University Online Classes during COVID-19 -- Exclusionary and Insufficient -Santosh Verma and Tripti Kumari

-Vikalp.ind.in

The spread of COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdowns in India since the last week of March 2020 have put not just people’s health concerns at the forefront, but most of the economic and social sector activities are at halt. Amidst the virus spread and subsequent lockdowns, schools, colleges, universities (educational institutions) are closed without completing the academic calendar year. To deliberate on teaching and learning processes and research activities in these educational institutions particularly in higher studies during the lockdowns and provide contemplating measures, the University Grants Commission (UGC) constituted an Expert Committee in April 2020. One among the various concerns before the Committee was to evolve a method to complete the teaching and learning process in the current year/semester. The committee found that most of the universities and affiliated colleges had covered 60 to 70 percent teaching and learning processes for this year (UGC, 2020). The committee prescribed that the remaining teaching and learning processes (at least 25 percent) should be completed through online mode to comply with the norms of social distancing among the teachers, students and the staff in all the educational institutions (UGC, 2020. Taking a note of it, the Ministry of Human Resource and Development (MHRD) and the UGC issued various guidelines to ensure teaching and learning to impart online education among the students. The MHRD and the UGC emphasised that the educational institutes, particularly teachers, should use IT services and infrastructure for effective delivery of e-learning among students. The educational institutes were advised by the UGC that online education should be done using e-resources such as Google Classroom, Google Hangout, Cisco WebEx Meeting (video conferencing etc.), You Tube Streaming, Open Educational Resources (OERs), SWAYAM Platform and SWAYAMPRABHA (available on Doordarshan (Free dish) and Dish TV), WhatsApp Groups, Emails and other Social Media Tools, etc. (UGC, 2020).

This article tries to understand the status, effectiveness and inclusiveness of these online classes conducted by the universities fulfilling the guidelines of the UGC with the perspective of university students. The students were surveyed using google questionnaire to collect information regarding the online classes. The students who took part in the survey belonged to both central and state universities where online classes were being run by the university faculties. A total of 852 students took part in the survey. Half of the students who took part in the survey belonged to central universities such as Delhi University (41.4 percent) and Allahabad University (9.4 percent and other half belong to state universities like Ambedkar University Delhi (3.5 percent), Himachal University (5.3 percent), Bhimrao Ambedkar Bihar University, Muzaffarpur, Bihar (24.6 percent), Lalit Narayan Mithila University, Darbhanga, Bihar (7.6 percent), and Jammu University, Jammu (8.2 percent).

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