Teachers handling online classes in schools and colleges have turned sceptical about the utility of online teaching-learning exercise in the long-run, citing their inability to determine the outcome.
The problems faced by the teachers are on two fronts. Due to the shortcoming in digital connectivity, one section of students has not been able to keep pace with the online teaching-learning process from the very beginning. And, even for other students, there was no way to ascertain if they were following the teaching.
All that the students do was listen to the teaching. “Missing out on eye-contact with students dilutes the punch of the teaching experience,” a senior professor of Bharathidasan University said.
“The activities are currently confined to just teaching, which is not at all sufficient. Even above-average students need to be assigned with writing tasks without which the after-effects of the teaching is bound to diminish,” a teacher of one of the constituent colleges of the university said. If the online exercise is meant only for delivering the content, providing students with theoretical content in print form instead would easily suffice, he pointed out.
School teachers are also in a spot of bother since sustaining the attention of students on a virtual platform has not been a smooth sail from the very outset.
“At times, it is the same as in the classroom situation. Only a few students listen and interact. But, at least we used to take the inattentive students to task in classroom situations. We simply just cannot toe the take-it-or- leave-it approach,” a science teacher in a leading private school in the city explained, lamenting that despite the glaring constraints in the virtual teaching-learning platform, they would still be held accountable if the students fail to perform.