Panaji: The department of education has stated that many of the teachers out of the 8,335 teachers recently trained to teach and monitor learning outcomes through online platforms, have already started online teaching process for the students from class IX to class XII.

It was also informed that other such trained teachers would commence online teaching for the students of the remaining classes, after their headmasters/ principals discuss the teaching modalities with them, during meetings to be held soon.

The first two phases of the online training programme for primary, secondary and higher secondary school teachers have been completed, with total of 8,335 teachers undergoing training. The third and the last phase of the training programme will train the remaining teachers. In all, 10,000 teachers are proposed to be trained by the department of education.

A highly placed official of the education department informed ‘The Navhind Times’ that earlier, the online teaching was happening through video calls by way of Zoom, Google Meet, etc and cost money. “However, now the teachers have been trained to handle various online teaching tools, which would be free of cost,” the official added.

Speaking further, the official said that the teachers, who have already started teaching secondary and higher secondary students are using same syllabus in the form of e-content like short videos, explanation videos, some Portable Document Formats (PDFs), question banks, tests and so on.

It was also informed that some of the e-content is prepared by the teachers themselves based on the syllabus, or even borrowed from open sources like National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT).  Furthermore, the DoE maintained that teachers would face real challenges wherever there is no connectivity. “However, it doesn’t mean that lack of connectivity is the main problem,” the official stated, adding that alternate modes of connectivity such as television channels or Swayam Prabha could be used in such a situation.

Swayam Prabha is a group of 32 DTH channels devoted to telecasting of high-quality educational programmes on 24×7 bases using the GSAT-15 satellite.

It is learnt that the final phase of the training for online teaching would begin during the first week of June.

The teachers presently involved in the conduct of the ongoing SSC examination, will be trained in this phase.