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Covid-19 and Digital Education Trend: Opportunities & Challenges- by Rumish

The burden of switching to online education falls mostly on teachers. They get overburdened by having to teach their own kids and the house chores. Even parents are also overburdened that they actually play a greater role as a teacher along with their works.

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ue to the unceasing pandemic situation, one of the worst affected areas is not just the economy but also our education system. However, if we delve deeply into this phenomenon, we find that Covid-19 has substantiated the importance of “Digital Education” with an increasing trend of home-schooling and online tutoring. Thus, the Covid-19 has brought both opportunities as well as certain surmountable challenges.

Covid-19 and Digital Education Trend: Opportunities & Challenges- by RumishWhen we talk about education or learning we are actually talking about the relationship between students and teacher. Teaching is not about information; it’s more about having an honest intellectual relationship with your students that probably is lost somewhere in such online learning environments.

The burden of switching to Digital Education falls mostly on teachers. They get overburdened as they have to teach their own children and the house chores. Preparing lesson plans, recording videos are also very sophisticated if you are at home you hardly get time to yourself. Likewise, parents are also overburdened so much so that they are actually playing greater role of a teacher along with their work.

As a teacher, I would share that the main problem comes from some uneducated or the less-cultured parents. Since they can access us directly with our numbers available, they send across messages full of queries, start pouring in from early morning till late evening. Some insist that classes must be as per their availability, while others want less numbers of classes. On an average, I have to stay 12 hours and then in between there are house chores which cannot be skipped, and if we do not attend them regularly, they start complaining. Thus, the challenge of online teaching/tutoring becomes insurmountable challenge.

Covid-19 and Digital Education Trend: Opportunities & Challenges- by RumishThe challenges do not end here. The fundamentals of physical classroom education do not meet the criteria of satisfaction. Another stress is the poor internet connectivity most of the time, call drops, non-serious attitude of children and the list is endless. Thus, there is no way to find out if the student has understood a lesson or whatever was taught was understood by the students in desired manner, and whether they will not be required to be taught the same topics again. These are some common worries of all the school teachers in the online education system.

The main challenge of this situation is the education of girls living in rural and remote areas. They are actually missing out on education because they cannot access online and distance learning. Girls are first to be pulled out of school, put to work, care for younger siblings, and undergo an early age marriage when families face economic hardships. As a result, they do not have time for school work and may not return once school reopens. Digital Education is proving an inflexible issue in schools rather than for the university students.

 

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One Comment

  1. Well written! The entire world now stress the need to change today’s learning methods, but quite little was done until the pandemic. Schools have drastically changed more in a few months than they did for several years. School administration is introducing online classes, home-schooling, distance learning, adaptive learning, etc. Leveraging technological disruption in education to make a difference in the under-served population is the pressing need of the time.

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