How has education technology impacted student learning in India during COVID-19?

Subscribe to the center for universal education bulletin, emiliana vegas , emiliana vegas former co-director - center for universal education , former senior fellow - global economy and development @emivegasv sunhwa lee , and sl sunhwa lee principal social sector specialist - asian development bank unika shrestha us unika shrestha social sector economist - asian development bank.

August 23, 2021

This blog summarizes the report, “ Ed tech and educational opportunity during the COVID-19 school closures: A case study of Chennai, Tamil Nadu .”

India has been one of the hardest-hit countries by COVID-19. Beyond the staggering impact on human life, COVID-19 has greatly disrupted access to education in India, with 247 million primary and secondary school students out of school. While school systems in India and across the world have made efforts to reach students at home through various means, recent estimates of the impact on learning and socio-emotional well-being suggest that the poorest children will be hurt the most by the pandemic-related school closures.

Indeed, school closures have compelled education systems to quickly devise and apply different modes of remote learning such as radio, TV, and various other types of online tools. But access to this education technology (ed tech) differs across and within countries—with students in high-income countries and communities much more likely to have access to online, virtual schooling than their peers in low- and middle-income countries and communities. Thus, an important question is to what extent will student learning and progression in school, especially among primary-school-aged children in low- and middle-income settings, be affected by the global school closures? Further, how will the COVID-19 school closures cause inequality in learning among girls and boys, among poor and affluent children, and across communities and countries of varying income levels?

To answer these questions, we conducted a household survey in February of this year in a southern city of India—Chennai in the state of Tamil Nadu—with financial support from the Asian Development Bank and in collaboration with J-PAL-India. Chennai is the largest urban center in Tamil Nadu and is India’s sixth most populous city. Due to Chennai’s dense population, families typically have several nearby private and government school options, which provide a ripe setting to explore how the use of ed tech differed between different types of schools—both prior to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, India offers a fertile environment for this study’s data collection as a leader in large-scale education reform and ed-tech application among developing countries. The diversity in its large population offers useful lessons applicable to many different contexts.

Alarmingly, 1 in 5 children in our sample were enrolled in schools that do not offer any remote instruction during the school closures, and even among the children whose schools had begun remote instruction, only slightly more than half attended all the classes.

Our goal was to get a better picture of primary school-aged children’s daily educational experiences during the COVID-19 school closures, and especially how students and teachers are using ed tech. We were particularly interested in understanding how these learning experiences may differ among children from low- and high-income households and between children attending private and government (publicly funded) schools.

Our survey findings

Our findings further indicate that during the pandemic-related school closures, students in private schools and those from households with high socioeconomic status (SES) have more access to digital devices and are more engaged in regular educational activities than their peers in government schools and from low-SES households. As Figures 1 and 2 show, children enrolled in private schools and from high-SES households had higher rates of access to digital devices—such as smartphones, internet, and computers/laptops—than their peers in government schools and from low-SES households. These preliminary results shed light onto a likely growing inequality of educational opportunity and suggest the need for policymakers to support access to regular learning opportunities at home for children from low-SES households in government and private schools. Other emerging evidence from the COVID-19 school closures suggests that ensuring students have access to even low-tech interventions, such as SMS text messages and phone calls, can help mitigate the potential learning losses.

Figure 1. Share of students with access to educational resources, by household income

Figure 1. Share of students with access to educational resources, by household income

Figure 2. Share of students with access to educational resources, by school type

Figure 2. Share of students with access to educational resources, by school type

Prior research has shown that the impact of school closures in low-income countries may differ by gender, as girls are often expected to help out with household chores and/or assist parents in caring for younger siblings. However, our study shows an encouraging pattern, where girls are more likely than boys to have access to digital devices for learning and to engage in more regular educational activities (see Figures 3 and 4). Nevertheless, this finding suggests the need for further analysis into why boys may be losing out on educational opportunities, and what strategies may be most effective to increase learning among both girls and boys in India and other low-income countries.

Figures 3. Share of students with access to educational resources, by gender

Figure 3. Share of students with access to educational resources, by gender

Figure 4. Frequency of engagement in educational activities, by gender

Frequency of engagement in education resources, by gender

Altogether, these preliminary results shed light onto a likely growing inequality of educational opportunity in India and around the world, suggesting the need for policymakers to broaden access to continuous and equitable learning opportunities across the student population.

Looking ahead, it will be crucial for governments to enact strategies to help students recover from the learning losses suffered during the school closures and to return to school. Such a strategy may include:

  • Working closely with the health authorities, plan to reopen schools safely as soon as possible.
  • Assess each child’s foundational literacy and numeracy skills as soon as possible to help teachers and parents develop personalized interventions to ensure that each child can get back on track to develop these critical skills.
  • Expand access to digital devices and connectivity among educators and students, along with guidance and support to teachers on ed-tech resources that are best aligned to each student’s learning level. While ed tech is not alone going to ensure children learn, it can be a tool for educators, students, and parents to facilitate learning continuity during school closures and allow for more student-centered, engaging instruction in and outside the classroom.
  • Provide socio-emotional support to educators and students, recognizing that the pandemic has not only caused learning loss but also emotional trauma in too many households.

You can access the full report here .

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Sunhwa Lee is a principal social sector specialist and Unika Shrestha is a social sector economist at the Asian Development Bank, which provides financial support for the Center for Universal Education.

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Research Article

Online education and its effect on teachers during COVID-19—A case study from India

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Area of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Management Indore, Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India

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  • Surbhi Dayal

PLOS

  • Published: March 2, 2023
  • https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282287
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Table 1

COVID pandemic resulted in an initially temporary and then long term closure of educational institutions, creating a need for adapting to online and remote learning. The transition to online education platforms presented unprecedented challenges for the teachers. The aim of this research was to investigate the effects of the transition to online education on teachers’ wellbeing in India.

The research was conducted on 1812 teachers working in schools, colleges, and coaching institutions from six different Indian states. Quantitative and qualitative data was collected via online survey and telephone interviews.

The results show that COVID pandemic exacerbated the existing widespread inequality in access to internet connectivity, smart devices, and teacher training required for an effective transition to an online mode of education. Teachers nonetheless adapted quickly to online teaching with the help of institutional training as well as self-learning tools. However, respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of online teaching and assessment methods, and exhibited a strong desire to return to traditional modes of learning. 82% respondents reported physical issues like neck pain, back pain, headache, and eyestrain. Additionally, 92% respondents faced mental issues like stress, anxiety, and loneliness due to online teaching.

As the effectiveness of online learning perforce taps on the existing infrastructure, not only has it widened the learning gap between the rich and the poor, it has also compromised the quality of education being imparted in general. Teachers faced increased physical and mental health issues due to long working hours and uncertainty associated with COVID lockdowns. There is a need to develop a sound strategy to address the gaps in access to digital learning and teachers’ training to improve both the quality of education and the mental health of teachers.

Citation: Dayal S (2023) Online education and its effect on teachers during COVID-19—A case study from India. PLoS ONE 18(3): e0282287. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282287

Editor: Lütfullah Türkmen, Usak University College of Education, TURKEY

Received: November 13, 2021; Accepted: January 27, 2023; Published: March 2, 2023

Copyright: © 2023 Surbhi Dayal. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: Data apart from manuscript has been submitted as supporting information .

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

As of November 4, 2021, the spread of novel coronavirus had reached 219 countries and territories of the world, infecting a total of 248 million people and resulting in five million deaths [ 1 ]. In March 2020, several countries including India declared a mandatory lockdown, resulting in the temporary closure of many institutions, not least educational ones. Since then, various restrictions and strategies have been implemented to counter the spread of the virus. These include wearing masks, washing hands frequently, maintaining social and physical distance, and avoiding public gatherings. The pandemic has greatly disrupted all aspects of human life and forced new ways of functioning, notably in work and education, much of which has been restricted to the household environment. The closure for over a year of many schools and colleges across the world has shaken the foundations of the traditional structures of education. Due to widespread restrictions, employees have been forced to carve out working spaces in the family home; likewise, students and teachers have been compelled to bring classes into homes [ 2 ]. Nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries have been physically out of school due to the pandemic. In total, 94 percent of the world’s student population has been affected by school closures, and up to 99 percent of this student population come from low-to middle-income countries [ 3 ].

