Five challenges educational institutions need to address before offering online courses

COVID-19 has brought the world’s economy to its knees, with people facing the impact across all age groups. It has brought with it new challenges and is giving rise to newer ones with each passing day. The education sector has managed to sustain itself, thanks to a quick adaptation of technology, and the emerging trend of online courses and classes. With most American universities opting for full-time online programs, a similar pattern is also being observed in the Indian educational domain. This shift from physical to online courses has brought into light challenges that educational institutions didn’t know existed and that need to be addressed before they start offering online courses to thousands of students. Let’s have a look at five of the biggest challenges:

Time-consumption in developing content

In a pre-COVID setting, a teacher would come to the class and begin their teaching and let the course topic progress in an organic manner. With things having moved completely online now, teachers need to spend hours developing presentations and video recordings, which consume way more time than the traditional setup. Not to mention, these come with their own technological challenges as well for example, fixing recorded videos is not something we can expect all the teachers to be trained in. This has certainly put a strain on the faculty of many institutions to work more hours in spite of schools and colleges being shut. The hours going up, and the salary getting halved is a challenge that wasn’t foreseen.

Technological infrastructure and its related problems

One cannot overlook the fact that India’s Tier 2/3 cities’ schools and colleges form a big chunk of the student population in the country. These institutions do not have the latest technology infrastructure in place to accommodate for bandwidths to handle thousands of students being taught online. Those teachers who are conducting classes from home, once again might not have the best connectivity, or might not have the required skill set to use the latest collaboration tools from Microsoft or Google for example. This learning curve, and the infrastructure setup cost, is another big challenge that needs to be addressed before offering an online course.

Lack of motivation in students

One of the most common problems in online learning modules is that students become more of passive observers than active participants. This is knowledge they are gaining but not essentially registering, to apply practically in real-world situations. Getting the students to engage, is a challenge that will need to be addressed by educational institutions. The students today have short attention spans and being on a laptop or a tablet only offers them more temptation to wander off to social media and other applications if the online course material becomes monotonous. To tackle this, these institutions need to make sure that the content in these online courses is interactive and current, so that the students are not only engaged in the material but can also see the value of the content.

Managing collaboration online

Collaboration is a key soft skill that a student would acquire during their time at school or college. This can be achieved through various team activities that are quite common and easy to do in a physical classroom setting, where the teacher can monitor it in real-time, and give constructive feedback at every stage dynamically. Online courses can have that collaborative element, but it’s not a one size fits all substitute, and might not work for everyone. The teacher will need to make sure to develop collaborative activities in a way that can be completed online while still helping students building this skill, for example by formulating problem-solving activities, or simple feedback sessions.

The sense of isolation in students

Having spent over four months in a lockdown situation, one cannot help but wonder that the students will be feeling lonely following these classes from their homes. A course that has always been done in-class, with classmates and colleagues, the online mode will certainly pinch after a while leading to demotivating a student. It can undermine all the hard work and effort the faculty has put into developing that course, and will not be fruitful for the students. Educational institutions will need to resolve this by simple things such as virtual interactive activities, or maybe just by having everyone’s cameras on, so everyone can see everyone else.

One might think that these challenges are not easy to overcome, but looking at the current trend, educational institutions have been a step ahead and have resolved quite a few of these challenges already. The educational domain is keeping up with the evolving pace of this space, which is ensuring that our future generations are skilled and pandemic-proof.

By Eesha Bagga, Director - Alliance and Partnership, Mindler