The New Education

The New Education

Sometimes you win,

Sometimes you learn…

The global pandemic has taken a massive hit on all the sectors of the economy. While it has been slightly easier for MNCs and professionals to adopt work from home as the new normal and continue business as usual, the times have been challenging for the education system around the world. With disruptions everywhere, several concerned scholars, citizens, politicians, and bureaucrats support the need for reimagining and reinventing the education system.

UNESCO has estimated that around 1.26 billion children or 70 percent of children around the world have had their education interrupted because of the pandemic and a large number of these children are from what UNESCO calls the “low tech or no tech” phase, with India contributing 300 million of the 1.26 billion children

Hence the need to adopt a smart classroom system by schools is transforming the traditional education system. The sudden switch is not only limited to private schools but even a number of government schools have started running smart classes. Though the crisis is devastating, it is making our schools and even colleges, technologically advanced. No doubt, students and teachers have had to make bigger adjustments as learning has always been in classrooms. Moreover, many of them are not well equipped with technology tools to avail of remote learning.

The Union HRD Ministry had launched a TV channel for students to take online courses and at present, 15 million students are enrolled in it. It also launched a subsidiary direct-to-home channel in 2019, called Swayam Prabha. The number of viewers has been doubled compared to its parent channel. It is believed that the reason India is not able to transition swiftly from face-to-face education to remote learning is the lack of institutional preparedness and accessibility by students to the new mode of delivering classes. Therefore, there is a “need to guide institutions, faculty, and students to repurpose e-content in a manner that fits into the curricula for achieving the desired learning objectives of that particular course”.

The impact of COVID-19 will remain for years, if not longer. The new normal will be that significantly larger numbers of students will attend classes from home. While this trend was already on the uptick, it will receive a massive impetus because of COVID-19. The great thing is that India is well prepared to teach the lakhs of students at home. The country has one of the world’s most extensive 4G networks on the planet. In virtually every part of the country, there is 4G connectivity. Even more impressive is the fact that data is very affordable. Over such robust networks, classes can be streamed with ease. Students who learn in virtual classrooms will find that their learning experience is as good as or maybe even better than that of students who sit in classes. The hugely transformative power of virtual classrooms is their ability to bring an endless number of courses to students’ doorsteps.

Changing in accordance with the current situation, we, at APG Learning, previously known as SIILC have made a stride ahead with carefully changing ourselves concentrating more on virtual and online courses, as we try to inspire the network by engaging everybody to easily access to quality training. Do look at their webinars/online courses here: 

https://www.linkedin.com/company/apg-learning