According to the World Economic Forum, the pandemic has changed how people receive and impart education [ 4 ]. Physical interaction between students and teachers in traditional classrooms has been replaced by exchanges on digital learning platforms, such as online teaching and virtual education systems, characterized by an absence of face-to-face connection [ 5 ]. Online education has thus emerged as a viable option for education from preschool to university level, and governments have used tools such as radio, television, and social media to support online teaching and training [ 6 ]. Various stakeholders, including government and private institutions, have collaborated to provide teachers with resources and training to teach effectively on digital platforms. New digital learning platforms like Zoom, Google Classroom, Canvas, and Blackboard have been used extensively to create learning material and deliver online classes; they have also allowed teachers to devise training and skill development programs [ 7 ]. Many teachers and students were initially hesitant to adopt online education. However indefinite closure of institutions required educational facilities to find new methods to impart education and forced teachers to learn new digital skills. Individuals have experienced different levels of difficulty in doing this; for some, “it has resulted in tears, and for some, it is a cup of tea” [ 8 ].

Teachers have reported finding it difficult to use online teaching as a daily mode of communication, and enabling students’ cognitive activation has presented a significant challenge in the use of distance modes of teaching and learning. Teachers have also expressed concerns about administering tests with minimal student interaction [ 9 ]. Lack of availability of smart devices, combined with unreliable internet access, has led to dissatisfaction with teacher-student interaction. Under pressure to select the appropriate tools and media to reach their students, some teachers have relied on pre-recorded videos, which further discouraged interaction. In locations where most teaching is done online, teachers in tier 2 and tier 3 cities (i.e., semi-urban areas) have had to pay extra to secure access to high-speed internet, digital devices, and reliable power sources [ 10 ]. Teachers in India, in particular, have a huge gap in digital literacy caused by a lack of training and access to reliable electricity supply, and internet services. In rural or remote areas, access to smart devices, the internet, and technology is limited and inconsistent [ 6 ]. In cities, including the Indian capital Delhi, even teachers who are familiar with the required technology do not necessarily have the pedagogical skills to meet the demands of online education. The absence of training, along with local factors (for example, stakeholders’ infrastructure and socio-economic standing), contributes to difficulties in imparting digital education successfully [ 10 ]. The gap in digital education across Indian schools is striking. For example, only 32.5% of school children are in a position to pursue online classes. Only 11% of children can take online classes in private and public schools, and more than half can only view videos or other recorded content. Only 8.1% of children in government schools have access to online classes in the event of a pandemic-related restrictions [ 11 ].

The adverse effects of COVID-19 on education must therefore be investigated and understood, particularly the struggles of students and teachers to adapt to new technologies. Significant societal effects of the pandemic include not only serious disruption of education but also isolation caused by social distancing. Various studies [ 7 , 12 , 13 ] have suggested that online education has caused significant stress and health problems for students and teachers alike; health issues have also been exacerbated by the extensive use of digital devices. Several studies [ 6 , 11 , 14 ] have been conducted to understand the effects of the COVID lockdown on digital access to education, students’ physical and emotional well-being, and the effectiveness of online education. However, only a few studies [ 13 , 15 – 17 ] have touched the issues that teachers faced due to COVID lockdown.

In this context, this study is trying to fill existing gaps and focuses on the upheavals that teachers went through to accommodate COVID restrictions and still impart education. It also provides an in-depth analysis of consequences for the quality of education imparted from the teachers’ perspective. It discusses geographical inequalities in access to the infrastructure required for successful implementation of online education. In particular, it addresses the following important questions: (1) how effectively have teachers adapted to the new virtual system? (2) How has online education affected the quality of teaching? (3) How has online education affected teachers’ overall health?

Because of lockdown restrictions, data collection for this study involved a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods in the form of online surveys and telephonic interviews. A questionnaire for teachers was developed consisting of 41 items covering a variety of subjects: teaching styles, life-work balance, and how working online influences the mental and physical well-being of teachers. In the interviews, participants were asked about their experiences of online teaching during the pandemic, particularly in relation to physical and mental health issues. A pilot study was conducted with thirty respondents, and necessary changes to the items were made before the data collection. The survey tool was created using google forms and disseminated via email, Facebook, and WhatsApp. A total of 145 telephonic interviews were also conducted to obtain in-depth information from the respondents.

The data were collected between December 2020 and June 2021. The Research Advisory Committee on Codes of Ethics for Research of Aggrawal College, Ballabhgarh, Haryana, reviewed and approved this study. A statement included in the google survey form as a means of acquiring written consent from the participants. Information was gathered from 1,812 Indian teachers in six Indian states (Assam, Haryana, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, New Delhi, and Rajasthan) working in universities, schools, and coaching institutions. Nearly three-quarters of the total sample population was women. All participants were between the ages of 18 and 60, with an average age of 34 and a clear majority being 35 or younger. Nearly three-quarters of participants work in private institutions (25% in semi-government entities and the remainder in government entities). In terms of education, 52% of participants have a graduate degree, 34% a postgraduate degree, and 14% a doctorate. Table 1 summarizes the demographic characteristics of the participants.

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Results & discussion

Upon analyzing the survey responses, three crucial areas were identified for a better understanding of the effect of COVID-19 on the Indian education system and its teachers: how effectively teachers have adapted, how effective teaching has been, and how teachers’ health has been affected.

1. How effectively have teachers adapted to the new virtual system?

The first research question concerns how willing teachers were to embrace the changes brought about by the online teaching system and how quickly they were able to adapt to online modes of instruction. This information was gathered from December 2020 to June 2021, at which point teachers had been dealing with school lockdowns for months and therefore had some time to become conversant with online teaching.

While 93.82% of respondents were involved in online teaching during the pandemic, only 16% had previously taught online. These results were typically different from the results of a similar study conducted in Jordon where most of the faculty (60%) had previous experience with online teaching and 68% of faculty had also received formal training [ 16 ]. Since the spread of COVID-19 was rapid and the implementation of the lockdown was sudden, government and educational institutions were not prepared for alternative modes of learning, and teachers needed some time for adjustment. Several other factors also affected the effectiveness of the transition to online education, namely access to different types of resources and training [ 18 ].

a. Access to smart devices.

Online teaching requires access to smart devices. A surprising number of teachers stated that they had internet access at home via laptops, smartphones, or tablets. A more pertinent question, however, was whether they had sole access to the smart device, or it was shared with family members. Only 37.25% of those surveyed had a device for their exclusive use while others shared a device with family members, due to lack of access to additional devices and affordability of new devices. During the lockdown, an increase in demand led to a scarcity of smart devices, so that even people who could afford to buy a device could not necessarily find one available for purchase. With children attending online classes, and family members working from home, households found it difficult to manage with only a few devices, and access to a personal digital device became an urgent matter for many. Respondents admitted to relying on their smartphones to teach courses since they lacked access to other devices. Teachers on independent-school rosters were significantly better equipped to access smart devices than those employed at other types of schools. The data also indicates that teachers in higher education and at coaching centers had relatively better access to laptops and desktop computers through their institutions, whereas teachers in elementary and secondary schools had to scramble for securing devices for their own use.

b. Internet access.

Internet access is crucial for effective delivery of online education. However, our survey shows that teachers often struggled to stay connected because of substantial differences between states in the availability of internet. Of the respondents, 52% reported that their internet was stable and reliable, 32% reported it to be satisfactory and the rest reported it to be poor. Internet connectivity was better in the states of Karnataka, New Delhi, and Rajasthan than in Assam, Haryana, and Madhya Pradesh. Internet connectivity in Assam was particularly poor. Consequently, many teachers with access to advanced devices were unable to use them due to inadequate internet connection.

The following comments from a teacher in Assam capture relevant situational challenges: “I do not have an internet modem at home, and teaching over the phone is difficult. My internet connection is exhausted, and I am unable to see or hear the students.” Another teacher from Haryana reported similar difficulties: “During the lockdown, I moved to my hometown, and I do not have internet access here, so I go to a nearby village and send videos to students every three days.” Another teacher from Madhya Pradesh working at a premier institution reported experiencing somewhat different concerns: “I am teaching in one of the institute’s semi-smart classrooms, and while I have access to the internet, my students do not, making it difficult to hear what they are saying.”

