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”.

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