Being constantly online and dwelling on the digital world is nothing new to the Generation Z. The fact is that the Generation Z prompted online educators to start utilizing the opportunity to bring and set up e-learning facilities long before the emergence of Covid 19 pandemic. These facilities could be accessed flexibly from any place and any time. While the trend was there, the sudden Covid outbreak essentially made the entire teaching-learning scenario online. This poses several pertinent challenges in front of us. On one hand, Covid made social distancing and self-confinement an absolute necessity, and as a result there has been a huge growth and new adoption of technologies in the field of education. On the other hand, several families have now come under new stressors in terms of including the internet in their daily list of basic amenities.
Online education, in its simplest term, is a procedure of gaining skills and knowledge through electronic devices like computers, mobiles, and laptops using the internet. Generally, it acts in two modes: e-learning and m-learning. The Cambridge Dictionary defines e-learning as "learning done by studying at home using computers and courses provided on the internet". m-learning is gaining knowledge through any device which is handheld and portable, such as mobile phones and tablets. With the rising number of internet users, the education sector is under continuous pressure to reduce costs by maintaining the existing infrastructure while improving the educational outcomes of the students. To ensure this, several countries have started shifting to online based education fully or in blended mode. In India, National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 recognizes the need of the 21st century and underlines the importance of technology in education. New Education Policy 2020 recommends key initiatives in school and higher education to strengthen India's online education ecosystem. The policy highlights on up-gradation of online tools and platforms like DIKSHA and SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds) with new insight into training content, in-class resources, assessment aids, profiles, etc. that will allow seamless interaction between students and teachers.
The sudden Covid 19 outbreak have created public health crisis and simultaneously has affected the education sector by shifting the traditional classroom infrastructure to support online learning as well. What was in pen and paper till then, had to confront reality without a shred of preparation. While some people were trying their level best to adapt to this new model, several people did not know what to do and how to do when it comes to online education; some did not want to accept the new normal too. Students and teachers struggled to cope with the change with sudden and limited resources.
Considering the Indian scenario, with the rising internet users in India, way before the outbreak of Covid 19, tools of online education started finding their relevance. The four major tools of online education are audio-video content, social networks, varied content (comprising images, texts, animations, etc.), and in-depth tracking methods. In India, in the year 2009, The National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology was launched and it was envisioned to bring out the potential of ICT in the teaching-learning process (India Science, Technology & Innovation, 2018). It is for the benefit of all learners in Higher Education Institutions who can access those at any time anywhere mode. The mission has three major components:
1. Content Generation
2. Providing Connectivity to Higher Education Institutions
3. Research and Development of low-cost access device
The focus of the mission is to include appropriate tutoring for e-learning, to provide a facility for performing experiments through virtual labs, taking online tests and certificates, and many more. (India Science, Technology & Innovation,2018). e-PG Pathshala is an initiative of the Ministry of Human Resources and Development (MHRD) under its National Mission on Education through ICT (NME-ICT) and executed by the University Grants Commission (UGC). Other than this, numerous open-access sites, virtual labs, and online courses have come up in the scenario of blended learning.
Online education has a lot of benefits. It gives a scope for the betterment of student-teacher relationship, while being flexible, and providing high-quality programmes by remaining cheaper, and many more. While schools, colleges, and universities located in metro cities or big towns have long been using both synchronous and asynchronous online teaching; schools/colleges located in the districts or villages or remote areas were not in the same position. When the pandemic closed districts, administrators were left scrambling to find software and online tools to adequately educate students. The teachers were in the same boat struggling to find the platform and software to provide the students with the best way to teach.
While technology is blurring the concept of the traditional chalk and talk approach and opening up new avenues for digital natives in India, issues like the digital divide concern us the most. The digital divide is a discrimination of access to technology in society, or uneven distribution in access to, use of, or impact of information technology. Most notably, the term access is not clearly defined anywhere. There is a huge difference between a theoretical access and effective access. Theoretical Access is mainly when a person has physical access to technologies like access to computer networks or the internet at home. Effective access refers to the users ability, desire, and motivation to use technology and to be able to achieve benefit from it. Despite having internet in the home the user may even struggle to open the computer browser due to his lack of understanding of the technology. Thus, the main difference lies between the access to computers and access to meaningful, useful, and relevant content for the user. In India, digital disparities are seen among individuals in the same educational institutes, and the reason is not only restricted within the geographical areas but largely based on economic factors, gender gap, electricity issues, and many more.
Practical-based subjects were hampered the most. While mobile telephony has a reach in remote parts of our country; it is not always convenient to carry out lengthy assignments or particular homework which requires huge amount of data. Students complained about being barely able to attend online classes due to a lack of mobile phones or low signal in their home location. Access to physical libraries had stopped too, stopping student fromn referring books of their choice. The current scenario thus raises a pertinent question whether we are ready with the requisite infrastructure needed to conduct online education and if the students belong to a section of society well-equipped to avail the fruit of online education.
