How Corona Virus Is Making Online Education Go Viral In India

With more than ninety percent of schools and colleges inclining towards some or the other form of online teaching methods post lockdown. A new direction, form of revolution has taken place in online education industry.

Be it zoom meetings, google classrooms, webinars, youtube, teachers are now learning new methods as to impart education to their students. Even the teachers who outright dismissed this idea and claimed physical education and how students and teachers interact can never be replaced by online education are now shifiting towards those methods during pandemic. There have been many videos and trolls going viral on social media about this.

Apart from recommending online classes to students, teachers in various schools have been advised to record daily lessons and send them across to students via groups on Whatsapp and other channels of communication. Even as teachers prepare lessons and record lectures, they are usinng all mediums from Whiteboards to powerpoint presentations and PDF, to ensure students stay attentive in the comfort of their homes too.

The CBSE board has also stepped up to the Plat and made all NCERT course books for classes 1 to 12 available for free. Apart from supporting online education, school boards have also decided to promote all students to the next class. In line with the advisory issued by the HRD ministry, CBSE has asked all its affiliated schools to promote all students of classes 1-8. Students of classes 9 and 11 will be promoted on the grounds of internal assestments. Similarly, UP Board has also decided to promote all students of classes 1-9 and 11 without conducting exams.

While many colleges accross India as well have either cancelled exams, or are promoting based on Online exams and internal assestments. Though few colleges, one of them AKTU are still planning to conduct physical exams after the lockdown is lifted and life gets back to normal.

Though with pandemic lurking, colleges and schools being shutdown this seems the only options for now, and it appears things will go back to normal post pandemic. However things are far from going normal, entire world has been impacted by this pandemic, in different ways be it

• Economically

• Psychologically

• Technology and Innovation   

While organisations all over the globe are coerced to work from home, Corporates have taken the initiative to run Virtual and Remote Internships for students, This has led to a rapid change in how innovation is taking place in this field, more number of Corporates and Startups are now leading innovation as to ease the online interaction and overcome the difficulties faced by students and corporates.

Government also has taken many steps to promote and ease this shift towards digitalisation. Narendra Modi's steps towards digital india is a big contributing factor to it. There have been many hackathons and other competitions running across India, so as to encourage students in various fields to come up and contribute to this shift through their innovation. 

Though there are many driving factors as to what might be the future of Online education, one such field that can completely change the face of how we learn and interact in future is Virtual and Augmented reality, as of now it is in its seeding phase, but people in capitalism and technology have high hopes from it, especially when tech giants like Facebook and Google are involved. Imagination helps understand complex problems in simple way, but what if you can see the imagination of others, that is exactly what this field has to offer.

As of now with so many variables in action its hard to predict the exact future, however if there is anything thats certain is that, we are going to see a balanced blend of physical and online education. 2020 has been filled with numerous tragedies and calamities, hope its brings a few postive changes, as the saying goes the sun does shines after a storm, and India has literally been through a devastating cyclone.