At the beginning of year 2020, a global pandemic (Covid-19) outbreak became a global health incident, which promoted the progress of online education at the same time. This article aim to address the challenges faced by teachers and students in online education.
Like in many countries, in fight against (Covid-19), educational institutes have closed and learning is taking place online. The amount of content, online assignments and much of it without perfect instructions are just some of the
problems that youth is facing in new learning environment.
Our government did good efforts to promote online education through video lessons and TV classrooms for primary and secondary students. The primary and secondary schools also started taking online classes through various digital platforms. All of these are good efforts, but – do all the student means to attend online classes and what can we say about the actual quality of education in online learning environment? These are some different prospective and views on how to make it work.
The truth is, for many students, online learning is like a formality. Some teacher shares only material to students without teaching it. Some students don’t even have equipment to attend online classes, some don’t have internet facilities in rural areas and some students don’t even have electronic devices. For uninterrupted online classes high-speed internet connection is must. In many backward areas of Pakistan especially in Balochistan and rural Sindh, residents are deprived of the facility of internet connection.
Online learning is new, unknown and different thing for students, teachers and parents. It’s especially difficult for lower grade students, because parents of these young students more often have to spend most of their time, helping their children, working with them on homework and explaining the process. This is true of parents who work for home but what about those students whose parents goes to work and whose parents don’t have IT skills? How can these parents help their children?
In this new picture, perhaps the biggest burden is put on teachers. They are in a situation where new criteria and guidelines are not sufficient to deal with this situation effectively. Teachers also need serious preparation to use online platforms. They are not all ready for this for the new environment of teaching. We are all aware that if we want to improve the quality of education, we need to better use technologies, but we also need to provide appropriate training and support to teachers to support the quality of instruction.
It is cleared that the pandemic affects everyone and everyone need to come together so that we can overcome the pandemic. However , we must not allow the widespread disease to compromise the quality of learning. That’s why our Ministry of education and science should provide us a systemic solution by developing a well-designed platform with a specific given curriculum and a fair and effective way of assessment, and needy families should be supported so that they can avail the equipment to their children to support them learn online.