These responses indicates clearly that it is not only teachers living in states where connectivity was poor who experienced difficulties in imparting education to students; even those who had good internet connectivity experiences problems caused by the poor internet connections of their students.

c. Tools for remote learning.

Teachers made use of a variety of remote learning tools, but access to these tools varied depending on the educator’s affiliation. Teachers at premier institutions and coaching centers routinely used the Zoom and Google Meet apps to conduct synchronous lessons. Teachers at state colleges used pre-recorded videos that were freely available on YouTube. Teachers in government schools used various platforms, including WhatsApp for prepared material and YouTube for pre-recorded videos. To deliver the content, private school teachers used pre-recorded lectures and Google Meet. In addition to curriculum classes, school teachers offered life skill classes (for example, cooking, gardening, and organizing) to help students become more independent and responsible in these difficult circumstances. In addition to online instruction, 16% of teachers visited their students’ homes to distribute books and other materials. Furthermore, of this 36% visited students’ homes once a week, 29% visited twice a week, 18% once every two weeks, and the rest once a month. Additionally, a survey done on 6435 respondents across six states in India reported that 21% teachers in schools conducted home visits for teaching children [ 19 ].

d. Knowledge and training for the use of information and communication technologies.

With the onset of the pandemic, information and communication technology (ICT) became a pivotal point for the viability of online education. The use of ICT can facilitate curriculum coverage, application of pedagogical practices and assessment, teacher’s professional development, and streamlining school organization [ 20 ]. However, the effective adoption and implementation of ICT necessitated delivery of appropriate training and prolonged practice. Also the manner in which teachers use ICT is crucial to successful implementation of online education [ 21 ]. While countries such as Germany, Japan, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States recognized the importance of ICT by integrating it into their respective teacher training programmes [ 22 ], this has not been case in India. However, there are some training programmes available to teachers once they commence working. In accordance with our survey results, the vast majority of respondents (94%) lacked any ICT training or experience. In the absence of appropriate tools and support, these teachers self-experimented with online platforms, with equal chances of success and failure.

The transition from offline to online or remote learning was abrupt, and teachers had to adapt quickly to the new systems. Our data indicate that teachers in professional colleges and coaching centers received some training to help them adapt to the new online system, whereas teachers in urban areas primarily learned on their own from YouTube videos, and school teachers in rural areas received no support at all. Overall, teachers had insufficient training and support to adjust to this completely new situation. Policy research conducted on online and remote learning systems following COVID-19 has found similar results, namely that teachers implemented distance learning modalities from the start of the pandemic, often without adequate guidance, training, or resources [ 23 ]. Similar trends have been found in the Caribbean, where the unavailability of smart learning devices, lack of or poor internet access, and lack of prior training for teachers and students hampered online learning greatly. Furthermore, in many cases the curriculum was not designed for online teaching, which was a key concern for teachers [ 24 ]. Preparing online lectures as well as monitoring, supervising and providing remote support to students also led to stress and anxiety. Self-imposed perfectionism further exacerbated these issues while delivering online education [ 15 ]. A study conducted on 288 teachers from private and government schools in Delhi and National Capital Region area, also found that transition to online education has further widened the gap between pupils from government and private schools. It was more difficult to reach students from economically weaker sections of the society due to the digital divide in terms of access, usage, and skills gap. The study also found that even when teachers were digitally savvy, it did not mean that they know how to prepare for and take online classes [ 10 ].

2. How has online education affected the quality of teaching?

Once teachers had acquired some familiarity with the online system, new questions arose concerning how online education affected the quality of teaching in terms of learning and assessment, and how satisfied teachers were with this new mode of imparting education. To address these questions, specific questionnaire items about assessment and effectiveness of teaching has been included.

a. Effectiveness of online education.

Respondents agreed unanimously that online education impeded student-teacher bonding. They reported several concerns, including the inattentiveness of the majority of the students in the class, the physical absence of students (who at times logged in but then went elsewhere), the inability to engage students online, and the difficulty of carrying out any productive discussion given that only a few students were participating. Another significant concern was the difficulty in administrating online tests in light of widespread cheating. In the words of one teacher: “I was teaching a new class of students with whom I had never interacted in person. It was not easy because I could not remember the names of the students or relate to them. Students were irritated when I called out their names. It had a significant impact on my feedback. I would like us to return to class so I do not have to manage four screens and can focus on my students and on solving their problems.”

For these reasons, 85.65% of respondents stated that the quality of education had been significantly compromised in the online mode. As a result, only 33% reported being interested in continuing with online teaching after COVID-19. The results show slightly higher dissatisfaction in comparison to another study conducted in India that reported 67% of teachers feeling dissatisfied with online teaching [ 25 ]. Findings of this study were similar to the findings of a survey of lecturers in Ukraine assessing the effectiveness of online education. Lower quality student work was cited as the third most mentioned problem among the problems cited by instructors in their experience with online teaching, right behind unreliable internet connectivity and the issues related with software and hardware. Primary reasons for lower quality student work were drop in the number of assignments and work quality as well as cheating. Almost half (48.7%) of the participants expressed their disapproval of online work and would not like to teach online [ 26 ].

Due to the nature of the online mode, teachers were also unable to use creative methods to teach students. Some were accustomed to using physical objects and role-playing to engage students in the classroom, but they found it extremely difficult to make learning exciting and to engage their students in virtual space. Similar trends have been reported in Australia, where schoolteachers in outback areas did not find online education helpful or practical for children, a majority of whom came from low-income families. The teachers were used to employing innovative methods to keep the students engaged in the classroom. However, in online teaching, they could not connect with their students using those methods, which significantly hampered their students’ progress. Some teachers mentioned difficulties with online teaching caused by not being able to use physical and concrete objects to improve their instructions [ 27 ].

b. Online evaluation.

Of our respondents, 81% said that they had conducted online assessments of their students. Teachers used various online assessment methods, including proctored closed/open book exams and quizzes, assignment submissions, class exercises, and presentations. Teachers who chose not to administer online assessments graded their students’ performance based on participation in class and previous results.

Almost two-thirds of teachers who had administered online assessments were dissatisfied with the effectiveness and transparency of those assessments, given the high rates of cheating and internet connectivity issues. They also reported that family members had been helping students to cheat in exams because they wanted their children to get higher grades by any means necessary. In response, the teachers had tried to devise methods to discourage students and their families from cheating, but they still felt powerless to prevent widespread cheating.

As one respondent stated: “We are taking many precautions to stop cheating, such as asking to install a mirror behind the student and doing online proctoring, but students have their ways out for every matter. They disconnect the internet cable or turn it off and reconnect it later. When we question them, they have a connectivity reason ready”.

Teachers are also concerned about the effects of the digital skills gap on their creation of worksheets, assessments, and other teaching materials. As a result, some private companies have been putting together teacher training programs. The main challenge pertains to be implementation of a type of specialized education that many teachers are unfamiliar with and unwilling to adopt [ 28 ]. Because of the lack of effective and transparent online assessments, school teachers have reported that students were promoted to the next level regardless of their performance. Thus, only time will tell how successful online education has been in terms of its effects on the lives of learners.

3. How has online education affected teacher’s overall health?

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought about a situation that few people had experienced or even imagined living through. Governments and individuals tried their best to adjust to the new circumstances, but sudden lockdown, confinement to the household periphery, and working from home had adverse effects on the mental and physical health of many people, including educators and students. To clarify the effects of online education on teachers’ overall health, a number of questionnaire items were focused on respondents’ feelings during the lockdown, the physical and mental health issues they experienced, and their concerns about the future given the uncertainty of the present situation.

a. Physical health issues.

COVID-19 brought a multitude of changes to the lives of educators. Confinement to the household, working from home, and an increased burden of household and caregiving tasks due to the absence of paid domestic assistants increased physical workload and had corresponding adverse effects on the physical health of educators.

