Wednesday, April 15, 2020

Classes in Cloud: Online teaching becomes order of the day amid lockdown


With the lockdown in force, live online teaching has become the order of the day, report Peerzada Abrar and Sai Ishwar


For the past few weeks, Father Muller Medical College in Mangaluru, Karnataka, is conducting virtual surgery classes for its students. In New Delhi, a pre-school is teaching kids rhymes and conducting online classes daily for each toddler. Education group PES has replicated online the entire physical campus experience for its schools, engineering and medical colleges across Karnataka, with over 1,000 classes being held daily.

At a time when India is under a nationwide lockdown to fight the coronavirus pandemic, much of the country’s $180 billion education sector is going online to adapt to the new reality. Many educational institutions are creating virtual learning infrastructure and radically transforming the way education has been offered for millennia. And to help them realise that goal, they are reaching out to technology companies such as Impartus Innovations, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Coursera and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).


Last week, the government of India also launched a week-long “Bharat Padhe Online” campaign to crowdsource ideas for improving the online education ecosystem in the country. Within three days of launching the campaign, the Union human resource development ministry received more than 3,700 suggestions.

“The coronavirus situation is forcing everyone to adopt online learning,” says Raghav Gupta, managing director, India and APAC, at Coursera, one of the world’s largest online learning platforms. Gupta says India has over 37 million students enrolled in higher education across thousands of universities and colleges.

In view of the lockdown, Coursera is giving universities and colleges free access to its catalogue through its “Coursera for Campus” platform. The platform enables almost any university in the world to deliver high quality, job-relevant, on-demand learning to students, alumni, faculty and staff.

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