Sitamarhi is a district in the Mithila region of Bihar. Located well inland into the state, this is one of those places where you would think that Ed-Tech was viewed, even in 2019, as an added burden and time-consuming initiative.

In early April 2020, around 10 in the morning, the all too frequent notification bell of my What’s App beeped yet again. But it was not a colleague reaching out to check something while we were working from home, nor was it a general forward from any of the countless What’s App groups we are all invariably a part of. Rather it was a tutorial on how to use Zoom that was sent by the principal of a school in Sitamarhi for his teachers. He sent this on the group we share with them as an Ed Tech platform and it took all of us by surprise. 

We still were not prepared to see the principal of a school in a remote village in an interior district sending material to his teachers for conducting online classes. This came at a time when most schools, even in cities like Delhi, were slowly gearing up for the new reality of online education. But, smaller towns had not only woken up, rather they were taking nascent strides towards ensuring that learning continues in some ways. 

This is one of the many stories that have surfaced over the past months when teachers and students, like everyone else in the country, have found themselves unexpectedly locked up in their homes, away from their classrooms and schools, which they had been frequenting for years. What no one could anticipate was that the lockdown would become a daily reality, that a new academic year at schools will not begin with teachers welcoming the new batch inside classrooms, but over phones, and messages and sometimes even over the local temple’s or mosque’s loudspeakers. But, as the old adage goes, it is adversity that brings out the best in humanity and this time has been no different.

As an Ed-Tech programme, Gurushala is familiar with the woes of having to assure circumspect school managements and educators in rural and semi-urban schools to explore technology in education. While sometimes rigid academic calendars posed the problem, at other times, increasing demands on teachers’ schedules played spoilsport.  However, almost overnight, the lockdown has pushed our educators, irrespective of geography, facility, and class into uncharted territories of ensuring continued education outside school. Gurushala had recently conducted a survey of 629 teachers from Maharashtra to better understand their teaching scenarios. A few insights:

The last few months have seen efforts from institutions working with educators to step up to the new found needs of teachers by organizing virtual trainings and assisting them to face this new reality. Gurushala has, during this period, conducted multiple trainings, webinars and expert sessions reaching 19,000+ unique peak concurrent viewers, through virtual platforms, discussing ways and means of teaching from home to students, both, with and without access to technology. Right from working with teachers on assessing the learning environments at student’s homes, which included their access to technology, parental support, availability of space and resources for studies, to helping in creating learning modules that could be delivered through What’s App and SMSs to introducing assessments through Group Viva over phone calls and quizzes, it has been a journey of discovering the latent talent of bringing technology into education that teachers seem to have always possessed but used sparingly before this scenario.

Within a matter of days, we saw teachers progress from sending messages for home-based tasks to making simple teaching videos to them creating live action videos. While earlier, the general request from school managements was for training of their teachers on pedagogy and strategies for online teaching, within weeks the need is transitioning into technical sessions for at least select teachers to record their screens, create basic animation videos or presentations using images, text, music to engage a student into learning. But as the data indicates, there still are significant number of students who do not have access to technology and teachers are finding ways to reach them as well through observation-based exercises, tasks based on textbooks, project-based activities etc.

The larger question still remains: Is all this leading to ‘actual learning’? The jury is still out on that question as it is on the larger role of technology in education. One thing is for sure, students are engaging in asynchronous learning - something the school ‘system’ will need to find new ways to adapt to, even after the schools re-open. The focus today is on continuing some form of learning engagement. It is exactly what it should be: A response and not a well-thought out plan. Once students are back in the classrooms, it will be interesting to see what the students have retained, how teachers are going the tackle the question of syllabus, examinations, impact on overall learning for the grade etc.

Change is almost always induced by a situation. This time too it’s no different. These months, when education has been locked out of schools, have seen several initiatives which would earlier be termed as ‘before their time’ being implemented at some scale, for instance, of enabling children to take control of their own learning, of creating a co-teaching mechanism with both teacher and the parents taking collective ownership of the student’s learning, integrating subjects to teach in interdisciplinary formats, of giving primacy to building skills and conceptual understanding rather than to only teach for examination and marks. It was also very encouraging to note that the Alternative Academic Calendar released by NCERT also emphasized on creative learning instead of a rush to complete syllabus. The long-held view that, in keeping with times, the role of the teachers needs to change from being ‘the sage on the stage’ to the ‘guide by the side’ is finally finding some voice. 

While all of these are encouraging signs of education taking baby steps to reinvent itself, the real litmus test would be to sustain the positive changes once schools resume and teaching goes back to the classrooms. It is for all stakeholders of education: from school managements to teachers to parents to institutions working on the field to ensure that these practices of education which have patiently waited in the wings for long years are not sent back to the greenrooms once classes take center-stage. We need to, for the sake of our young children, ensure that the fresh breath of life that education has received is sustained and strengthened in the days to come.