During the 3rd week of March, the first circular regarding the closure of college for fortnight made everyone surprised. Students were utterly disappointed as they were in the mood of celebrating Annual day ZealotZ-2020.
During the first week of lockdown period, people were in panic as the virus started spreading globally. The quarantine and the lockdown rules became strict and people started worrying about surviving in the COVID affected world.
As a teaching faculty our focus shifted in covering the syllabus for the benefit of the students such that they could start their exams after this lockdown period. Slowly we accustomed to the situation and started teaching classes online. This led to successful scheduling of the online classes. Online mode of teaching is a new positive change in the field of teaching during this pandemic.
Initially I felt nervous about teaching classes online. I spent much time for my preparation to cover concepts and techniques with examples in the topics. I thank my friend and co-faculty of DAA for providing necessary online connection as I had a very poor network in my native place. I believe that this online teaching went on successfully as students participated with enthusiasm. Online mode made the students attend classes comfortably from their home. Later I shared the videos of the session so that students can listen to the topics that they feel more complex. We have posted certain assignments on the Google classroom and felt happy to receive response from the students in form of scanned copies of solutions. This made our teaching-learning process more exciting and interesting. Quizzes and assignments were conducted to award the marks for internal assessment.
The bottom line of the success of online courses is the engagement of students. The knowledge component is more natural to deliver in online mode. The transfer of skills through online mode is case dependent.
Communication is the heart of any LMS. Multiple communication modes like creating email groups, informing via Whatsapp/Telegram app, using web-based live video conferencing platforms (like WebEx, Zoom), and also teaching webs (like Moodle, Google Classrooms) have been used.. The future of online teaching should not be reactive to the situation. Instead, I believe it is a potential model for a resource crunched country like India and a personal tool for self development. Intelligent teachers should realize and preach that.