Of the study participants, 82% reported an increase in physical health issues since the lockdown ( Fig 1 ). Notably, 47% of those who were involved in digital mode of learning for less than 3 hours per day reported experiencing some physical discomfort daily, rising to 51% of teachers who worked online for 4–6 hours per day and 55% of teachers who worked more than 6 hours per day. Respondents reported a variety of physical health issues, including headaches, eye strain, back pain, and neck pain.

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The number of hours worked showed a positive correlation with the physical discomfort or health issues experienced. A chi-square test was applied to determine the relationship between the number of online working hours and the frequency of physical issues experienced by the participants and found it to be significant at the 0.05 level ( Table 2 ).

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282287.t002

As Fig 2 shows, 28% respondents’ complaint about experiencing giddiness, headaches; 59% complain of having neck and back pain. The majority of the participants had eye-strain problems most of the time; 32% faced eye problems sometimes, and 18% reported never having any eye issue. In addition, 49% had experienced two issues at the same time and 20% reported experiencing more than 2 physical issues at the same time.

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The data in this study indicates a link between bodily distresses and hours worked. As working hours increased, so did reports of back and neck pain. 47% respondents reported back and neck pain after working for 3 hours or less, 60% after working for 3–6 hours, and nearly 70% after working for 6 hours or more.

The analysis also indicates link between physical issues experienced and the educator’s gender. Women experienced more physical discomfort than men, with 51% reporting frequent discomfort, compared to only 46% of men. Only 14% of female educators reported never experiencing physical discomfort, against 30% of male educators.

In terms of types of discomfort, 76% of female teachers and 51% of male teachers reported eye strain; 62% of female teacher and 43% of male teachers reported back and neck pain; 30% of female teachers and 18% of male teachers said they had experienced dizziness and headaches. The gender differences may be caused by the increase in household and childcare responsibilities falling disproportionately on female educators compared to their male counterparts. Several studies [ 17 , 29 – 31 ] have reported similar results, indicating that the gender gap widened during the pandemic period. The social expectations of women to take care of children increased the gender gap during the pandemic by putting greater responsibilities on women in comparison to men [ 29 ]. Women in academics were affected more in comparison to the men. Working from home burdened female educators with additional household duties and childcare responsibilities. A study done [ 32 ] in France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden, the United States and the United Kingdom discovered that women were immensely affected by lockdown in comparison to men. On top of this, women with children are affected more than women without children.

No effect of age on physical discomfort was observed in this study but increasing use of online tools (such as class websites) for content creation and delivery and extended working periods were major contributors to health problems.

b. Mental health issues.

The psychological effects of the COVID-19 pandemics have also proved difficult to manage. Being at home all day with limited social interaction, not to mention other pandemic-related sources of stress, affected the mental health of many people. The majority of the participants in this study admitted experiencing mental health issues including anxious feelings, low mood, restlessness, hopelessness, and loneliness. According to UNESCO [ 33 ], due to the sudden closure of schools and adaptability to new systems, teachers across the world are suffering from stress. Studies conducted in various parts of the world confirmed similar trends [ 34 , 35 ]. In Israel, teachers reported psychological stress due to online teaching. 30.4% teachers reported being stressed in comparison to 6.1% teachers in traditional classroom settings [ 34 ]. In Spain, teachers experienced various kinds of mental health issues like anxiety, stress, and depression [ 36 ]. An Arabian study found an increased number of cases related to anxiety, depression, and violence during the pandemic [ 37 ]. In New Zealand teachers in Higher education reported being overwhelmed due to the online teaching [ 15 ].

Online teaching appears to have negatively affected the mental health of all the study participants. Women (94%) reported more mental health issues than men (91%), as shown in Fig 3 . Nearly two-thirds of participants said they had been dealing with mental health issues regularly and a third occasionally; only 7% said they never dealt with them. Findings of this study are in line with other studies which found that female teachers had higher levels of stress and anxiety in comparison to men [ 36 ]. Studies conducted in China reported that teachers developed mental health issues due to online classes [ 37 , 38 ].

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Our analysis indicated a positive relationship between the number of working hours and the frequency of mental health issues. Of the respondents who worked online for less than 3 hours, 55% experienced some kind of mental health issue; this rose to 60% of participants who worked online for 3–6 hours, and 66% of those who worked more than 6 hours every day. A chi-square test was applied to determine the relationship between the number of online working hours and the frequency of mental issues experienced by the participants and found it to be significant at the 0.05 level ( Table 3 ).

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In terms of types of mental health issues, respondents reported restlessness, anxious feelings, and a sense of powerlessness, along with feelings of hopelessness, low mood, and loneliness as shown in Fig 4 . The stress of adapting to a new online working environment, the extended hours of work required to prepare content in new formats, the trial-and-error nature of learning and adopting new practices, uncertainty caused by lockdown, and an overall feeling of having no control were some of the contributing factors.

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282287.g004

Mental health issues were more common among those under the age of 35, with 64% reporting a problem most of the time compared to 53% of those over 35. It has been found that job uncertainty is one of the primary causes of a higher prevalence of mental health concerns among younger respondents than among older respondents. These findings are in line with other studies which found higher levels of stress among the young people in comparison to older one [ 36 , 39 ]. Feelings of loneliness and a sense of no control were reported by 30% of respondents under the age of 35, with these feelings occurring constantly or most of the time; only 12% of respondent over the age of 35 reported experiencing these feelings always or most of the time. Of respondents under 35 years of age 61% felt lonely at some point during the COVID-19 pandemic, compared to only 40% of those age 35 or older.

This study also found gender-based differences in the frequency of mental health issues experienced, with 62% of male respondents and 52% of female respondents reporting that they had always experienced mental health issues. The types of issues also differed by gender, with men more likely to report restlessness and loneliness and women more likely to report feeling anxious or helpless. More female respondents reported feelings of hopelessness than male respondents (76% compared to 69%), and they were also more anxious (66%).

The uncertainty of the pandemic seems to have caused helplessness and anxious feelings for female teachers in particular, perhaps because a lack of paid domestic help increased the burden of household and caregiving tasks disproportionately for women at a time when the pressure to adapt to new online platforms was particularly acute. In some cases, respondents left their jobs to accommodate new family dynamics, since private employers offered no assistance or flexibility. Deterioration of mental health also led to the increased number of suicides in Japan during COVID-19 [ 39 ].

However, female teachers fared better than their male counterparts on some measures of mental health. Although half of the respondents (men and women equally) reported low mood during the pandemic, the men reported more restlessness (53%) and loneliness (59%) than the women (50% and 49%, respectively). Restrictions on eating and drinking outside the household may have had a disproportionate effect on male respondents, making them more likely to feel restless or lonely than their female counterparts, who may have handled COVID-related isolation better by being more involved in household work and caregiving.

Number of hours worked online was also a factor contributing to mental health issues. Just as respondents had more physical complaints (including eye strain, back and neck pain, and headaches) the more hours they worked online, respondents who worked longer hours online reported more mental health issues.

One of the major drawbacks of online education is the widespread occurrence of physical and mental health issues, and the results of this study corroborate concerns on this point. This study found that online teaching causes more mental and physical problems for teachers than another study, which only found that 52.7% of respondents had these problems [ 12 ].

A report by the University of Melbourne has also indicated that online teaching and learning have a negative effect on the physical and mental well-being of individuals. Teachers working from home, in particular, have reported isolation, excessive screen time, inability to cope with additional stress, and exhaustion due to increased workload; despite being wary of the risks of exposure to COVID-19, they were eager to return to the campus [ 27 ].

c. Support mechanisms.

In general, teachers experienced good support from family and colleagues during the pandemic, with 45.64% of teachers reported receiving strong support, 29.64 percent moderate support (although the remainder claimed to have received no or only occasional support from family and colleagues). 9.39% of male respondents reported that they have never received any support in comparison to 4.36% females. Female respondents reported receiving more support than male respondents perhaps because they have access to a more extensive network of family members and coworkers. Children, parents, and siblings were cited as the provider of a robust support system by most female respondents. For example, maternal relatives called or texted children to keep them engaged and helped them with homework, and female participants said their peers helped them to prepare lectures and materials. A link was also found between age and support; the older the respondent, the stronger the support system. A possible explanation for this difference is that older people have had time to develop stronger and longer-lasting professional and personal ties than younger people.

