Daily Times

We are a generation of a typical classroom both as a teacher and as a student. This is how we have experienced academia. In the face-to-face classes, we, both teachers and students, get energy from one another and try to develop that synergy in class through interactive sessions so that everyone becomes a part of a learning process. Creating that space for intellectual growth in class is, though, more dependent upon how a teacher grabs the attention of students through the way he/she introduces the subject and how he/she keeps the class environment conducive for learning yet I must say it’s a mutual effort and both teachers and students are dependent upon one another in giving birth to spaces conducive to learning.

However, Covid-19, in its wake this year, like in every other sphere of life, greatly affected academic spaces across Pakistan. In the wake of lockdown imposed by the government in March, all academic institutes were closed. Because of no clear direction about their reopening during the lockdown, some institutes, without any delay, experimented with online classes and some waited for the resumption of normal classes until finally they also had to go for online teaching. The previous semester was no doubt a test for all in academia for which nobody had been trained before properly. Though, in some universities, efforts were made to educate both teachers and students on how to go along with an online system of education via short videos and emails carrying digital instructions yet adapting to them all of a sudden was, honestly speaking, overwhelming both for students and teachers.

In the capacity of faculty, I experienced online teaching for the first time in my academic career during the lockdown. Here, I must confess that the universities that I am part of did a great job in mainstreaming everything digitally in a short period and that IT administration made themselves available 24/7 to deal with all the queries and smooth flow of classes. However, somewhere along the way, the academic spirit that one aspires to actualize in classes as a teacher was compromised while dealing with classes digitally due to lack of experience. Also, for the majority of the students as per my interactions with them, the semester turned out to be less engaging as the whole mode was new, and catching up with it in the wake of poor internet connections and poor delivery of content was nothing less than a challenge.

This time, after having experienced academia online, we need to make the digital mode of education more efficient

Keeping in view the glitches in digital mode, it had been instructed covertly to the faculty by the university not to be too strict with students over their attendance and their assessments as a majority of the times they had internet problems or were not tech-savvy to deal with all the assessments digitally. This is something that I experienced as well. I had to take some assessments two to three times as every time some of the students because of technical issues could not take tests. Moreover, in the majority of the assessments, plagiarism and cheating was a recurring theme as it was hardly possible to keep a check on them in online mode when students had access to all the material online. Also, in time-bound assessments, some of the students could hardly complete them because of poor typing speed or any other online problem. More importantly, as the scope of engaging with students digitally, which can be quite large for any tech-savvy, was small due to no experience before for majority of the teachers especially those who were exposed to online teaching for the first time, it was difficult to engage students with interactive sessions in which focus is more improving their skills like communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity.

In September, it is hoped that classes will resume normally as the government has decided to open academic institutes with SOPs; however, Corona pandemic is still not over and as its second wave is rising its head across Europe, chances are that Pakistan may have to revert back to the imposition of lockdown which may result in the closure of academic institutes and we, all in academia, have to go back to digital mode. Keeping in view the looming threat of Covid-19, academic institutes should keep themselves prepared for plan B that is digital mode; however, this time, after having experienced academia online, we need to make the digital mode of education more efficient. We need to take the feedback of all those involved in academia including both teachers and students about their experience of digital mode and, through an inclusive approach, make it more efficient. Moreover, teachers, especially, should be trained with all the required digital means with which they can experiment with to create conducive learning spaces for students.

The writer is an MPhil scholar studying International Relations at Department of Political Science at University of the Punjab, Lahore. He can be reached at uinam39@gmail.com, https://www.facebook.com/inamullah.marwat.56