Amid COVID 19, the impact of the pandemic across the educational stakeholders has created a tectonic drift between students and pedagogical education which has resulted in a paradigm shift in India’s Education System. In this unprecedented time, the spotlight has shifted from in-school to online and remote learning which is the current default mode of education and we are facing a plethora of challenges with untrained faculties, a dearth of access to digital learning resources, seamless integration of technology, inefficient e-learning platforms and quality assurance mechanism to deliver quality education. Pedagogy has transformed during these challenging times and we are lacking an effective educational practice.
Lockdown has accelerated the digital shift however a multi-pronged strategy is critical to balance this crisis and construct a long term resilient unified learning system for the near future. In the present diversified Indian Education System, simple approaches for enhancing remote learning needs to be considered that will optimise a unique digital pedagogy that is critically conscious towards favouring the learner-student and humanization rather than the digitization.Pedagogy education had evolved since the Gurukul system transforming totally into technology-mediated education. This cross over towards online learning has shaped up from time to time with half-hearted attempts. Online education existed parallel to traditional education over a decade however a complete turnover from mainstream institution to remote learning has only been witnessed during the COVID 19 crisis. The success of online learning lies within efficiency and effectiveness however this wave has slowed down over some time.
Online learning needs to curate the useful resources, related documents, contextualized content making learning interesting and engaging. Classroom subject study needs to be improvised to a considerable extend where application and digital pedagogy needs to be evolved for better understanding of concepts. The program design needs to weave well-crafted teaching-learning approaches for diverse learner groups. Multiple pedagogy models need to be combined to create customised learning plans and methods aiding to efficiently deliver this specialised learning. Learning sciences, emerging sciences, artificial intelligence, psychology, and behavioural analytics should be at the forefront.Pedagogy with the adoption of digital technology solutions and enhancement of IT infrastructure has shifted from teacher-driven education to student-driven education. This digital shift is leading to a new era where education soon will be defined by the availability of best of teachers having subject knowledge and qualified expertise in digital teaching technologies from all over the globe for students. The physical infrastructure and location of academic institutes will hardly influence education and hence will directly affect the price of education in future. Besides democratization of technology comprising of internet connectivity, telecom infrastructure, affordability of online system, availability of laptop/desktop, software, educational tools, online assessment tools, etc. will become mandatory.
There is a different type of emancipation that eLearning offers. Wider access and flexibility are the strong nodes of asynchronous eLearning.The educational landscape post-COVID-19era would embark a combination of hybrid or blended learning with the collaboration of conventional education models with digital learning specialist structuring the newest form of the World Education.
