Govt schools face hassles in distributing video lessons

Coimbatore: Government and aided schools are facing a lot of difficulties in distributing video lessons to Class XII students along with textbooks. The problems they face range from lack of hi-tech labs to slow network connection. The distribution of video lessons and textbooks commenced on Wednesday.
The video lessons have to be download from an online portal to a pen drive and then copied to the students’ laptops.
Teachers said they were facing problems right from downloading the material, as the network in some schools was slow. “Also, the file size is big. For a group, the material for a subject is around 5GB. For five subjects, the files come around 25GB to 30GB. It takes quite some time to copy the files to a student’s laptop,” said a government school computer teacher in the city.
Another teacher from an aided school said in some cases the problem was with the students’ laptops. “Generally, computer science students take care of laptops well. But other group students don’t. They come without laptops. When we ask them, they say their laptops are under repair or they have lost them. How can we give them the video lessons?”
Instead of laptops, a teacher said, some students were bringing pen drives, which didn’t have enough space to copy 30GB of files.
While schools have been asked to distribute the books and e-materials to 20 students per hour, teachers said they were able to provide the same to only 20 students a day, because of the problems they were facing.
Teachers said the situation would have been different had they been informed well in advance about the e-materials and provided at least a week’s time to download the videos. But they were asked to download the videos only on Wednesday and start distributing them the same day. They said the distribution of textbooks and video lessons for Class XII students could have been scheduled a week after distributing the same for Class X students.
District school education officials were not available for any comments.
On Wednesday, books and video lessons were distributed at 150 higher secondary schools and 106 high schools in the district.