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Top1. Introduction
Covid-19 pandemic has made the world stand-still on its path of development. All the sectors and all the communities of the globe has been affected so badly that if the pandemic ends now, it will take years to catch the momentum that they were experiencing in their usual functioning prior to the outbreak of the pandemic. As such, there is no hope of the pandemic getting ended now and hence recovery from damages by the pandemic, which have been intensified day by day, may need a very extended time frame. Two sectors of any economy that matter most are education and health. Pandemic has distorted the health sectors directly as multiple lakhs of people are becoming prey of the deadly virus. Education sector is devastated indirectly as to check the spread of Covid-19, all the educational institutions are closed, examinations of the ongoing Semesters/Terms are postponed indefinitely and evaluation process of the classes for which examinations are completed has not been started yet. Commencement of new Sessions will be delayed indefinitely. Private educational institutions will suffer a lot as they are unable to generate revenue either from fresh admission or from the existing students’ Semester fee payments. Consequently, the promoters of the private educational institutions are paying the employees either less than what they deserve or not paying at all. In short, the education sector of the country has been immensely suffered.
Pandemic due to the deadly virus Covid-19 has put the entire world in complete lock-down, that too, for months together. India has locked-down the entire country for more than two months. Schools, Colleges and Universities were to be closed immediately putting everything in halt. Classes were abruptly suspended and examinations were to be postponed indefinitely. Education at all levels got affected hugely. Higher education institutes (HEIs) of India that are embedded with technology blend teaching-learning system, used electronic mode for teaching and learning, i.e., e-learning, immediately after the announcement of first phase of lock-down. Following the trend, some of the primary Schools of the country also adopted the virtual platform for teaching-learning. On this backdrop, it is necessary to unfold whether the stakeholders of primary education are ready for virtual platform of teaching-learning.
Covid-19 pandemic has forced India to lock-down the country in different phases for the sake of social distancing. Planners and decision makers were expecting that the lock down will get over in a week or so and thereafter all academic activities will be resumed. But that did not happen. Lock-down got extended in India in four phases for more than two months. Nobody knows whether this will be extended further. Keeping this in mind, most of the higher educational institutions have adopted e-learning platform to complete the syllabi and conduct examinations. Even at school level, the classes, which will have Board/Council examinations in this academic year, have also been dragged into the purview of e-learning platform. In Odisha, Classes of Vernacular schools other than 10th Class are excluded from virtual learning platform. However, the teachers of those classes are instructed to reach out to the students’ residence and distribute books to them as they don’t have books for new classes and book shops are closed due to lock-down.
But the exceptional practice that happened during this pandemic is exposing primary school students to e-learning platform. Of course, this e-learning platform has not been adopted by primary vernacular schools. Government Schools have not sought for that but some of the private schools, for say in Odisha, have been utilizing virtual platform for teaching-learning even in primary classes. However, it is yet to ascertain to what extent the e-learning is beneficial or hazardous to the stakeholders of the primary schools, specifically to the students of primary schools. This is the base of this paper.
The plan of this paper is as follows. Section-2 of the paper outlines the conceptual framework of the study. Objectives and Methodology of the study is presented in Section-3. Section-4 explains different virtual learning/E-learning modes practiced at primary education level during Covid-19 pandemic. Data collected from the stakeholders of primary education have been analyzed in Section-5. Section-6 summarizes the findings of the study and Conclusion is presented in Section-7.