Online education to stay here forever: KSHEC

Thiruvananthapuram: The roiling criticism from political opponents and the tragic death of a dalit girl, who had no access to classes broadcast on television channel, might have forced even the otherwise stubborn chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan to dress up online mode of education as a stop-gap arrangement to get across the crisis brought about by the pandemic.
But, the Kerala state higher education council (KSHEC) led by left intellectual and historian Rajan Gurukkal minced no words in stating how ineffectual the protests against online mode of education could be in the post Covid-19 scenario in the higher education sector.
A draft policy document prepared by the Kerala State Higher Education Council reads, “Thoughts about post Covid-19 higher education policy tries to capture the scope and depth of technology-aided education, which the council predicts would drive higher education sector in multiple ways in the coming days. The only question that remains pertinent would be how adept the higher education sector is in reinventing itself in the new techno-economic culture that the post Covid world is most likely to embrace”.
“Pandemic lockdown has helped the world exhilarate the reforms, especially the mode of teaching and evaluation. It appears that the contingent situation will predictably divide the higher education institutions into two types. One type covering humanities and social sciences taught informally through virtual mode involving less expense and meant for the general public. The other type covering medicine, pharmacy, nursing, pure sciences, engineering and architecture taught formally through the campus mode involving more expense,” the draft documents predicted.
Lockdown-induced closure of higher educational institutions will compel teachers and students to resort to online mode and there would be a call for a ‘de facto switching to the system of virtual learning’, said the draft document that has been sent to a consultative committee comprising of education experts for fine tuning.
“Hailed more effective, quick and less expensive, the online mode of teaching would allow all the open and other universities to run UG and PG programmes in online mode pushing an unprecedentedly huge number of teachers into a mode unfamiliar to them,” said the document.