This study explored the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Indian education system and teachers working across six Indian states. The effectiveness of online education methods varied significantly by geographical location and demographics based on internet connectivity, access to smart devices, and teachers’ training. While premier higher education institutions and some private institutions had provided teachers with the necessary infrastructure and training to implement effective successful online learning with relatively few challenges, teachers at schools and community colleges have more often been left to adopt a trial-and-error approach to the transition to an online system. Further, it indicates that online education has had a significant effect on the quality of education imparted and the lives and wellbeing of teachers. While online learning has enabled teachers to reach out to students and maintain some normalcy during a time of uncertainty, it has also had negative consequences. Owing to the lack of in-person interaction with and among students in digital classes, the absence of creative learning tools in the online environment, glitches and interruptions in internet services, widespread cheating in exams, and lack of access to digital devices, online learning adversely affected the quality of education. Teachers experienced mounting physical and mental health issues due to stress of adjusting to online platforms without any or minimal ICT training and longer working hours to meet the demands of shifting responsibilities. A positive correlation was found between working hours and mental and physical health problems.

The long-term impact of COVID-19 pandemic on both the education system and the teachers would become clear only with time. Meanwhile, this study sheds light on some of the issues that teachers are facing and needs to be addressed without further ado. These findings will provide direction to the policy makers to develop sound strategies to address existing gaps for the successful implementation of digital learning. However, researchers should continue to investigate the longer-term effects of COVID pandemic on online education.

Supporting information

S1 file. supplementary material..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282287.s001

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Problems Faced by Students and Teachers During Online Education Due to COVID-19 and How to Resolve Them

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  • Published: 25 January 2021

Online education in the post-COVID era

  • Barbara B. Lockee 1  

Nature Electronics volume  4 ,  pages 5–6 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

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The coronavirus pandemic has forced students and educators across all levels of education to rapidly adapt to online learning. The impact of this — and the developments required to make it work — could permanently change how education is delivered.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the world to engage in the ubiquitous use of virtual learning. And while online and distance learning has been used before to maintain continuity in education, such as in the aftermath of earthquakes 1 , the scale of the current crisis is unprecedented. Speculation has now also begun about what the lasting effects of this will be and what education may look like in the post-COVID era. For some, an immediate retreat to the traditions of the physical classroom is required. But for others, the forced shift to online education is a moment of change and a time to reimagine how education could be delivered 2 .

research paper on online education in india during covid 19

Looking back

Online education has traditionally been viewed as an alternative pathway, one that is particularly well suited to adult learners seeking higher education opportunities. However, the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has required educators and students across all levels of education to adapt quickly to virtual courses. (The term ‘emergency remote teaching’ was coined in the early stages of the pandemic to describe the temporary nature of this transition 3 .) In some cases, instruction shifted online, then returned to the physical classroom, and then shifted back online due to further surges in the rate of infection. In other cases, instruction was offered using a combination of remote delivery and face-to-face: that is, students can attend online or in person (referred to as the HyFlex model 4 ). In either case, instructors just had to figure out how to make it work, considering the affordances and constraints of the specific learning environment to create learning experiences that were feasible and effective.

The use of varied delivery modes does, in fact, have a long history in education. Mechanical (and then later electronic) teaching machines have provided individualized learning programmes since the 1950s and the work of B. F. Skinner 5 , who proposed using technology to walk individual learners through carefully designed sequences of instruction with immediate feedback indicating the accuracy of their response. Skinner’s notions formed the first formalized representations of programmed learning, or ‘designed’ learning experiences. Then, in the 1960s, Fred Keller developed a personalized system of instruction 6 , in which students first read assigned course materials on their own, followed by one-on-one assessment sessions with a tutor, gaining permission to move ahead only after demonstrating mastery of the instructional material. Occasional class meetings were held to discuss concepts, answer questions and provide opportunities for social interaction. A personalized system of instruction was designed on the premise that initial engagement with content could be done independently, then discussed and applied in the social context of a classroom.

These predecessors to contemporary online education leveraged key principles of instructional design — the systematic process of applying psychological principles of human learning to the creation of effective instructional solutions — to consider which methods (and their corresponding learning environments) would effectively engage students to attain the targeted learning outcomes. In other words, they considered what choices about the planning and implementation of the learning experience can lead to student success. Such early educational innovations laid the groundwork for contemporary virtual learning, which itself incorporates a variety of instructional approaches and combinations of delivery modes.

Online learning and the pandemic

Fast forward to 2020, and various further educational innovations have occurred to make the universal adoption of remote learning a possibility. One key challenge is access. Here, extensive problems remain, including the lack of Internet connectivity in some locations, especially rural ones, and the competing needs among family members for the use of home technology. However, creative solutions have emerged to provide students and families with the facilities and resources needed to engage in and successfully complete coursework 7 . For example, school buses have been used to provide mobile hotspots, and class packets have been sent by mail and instructional presentations aired on local public broadcasting stations. The year 2020 has also seen increased availability and adoption of electronic resources and activities that can now be integrated into online learning experiences. Synchronous online conferencing systems, such as Zoom and Google Meet, have allowed experts from anywhere in the world to join online classrooms 8 and have allowed presentations to be recorded for individual learners to watch at a time most convenient for them. Furthermore, the importance of hands-on, experiential learning has led to innovations such as virtual field trips and virtual labs 9 . A capacity to serve learners of all ages has thus now been effectively established, and the next generation of online education can move from an enterprise that largely serves adult learners and higher education to one that increasingly serves younger learners, in primary and secondary education and from ages 5 to 18.

The COVID-19 pandemic is also likely to have a lasting effect on lesson design. The constraints of the pandemic provided an opportunity for educators to consider new strategies to teach targeted concepts. Though rethinking of instructional approaches was forced and hurried, the experience has served as a rare chance to reconsider strategies that best facilitate learning within the affordances and constraints of the online context. In particular, greater variance in teaching and learning activities will continue to question the importance of ‘seat time’ as the standard on which educational credits are based 10 — lengthy Zoom sessions are seldom instructionally necessary and are not aligned with the psychological principles of how humans learn. Interaction is important for learning but forced interactions among students for the sake of interaction is neither motivating nor beneficial.

While the blurring of the lines between traditional and distance education has been noted for several decades 11 , the pandemic has quickly advanced the erasure of these boundaries. Less single mode, more multi-mode (and thus more educator choices) is becoming the norm due to enhanced infrastructure and developed skill sets that allow people to move across different delivery systems 12 . The well-established best practices of hybrid or blended teaching and learning 13 have served as a guide for new combinations of instructional delivery that have developed in response to the shift to virtual learning. The use of multiple delivery modes is likely to remain, and will be a feature employed with learners of all ages 14 , 15 . Future iterations of online education will no longer be bound to the traditions of single teaching modes, as educators can support pedagogical approaches from a menu of instructional delivery options, a mix that has been supported by previous generations of online educators 16 .

Also significant are the changes to how learning outcomes are determined in online settings. Many educators have altered the ways in which student achievement is measured, eliminating assignments and changing assessment strategies altogether 17 . Such alterations include determining learning through strategies that leverage the online delivery mode, such as interactive discussions, student-led teaching and the use of games to increase motivation and attention. Specific changes that are likely to continue include flexible or extended deadlines for assignment completion 18 , more student choice regarding measures of learning, and more authentic experiences that involve the meaningful application of newly learned skills and knowledge 19 , for example, team-based projects that involve multiple creative and social media tools in support of collaborative problem solving.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, technological and administrative systems for implementing online learning, and the infrastructure that supports its access and delivery, had to adapt quickly. While access remains a significant issue for many, extensive resources have been allocated and processes developed to connect learners with course activities and materials, to facilitate communication between instructors and students, and to manage the administration of online learning. Paths for greater access and opportunities to online education have now been forged, and there is a clear route for the next generation of adopters of online education.

