Digitisation - Way Ahead
in the Pandemic Environment
The
global COVID catastrophe has impacted every sphere of life - healthcare,
industries, transport, education! In India, schools and universities
were called off sometime in the second week of March this year. Since
then, the education system has suffered and the learning process is
profoundly affected.
Richa
Choudhary, a young professional in NITI Aayog says, “As the days pass by
with no immediate solution to stop the outbreak of Covid-19, school and
university closures will have an adverse impact on the continuity of
learning for more than 285 million young learners in India”.![](images/Pg8.jpg)
A solution
to this can be the digitisation of learning material and modification in
the contemporary pedagogy of teaching. While going digital and
conducting online classes seems a relatively easy affair for private
schools, it becomes a huge problem for government and village schools.
Therefore, the thought of taking digitisation to every part of the
country demands finding solutions for issues such as no internet
accessibility, low bandwidth, lack of required devices to attend the
classes and the mentality of parents & students in not taking the idea
of learning on a digital platform seriously.
Development
Alternatives, by understanding the need of the hour has taken
initiatives to strengthen the process of learning for every student. The
organisation has been using WhatsApp as a learning platform to give
students training on skill development and livelihood awareness. This
strategy has helped students to learn even in areas with low bandwidth
and network. The process of sharing information has been divided into
the following steps:
-
The first
step is to share information.
-
The second
step is to share the activity and wait for the student´s response.
-
The third
step involves taking their queries under “Sawaal Shukrawaar” which is a
specific day that is dedicated to solving queries and sharing feedback.
Through pre
and post-assessment forms, a stark difference has been observed in the
learning perspective of students. Development Alternatives is also
working on developing and digitising learning materials to conduct
online sessions under different projects. Apart from digitisation, the
priority is to strengthen the monitoring process to ensure quality of
training sessions. Therefore partnering with other platforms and
organisations is one of the important strategies. As the problem is
common to all of us, the solution calls for common endeavours which
should be sensitive to basic problems of the students even to those
belonging to the remote areas of the country. In this way, we can make
digitalisation a tool that will be accessible to all for learning.
■
Pooja Jha
pjha@devalt.org
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