While online education is here to stay, it is not in isolation. Therefore, it is important to adapt things from offline to online, says SUMEET MEHTA
When we talk about education in the post COVID world it is imperative one understands how each one of us got here. The education timeline can be broken down into pre-lockdown, during lockdown and post-lockdown period.
In the pre-lockdown era, we were living in a world where each one of us believed that education only existed in the physical world where children went to a physical school, be taught by a teacher who is present in the classroom and that was the de facto form of learning for years for almost all students and schools in India. Then there is supplementary education, which is tuitions and test preparations that primarily took place in coaching centers and tuition classes and a bit of it took place digitally.
However, did we imagine such a drastic change where all of us are locked into our houses and the physical form of education is replaced by online learning suddenly? It was so quick that most of us did not even get time to process this change that was taking place.
Effective online learning can contribute to good screen time and here are some parameters that can help any parent or school achieve that. First, online learning should be age-appropriate, which means that when you teach someone between the age of three to five years, you cannot have an long online session because children that small have very little attention span. Engaging the child through an activity and play will definitely improve learning and that too in a much shorter span of time and limited screen time.
Second, online learning has to be multi-modal, where children are engaged through slide decks, work sheets, demonstrations and activities. The online session should be created in a way that allows children to pause or replay a lecture according to their level of understanding. Simply expecting children, of any age, to group stare at a monotonous online session is not going to help the learner and will render the exercise futile.
Therefore online learning has to be delivered in a way that it contributes to good screen time instead of becoming a disconnected method of teaching that doesn't help the child and leads to poor learning.
Online learning is here to stay but not in isolation. When schools reopen they will have to take care of two things, one being safety and hygiene at utmost priority and second ensuring seamless hybrid online-offline learning model because all children will not be in school on all days. This hybrid method of learning will in turn provide a good and higher quality of education. Government intervention through a policy that supports creating the right kind of online learning will definitely abate the current worries of parents and also help in providing the right kind of learning to our children.
Hopefully, it works out for everyone since we can adopt good things out of offline learning and adapt to the new things being taught by online learning. It therefore makes sense to work towards creating online learning more robust and mindful so that it adds to good screen time and not poor screen time.