Before the pandemic, the primary purpose of distance and online education was providing access to instruction for those otherwise unable to participate in a traditional, place-based academic programme. As its purpose has shifted to supporting continuity of instruction, its audience, as well as the wider learning ecosystem, has changed. It will be interesting to see which aspects of emergency remote teaching remain in the next generation of education, when the threat of COVID-19 is no longer a factor. But online education will undoubtedly find new audiences. And the flexibility and learning possibilities that have emerged from necessity are likely to shift the expectations of students and educators, diminishing further the line between classroom-based instruction and virtual learning.

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Perspective article, effective teaching practices for success during covid 19 pandemic: towards phygital learning.

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  • 1 Shakti Chaturvedi, School of Management Studies, REVA University, Bengaluru, India
  • 2 Sonal Purohit, University School of Business, Chandigarh University, Mohali, India
  • 3 Meenakshi Verma, Symbiosis Center for Management Studies, Symbiosis International University, Nagpur, India

Following the outbreak of COVID 19 in February 2020, Indian universities were shut down and used digital platforms to teach their students since then. Drawing from Kolb’s Learning Theory, John Dewey’s theory, Jack Mezirows transformative learning theory, and Jean Piaget’s theory, the authors in this paper offer a viewpoint on some of the practical teaching practices which can be adapted in business schools in India to be successful in this emerging blended or phygital environment. Using a Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework, the authors reflect on the effective teaching practices based on their own experience, theoretical knowledge gained from an exhaustive web search of various databases of the period, particularly from February to August 2020. The authors performed a careful manual content analysis of the selected research papers. They concluded seven principal teaching methods to create an effective blended environment for students and faculties in Indian business schools: a) reframing virtual spaces in India through online knowledge repository and virtual labs b) using reflective thinking for andragogical and pedagogical Indian approach c) Indian teachers’ readiness to offer various genres of courses on demand d) reinforcing resilience in Indian schools through meaningful participation and conflict resolution e) purposeful learning and inquiry-based learning for Indian students f) experiential learning through an inclusive online pivot in India g) useful apps are discussed to reach out to Indian parents community. These initiatives can influence academicians, educationists, podcasters, and the entire teacher fraternity to design an efficient and adequate teaching plan for the student community in India.

Introduction

COVID 19 is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered virus, “Novel Corona Virus” ( Dhawan, 2020 ). This virus has now become an unparalleled worldwide sensation due to three major reasons: widespread contamination of elevated mortality rate and considerable delay in the formulation of the vaccine. All this has led the government to implement mammoth measures ( Chaturvedi et al., 2020 ). Great efforts are in place to ensure social and physical distancing by convincing the public to stay at home. These endeavors are primarily directed to break the infection chain and ensure a reduced burden on the civic-health machinery. While the onus of all the trouble was laid on the medical facilities, the changes that have been adopted are massive. This has resulted in subsequent commercial and communal defeats. The consequential fiscal and communal exercise of social distancing has led to some major policy changes in the functioning of higher education guided towards “online pivot” ( George, 2020 ). For the first time in the history of the Indian education system, there has been a shift from a face-to-face teaching model to a completely online one ( Zimmerman, 2020 ). The extensive use of digital media is in place. Teachers across the section of the society variably or invariably have had to quickly get used to the online mode of teaching guided towards a digital mindset (Victoria, 2020). The student community is also deeply affected. They have had to let go of their campus life, stay indoors, and attend online classes (Chaturvedi and Pasipanodya, 2019; Govindarajan and Srivastava, 2020 ). Some researchers believe that students who adopt an online learning mode are slightly more receptive than those who “prefer to learn in a traditional face-to-face environment.” However, some other researchers proved that the blended teaching mode yields the best results ( Means et al., 2013 ). The teaching community remains cynical about the success of online teaching and learning pattern. A study conducted on complete reliance on online mode of teaching based on the Technology Acceptance Model ( Davis, 1989 ) has revealed that students and faculty share common concerns regarding the availability of the Internet, student-teacher engagement, and incessant workload ( Wingo et al., 2017 ). In line with this, the Unified Technology Acceptance and System Success (UTASS) model was proposed, which said that system quality, social influence, and facilitating conditions positively impact students’ behavioral intention towards e-learning systems ( Chaturvedi et al., 2018 ; Zhang et al., 2020 ). Fundamentally speaking, the entire student and teacher community must bridge a gap quickly from the offline mode of teaching to complete online mode. This is without a choice for either of them as large sums of money are involved. All this has taken a huge toll on the admissions of students in the Universities. The future of educational institutes remains erratic as the government is unable to arrive at any concrete decision. Despite all these uncertainties, university finances are further affected because of the unstable stock market, reduced or no grants from government bodies. Several small and medium-sized private institutions would be worst affected and eventually close due to the tumultuous finances. Higher education remains the most affected. Meanwhile, Business Schools are also not far from being affected by this pandemic. Some industries have immediately come under the spell of COVID 19, such as all the service sectors. Students who intend to make their careers in these sectors are now compelled to shift their focus to other sectors. The government is doing its best to help the economy, and people recover from this crisis ( Bolaran, 2020 ). However, the fact remains, organizations and sectors that can successfully transform themselves from a physical model of operations to online would be the only ones to survive this crisis. To serve all these needs, the organizations need to turn to a blended model of education, which has been referred to as phygital mode ( George, 2020 ) of education. However, it is challenging for organizations to implement the phygital model most effectively. The burning question here is what can be the effective teaching practices from a phygital perspective? Concerning all these challenges, the authors in this paper throw light on some of the effective teaching practices that could be followed in higher education regarding business schools (B schools) in India to achieve success during these uncertain times of the COVID 19 pandemic. It would be interesting to see the novel teaching practices in the phygital mode. There has been much research on education and teaching in the COVID pandemic. However, none of those have focused on the practices that can increase teaching effectiveness in a phygital mode, specifically in a B school context. Moreover, the empirical or qualitative studies are restricted to the study contexts and fail to present more generalized information. Thus, we collected information from secondary sources to present information that the education institutes can practically use. We use Kolb’s Learning Theory, John Dewey’s theory, Jack Mezirow’s transformative learning theory, and Jean Piaget’s theory to present a viewpoint on some effective teaching practices that can improve teaching effectiveness in a phygital mode. Thus, we intend to contribute to the extant literature on education and teaching practices through this study. We also present a framework based on the research findings that the education institutes can use for designing effective teaching pedagogies.

How Indian Business Schools Would Adapt to This Virtual Teaching?

The authorities may envision a bright future. The management may take this vision to the next level by putting it into practice. However, ultimately it is the teaching fraternity (Faculty members) who would have to work at the ground level to change ( Bates, 2000 ). When it comes to distance learning courses, the primary concern is regarding the infrastructure and internet support from the Institution, quality of lectures as they will be delivered online ( Bao, 2020 ). The research of the adoption of a complete online teaching mode is yet in its nascent stage to recommend anything. Hence institutions have a significant role in lending proper and timely support to adopt a complete online teaching mode. For instance, the exciting research in Computer Vision focuses on predicting the pose of the human head in an image. This describes the object’s rotation in 3D space. By predicting this, we can determine the direction a human head face. Having a computer able to figure out which direction a human head is facing provides many practical applications. For instance, it can be used to map a 3D object to match the direction of the students in the classroom to have the best visual effect on their minds for learning purposes ( Liu et al., 2021 ). Also, in a case study experimentation of Peking University’s online education during COVID 19, few specific instructional strategies were presented to summarize current online teaching experiences for university instructors who might conduct online education in similar circumstances. For instance, online effective delivery mechanism, adequate support provided by faculty and teaching assistants to students, and high-quality participation for better student learning can be followed for better learning experiences ( Bao, 2020 ). The authors have highlighted some benchmarking teaching methods in the following sections of the paper to extract some learnings imparted in Indian business schools in India for the effective pedagogical methods amidst COVID 19. The research objectives of the paper are mentioned in the following section.

Research Objectives

The main objectives of the paper are as follows

 1. To present some successful teaching practices that can be/are followed in Indian Business schools amidst COVID 19.

 2. To understand the challenges that came with adopting technology by both students and faculties amidst COVID 19.

 3. To conclude, some principal teaching methods based on existing theories of learning from literature to create an effective blended environment for students and faculties in Indian business schools amidst COVID 19.

