a smear of distrust for the academic institutions and, as a result, came down heavily on online learning missing the big picture thereby.
Every time the decision to close at academic institutions was taken, it caused more damage than good. Instead, it proliferated the growth of ed-tech products only to widen the digital divide. In India, government schools offer the backbone of primary and secondary education, mostly located in rural areas with zero or minimum technology infrastructure. In many areas the schools reopened after complete closure of almost two years, forcing many students to drop out.
Another interesting decision was to conduct classes with 50% attendance,a cornerstone decision after the second wave, made the teachers to repeat the same content to the two different groups of students of the same class either in blended mode or on alternated days thereby causing quick a burnout of teachers – an important part of the society considered the most dispensable.Moreover, it doesn’t need any expert to deduce that the efficacy of teaching cannot be the same in both sessions, thereby depriving one in the process.
Daft & Lengel (2006) in their neo-classical media richness theory (MRT) advocated that as the quality of digital media improves, the students will enjoy higher learning gain. However, the theory proved itself so brilliantly when we saw the hue and cry during online sessions as unstable media, power disruptions, and low internet bandwidth crippled the learning experience indicating that we didn’t plan well.
Technology-mediated learning pedagogy is a planned intervention supported by adequate support infrastructure. In the absence of the same, the whole exercise becomes futile despite the best and willing efforts of the teachers & students alike. When we switched to emergency remote teaching, none of us could anticipate that we were looking at a gleam scenario that would sustain over a year or more but never planned for a long haul.