PANAJI
Happy to be back to school from Monday, most students in Goa along with their parents and teachers have breathed a sigh of relief. After almost two years of online learning, the children would be physically in the classrooms sitting before their teachers and taking their lessons. Physical classes brought back the smiles on the faces of students and put an end to the challenges in online teaching-learning mode.
“The students prefer face-to-face mode of teaching-learning with a combination of blended classroom added to it, revealed a survey done by two of our teachers Kanika Korgaonkar and Pooja Vadkar,” stated Sudesh Kochrekar, headmaster at Swami Vivekananda Seva Sangh’s Keerti Vidyalaya High School, Siolim while speaking to The Goan and pointed out that this survey has revealed some of the shocking facts about various challenges faced by the student community in twhe past two years.
“We had randomly selected students of class 5-10 from different schools and our sample size was 10,027 who were between 10 and 16 years of age. A well-thought-out questionnaire in a Google form was used to collect data. What we found was shocking “ nearly 77 per cent students were not satisfied with knowledge gained through the online teaching-learning process,” stated Kanika Korgaonkar, one of the two teachers who conducted the survey.
Korgaonkar, a postgraduate in Physical Chemistry who teaches maths and science at Keerti Vidyalaya, pointed out that the most used online platform by teachers to stay connected with the students during this pandemic time is Google meet whereas the students used smartphones to attend the online classes. Several health-related issues were reported by the students including headache (17 per cent), sleep-related issues (21 per cent), neck-related issues (17 per cent) etc, revealed her survey.
Online learning was found to be having its own benefits during this time of pandemic mainly it was time-saving and had made all to get hands-on over it. But on the other hand, the study revealed the challenges faced by the students such as slow connectivity, moderate to poor strength of signal experienced by them and 77 per cent of the students were not thoroughly satisfied with the knowledge gained during this pandemic time.
Students also showed psychosomatic and health problems due to the ongoing pandemic. They went through several fears, especially the fear of having an offline exam (physical exam) due to lack of proper understanding of the content taught. They also felt an impact on their interpersonal relationship between friends and family due to the lack of interaction between them, found the survey.
Also, parents face the burden of buying additional smartphones and provide other facilities to their wards. It was also found that students have to share the same electronic device with their siblings.
Most of the parents were found to be literate in which the majority had 10th standard qualification i.e. 33 per cent of fathers and 32 per cent mothers and whereas 18 per cent fathers and 20 per cent mothers did not have any formal education.
The study further reveals that 42 per cent of the parents experienced a burden to purchase additional digital devices for their children, 41 per cent students had to adjust by sharing the same electronic device with their siblings.
The faculty at Keerti Vidyalaya feels the results of this research study will encourage policymakers and educational institutes to organize need- based training for teachers, introduce mentor-mentee programmes in schools, and conduct additional/remedial classes for regular/weaker section of students.
