As we enter into a different kind of aworld order after the outbreak of Covid-19, health, economy and every sectorincluding education need to brace up for this emerging challenge. The immediatefallout on education has been that as of now most of the educationalinstitutions like schools, colleges and universities world over stand closedwhich is unprecedented in scale. What does this mean, it means millions ofstudents across the world have stopped going to schools for their day to dayactivities at their respective institutions. Thousands of scholars will not beable to attend their respective research institutions globally. Does that meaneducation will stop or do we need to resort to alternative educational models?There is another question, do we really need to care about education when thelife and death kind of a situation has arisen. These and many other questionsarise in times of doom and gloom. This reminds me of a quote by Malcolm X,”Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those whoprepare it for today.”
In this scenario which of course is verydifficult to come to terms, is pretty tough. My humble way of looking into thisis that probably education cannot and should not stop-come what may. Becauseultimately we need to come to terms with the world which is uncertain and it isprobably education which will help us navigate this uncertain territory.
Currently if we look into the world over-itis evident that the advocates of virtual education are more proactive and arevirtually shooting from the foot and these people believe that virtualeducation is the only remedy, which now seems unavoidable if not completelypracticable.
Here I am reminded of an IDEA conferenceorganized by the Indian Distance Education Association in collaboration withthe Directorate of Distance Education, University of Kashmir, which was thenheaded and guided by Prof. (Dr.) Shafeeqa Parveen, in November 2009, in which Iwas a participating member, a Professor from somewhere South of India,unfortunately of whom I do not remember name, argued during his presentationapart from many things that “tomorrow belongs to Distance Education” and ofcourse he was trying to build a case for distance education and many among theaudiences including me thought otherwise and argued with the presenter on thiskind of argument.
Today, after more than a decade when I lookback and see the emerging world scenario and the challenges ahead to the formaleducation, I believe he had a point then.
At the same time, we need to understand thefact that going virtual has its own set of issues and problems and probablywith this baggage of problems we can say that the virtual education can act asthe complementary system of education rather than an alternative model ofeducation.
As the current pandemic has thrown open lotof challenges and these challenges are equally true with regard to education, Ibelieve as teachers as well as administrators we need to take on this challengehead on. Having said this as a teacher we are being told to shift to the onlinemedium and reach out to our students. Apparently it seems a good idea, but there seems to besome inbuilt challenges. Can this transition be possible within days especiallyin this part of the world wherein the work in the area of online education isat nascent stage.
When it comes to e-resources, I believethere are enough of them available on different digital platforms and as ateacher it is our moral as well as professional responsibility to filter theseresources and make them available to a particular group of students as pertheir needs.
What educational administrators could havedone or could do in future is to prepare a data base of the student’s rightfrom the pre primary to the university level and to make that available totheir respective teachers on some digital platform.
This transition from face to face educationto the virtual education should not be taken as an alternative but ascomplementary to each other and it needs investment, time, and willingness onpart of all stakeholders more importantly teachers at all levels of education.Biggest of all challenges vis-à-vis education is yes we can put up onlineresources for learning but do we have a robust mechanism of evaluation systemthrough online medium. Yes I believe lot of objective tests are done especiallyfor competitive exams but we need to move beyond the objective tests as theyhave very limited scope and can be only put in use on limited occasions.
Among all the stakeholders, we perhaps haveone important task to reorient our youth especially our students to help themunderstand that internet is not only about social networking sites and games,let them understand it is beyond that and they too need to come in terms withthis hard fact.
Adding to all aforementioned challenges isthe issue of reaching out to millions of those students who do not have theprivilege of having the smart phones, which then obviously puts these studentsat a disadvantageous position, we need to take care of thisfact too and try our best to reach out to these students as well.
In conclusion, apart from above mentionedchallenges we have issues like from no internet to low internet which has addedto our complications of this transition from face to face formal system ofeducation to an online education which I believe is completely within thepurview of the government and authorities have a moral responsibility of fixingthis issue so that the transition could be possible and smooth enough.
Author is Assistant Professor (Education), Higher Education Department, Government of Jammu and Kashmir, posted at Government Degree College Ganderbal, Kashmir. Views are personal.