Research Methodology

This study had reviewed several online research articles published, newspaper stories, conference papers, working papers, and books using manual content analysis. It was a cross-sectional analysis where the authors searched various electronic databases in March and then again in June 2020 with no language restrictions. The authors also searched the WHO research database on COVID-19 with the term “school,” which only resulted in one article that was not considered more general than specific to our topic. Therefore, the authors searched again using the keywords such as “teaching practices during COVID 19,” “adoption of technology in higher education during COVID 19,” “learning AND teaching pedagogy during COVID 19,” “Indian business schools AND COVID 19,” “digital learning during the lockdown,” “online teaching during a pandemic,” “education policy during COVID 19” and “phygital learning during the shutdown” and the combinations of these words. All authors performed data management and cleaning. All three authors triple screened (by S.C., S.P., and MV) the articles on title and abstract. The authors excluded viewpoint papers, systematic literature reviews, and studies on other viruses and other languages. The selected research papers were not limited only to India but also from the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe to gain an international view of the topic. As the authors analyzed the papers already written, there was no need to get the formal ethical clearance for citing them. The key themes identified and discussed included “online teaching practices during COVID-19,” “blended mode of teaching in higher education,” and the “shift towards online teaching during COVID 19.”

All full-text downloaded articles identified were reviewed by S.C. The authors maintained to keep highly cited articles out of all downloaded articles for the present study. The authors did not try to rate the quality of studies included in this paper. The authors also included findings of some preprint articles and peer-reviewed articles. Most of the articles cited are from renowned publishers like Elsevier, Emerald, Sage, Springer, Taylor and Francis, and Wiley. The different database searches identified 100 articles, of which 30 full-text articles were assessed, and eighteen were included in this paper. No relevant articles were returned searching the WHO Global Research Database on COVID-19. The search on medRxiv resulted in 20 preprint articles, out of which one was included in the review. In total, 30 journal articles, ten books, eight conference papers, and one working paper were included in this review (see the flowchart Figure 1 below).

www.frontiersin.org

FIGURE 1 . Article Selection criteria Flowchart.

Emerging Teaching Practices Discussed

The word technology connotes different meanings to faculty members engaging in different subjects. For example, a teacher of mathematics and a philosophy teacher will have their ways to use technology for teaching their subjects. The word technology is often used in common parlance to digital devices, online and blended systems, scientific artifacts, tools, and other facilitating objects ( Brown and Sammut, 2012 ). At times, technology also refers to engineering procedures that assist in the creation of new gadgets. It is now commonly used even in the arena of teaching (Elen and Clarebout, 2006). Few members of the teaching fraternity who are comfortable using the latest technology for teaching can be termed as those set of individuals who are welcoming the change in the gamut of teaching ( Gershon, 2017 ).

Moreover, such individuals are the ones who are the pioneers in adopting this new digital teaching pedagogy across the globe. The theoretical framework which can be used to understand the online teaching and learning process is the Community of Inquiry (CoI) model (Refer to Figure 2 ), which consists of three critical factors: Social element, Cognitive element, and Teaching element ( Garrison et al., 2000 ). It is the interactions of all three elements of the model that facilitates the educational experience for participants, as illustrated in Figure 2 . Based on this model, Social Presence is understood as the ability of participants to project their characteristics and therefore presenting themselves as real people. Cognitive Presence is defined as the “extent to which the participants in any particular setting can make meaning through sustained communication” ( Garrison et al., 2000 ). Teaching Presence is composed of the design of the educational experience and the creation of sound knowledge to better society ( Garrison et al., 2000 ).

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FIGURE 2 . The community of inquiry model ( Garrison et al., 2000 ).

Reframing Brick and Mortar Practices in Virtual Spaces: Reflections From India

In 2006, Chau and Lam talked about unique teaching ideas to suit the age-old “brick and mortar” universities shifting to the online mode of teaching. Currently, India is in the initial stage of adopting an online teaching mode, and we are marching ahead with small but firm footsteps. One such breakthrough in online teaching was achieved through MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courseware) in India. Because of its immense benefits, MOOC is now acknowledged across the globe. It can successfully substitute the face-to-face teaching mode with online teaching by enhancing the pool of wisdom and facilitating blended teaching and learning environment. These online classes can be categorically classified under two heads, synchronous and asynchronous, based on the conduction of the classes. Synchronous mode refers to the type of learning where students and teachers are present at the exact location and at the same time for teaching and learning. This comprises in-person classes (where teachers and students are present in the same classroom), online meetings and live streaming of classes or demonstrations on Zoom, MS Teams, Google meet, and other platforms ( Calongne, 2008 ). Precisely it is a “real-time” type of learning where a group of learners is engaged simultaneously. Hence, it enables collaborations amongst the students and teachers to ask doubts and get them resolved on the spot. For example, webinars, online classrooms, and video conferences are examples of synchronous classes. Asynchronous mode refers to the universal form of teaching and learning that does not happen simultaneously or in the same classroom. The students are not present in the class at a prescribed time. However, they have access to the previously recorded lecture videos of their teachers in addition to online study materials ( Hsiao, 2012 ). Students can respond through emails and any social media network. The teachers generally record their classes. This recording is made available to the students; it is a learner-centered approach, where the students can undertake any course without fulfilling the criteria of being present at the same time and exact location as the tutor. For instance, blogs, youtube videos, and online lectures are examples of synchronous classes. In line with this, the Indian institutes have also experimented with several experiential learning tools, e.g., uploading recorded videos of faculties, creating online discussion forums for students, asking students to upload their self-made videos, and embedding the research into the course curriculum ( Mishra et al., 2020 ). Kolb’s Learning Theory from the literature also emphasizes the “conversational learning” approach, which enabled learners to make meaning and convert experiences into knowledge through the exchange of conversations ( Kolb et al., 2002 ). The major challenge lies with the practical courses that are difficult to deliver online. One of the institutes in India created virtual labs where experiments were demonstrated through video conferencing ( FutureLearn, 2020 ). Another issue was the support for students in remote areas with limited access to high-quality teaching and less knowledge of the English language ( Flack et al., 2020 ). Several tech companies such as BYJU’s worked towards this digital divide and create apps that support live classes and localized language for such communities. However, more needs to be done to cover the digital divide for these communities ( Brundha and Chaturvedi, 2021 ).

Experiential Learning Approach in Creating Virtual Management “Sandbox” in India

The concept of sandbox technology in our paper denotes a cloud or a computer-generated space for teaching. However, the different methodology needs to be adopted for students’ different age groups (adults, middle school students, and kids). This implies the policies and procedures adopted for higher education must necessarily be different for school-level education ( Halupa, 2015 ). Thus, satisfying the needs and requirements of both sets of the audience. The teachers must adhere to an altogether new focus and degree of teaching in the classrooms. The tutor must curb all the obstacles that come his/her way during a teaching in an online platform. For this, the practices of “Experiential Learning” need to be embraced to gauge and then accentuate, strengthen, and communicate the experiences in activities. Experiential learning (E.L.) refers to the procedure that involves “learning by doing,” resulting in gaining specific experience. For instance, a student learns by working in a company during the internship or learning to ride a bike. In this learning, the outcome is based on the involvement in the experience. Prior researchers have contributed several definitions for the E.L., the scope of which is extended to the pedagogies, learning domains, and undertakings (Eyler, 2009; McClellan and Hyle, 2012 ; Morris, 2016 ; Beard and Wilson, 2018 ). The philosophy mentioned above of experiential learning has its roots in John Dewey’s theory. Dewey (1938) emphasized that experience is continuous, and the experiential learning process is of vital importance to adult education. Therefore, E.L. is a procedure that involves immersion and self-direction, resulting in a meaningful experience that helps gain knowledge that can be applied in future contexts. Given the issues of student engagement and impactful learning for the students at the online platform, the faculties have identified ways to implement the experiential learning model (ELM) effectively.

For example, at some universities, the courses were redesigned utilizing the experiential learning module to enable the MBA students to develop presentation skills to enhance their employability. One of the universities used iPads equipped with Panopto’s mobile app, creating an experiential learning opportunity for the physician students. Students made videos of their role-play interacting with patients uploaded on the video content management system of the university from where they were available to the professors who left feedback for the students. On the other hand, some universities are including Industrial Informatics into their master’s degree curriculum to address Industry 4.0. The pandemic has resulted in the growing importance of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in the industry, resulting in great demand for CPS talent and know-how. The mission of academia is to address the needs of the industry for CPS engineers and develop a curriculum to fill the existing gaps in the qualification of the CPS workforce ( Colombo et al., 2020 ).

Offering À La Carte and On-Demand Online Courses in Indian Business Schools

The pandemic has compelled the education institutes to embrace virtual teaching and learning methodology. This has further pressed the institutes to offer an extensive menu of courses and those in great demand. For instance, mechatronic education and experimental systems have, for example, been developed to facilitate experiential education and enhance the learning process in order to encourage students to think. The Mechatronics systems are designed, implemented, programmed, tested, and used by the students successfully within designed Lab sessions. The developed systems have their learning indicators where students acquire knowledge and learn the target skills through engagement, hands-on experience, brainstorming, and interactive discussions ( Habib and Nagata, 2020 ). To provide such courses to the students, first teachers will have to learn these courses to further enhance their knowledge in the respective subject. This is in synchronization to Jean Piaget’s cognitive development of experiential learning. Piaget (2008) asserted that learning is a lifelong process of finding knowledge from experience. Some countries like Germany are surveying the teaching fraternity to understand their requirements, abilities, and career enhancement objectives. Subsequently, when the colleges reopened, they were given free tutoring on the curriculums they were keen on. This exercise is intended to meet the distinctive requirements of teachers. However, the primary motive was to provide skill-based courses to all teachers. Later, these teachers were summoned to teach the same skill-based course to the students. This was the practice followed by some countries like Germany. Taking cues from there, India can follow on these lines and offer professionally motivated courses in Indian B schools.

Strengthening Resilience in Indian Schools in Challenging Times

The word resilience means having the ability to have a successful outcome despite being in a challenging situation ( Masten et al., 1990 ). The school authorities and teachers are solely responsible for promoting resilience amongst the student community in these challenging situations. The authors in the present paper have arrived at specific recommendations to foster resilience amongst the student community towards online teaching with the help of studies conducted by Benard (2004) and Henderson and Milstein (1996) :

 1. It is improving social skills by showing affection and concern towards adults (e.g., instituting absolute optimistic regard, establishing a philosophy of care and mutual admiration, constantly appreciating each-others work).

 2.  Establishing elevated and clear expectations for educational accomplishment and school room conduct (e.g., cooperation and dispute solution, constant enactment of policies and directions, conveying a belief that students are adept at increased academic performance).

 3. Offering prospects for significant involvement in learning (e.g., forming the curriculum so that every child benefits, linking the syllabus to learners, supporting home dialect, offering practical learning, encouraging the use of group activities while teaching the course).

Improving Digital Pedagogical Methodology in India

The teaching pedagogies have been transformed with the information and communication technology (ICT) innovations ( Konig et al., 2020 ). For instance, ICT has facilitated the faculties adoption of student-centric practices such as learning through projects (Law, Pelgrum, and Plomp, 2009 ) that helped the promotion of purposeful learning ( Koh and Chai, 2014 ), inquiry-based learning ( Bell et al., 2013 ) and learning through problem-solution ( Walker et al., 2012 ). Prior researchers have presented strong arguments in favor of ICT as a catalyst for a metamorphosis of the teaching pedagogies ( Beauchamp and Kennewell, 2010 ). The model identifies the interaction between the knowledge of a faculty about the technology, pedagogy, and content for an efficacious utilization of ICT for delivery in a classroom ( Herring et al., 2016 ). There has been much research on the factors that affect the acceptance of technology in education. This includes the adoption of e-learning among the students, e.g., Boateng et al. (2016) , Sanchez et al. (2013), Zhou and Xu (2007) and teachers, e.g., Holzmann et al. (2020) , Salinaz et al. (2017) , Buckenmeyer (2010) , Nicolle and Lou (2008) , Kotrlik and Redmann (2009) . However, the COVID 19 pandemic created a situation wherein both the teachers and students had to adopt the technology not by choice but as an essential requirement for the education system’s smooth functioning. The adoption came with many challenges related to the lack of knowledge about the use of technology by both students and faculties, difficulty finding and selecting a suitable platform for online class delivery, cost of the license, and issues related to the infrastructure unavailability of the Internet in remote areas. This pivots the need for research from factors that affect the technology adoption to the factors that would affect the continued use of technology for blended learning and student benefit. Instead, research that can guide the behavioral change strategy for both students and faculties would be needed.

Moreover, the content delivery and examination pattern required a significant overhaul. The uncertainty of events posited a dilemma for the education institutes and policymakers about the pattern of examination. A need-based approach was followed at the school level. Some primary class students were promoted directly to the next class; an online examination was conducted for several higher semester classes and offline exams for those who appeared for the board (secondary and senior secondary) exams. The universities and Business schools majorly adopted online mode for conducting the examinations as the direct promotion could affect the career and placement. As far as higher education is concerned, it seems that the teaching pedagogies would adopt the blended learning and teaching mode for higher effectiveness.

Transformative Learning for Inclusive Online Pivot in India

The introduction of digital tools has enabled educators towards a blended approach for learning; for instance, flipped classrooms providing room for the enhanced classroom experience. Educators are using the technology to develop videos that enrich the digital content, thus enabling them to utilize the free time for other innovations. According to Jack Mezirows (2003) , in transformative learning theory, learning begins with an experience called a disorienting dilemma (cognitive dissonance, which happens on realizing that your current understanding of the world does not fit with the current evidence). The abrupt, unplanned, and rapid transition into online learning triggered by COVID 19 has contributed to cognitive dissonance because our educational expectations are called into question. If we talk about India, the central issue was faced by the students who are supposed to undertake practical field training called summer internships, where they are supposed to be trained on the job while working with the corporation. The lockdown and closure of most offices resulted in a lack of opportunity for the student to go through this practical training. Several students got the work from a home internship, but they could not learn or get accustomed to the environment and system in which work is done in a corporate ( Srivastava and Chaturvedi, 2014 ). Some institutes facilitated the students by providing them projects that required in-depth study of the field or industry they wanted to cope with. This helped the students to get prepared for the jobs. However, the kind of “mindset change” a student goes through after and on-the-job training was absent. This posits the need to develop an education system of blended learning with an industry interface embedded within the course for a better experience. Here comes the role of a mentor who accelerates preliminary activities that enhance introspection, face challenges, and includes probes and mutual understandings ( Chaturvedi et al., 2019 ). However, it is ideal to understand the requirements of the students and the demands of the course curriculum and then adopt a suitable teaching methodology that is acceptable and understandable by the majority of the audience at large. In the end, the authors support the notion of Sharp and Marchetti (2020) , who said that the natural way should be to choose the correct teaching practice in the present phygital scenario of COVID 19.

The authors point out these examples to take lessons for Indian management schools ( Chaturvedi, 2020 ) where the whole idea of experiential learning through video observation is picking up fast. Moreover, given the difficulties with effective experiential learning with the existing platforms raises a need for the development of e-learning facilities that can be compatible with the extant infrastructure, thus pivoting towards blended learning/phygital learning.

Collaborating With Parents Through School-Wide Online Strategies in India: Apps discussed

As per recent research findings, there has been a substantial drop in the number of parents who believe in the effectiveness of the personalized methods of communication to get informed about student performance, e.g., face-to-face meetings. In India, parents take an interest in the education of students at the university level, and several universities communicate the performance to the parents through various modes such as phone calls. The findings indicate the increasing adoption of digital methods of communication for getting informed about student performance. This opened a door for a new opportunity and apps such as ClassDojo, Spotlight, Remind. Seesaw developed an interface that allows mobile messages, videos, and other alerts about its activities and student performance. For instance, a university used technology to send texts about grades, attendance, and assignment submission to the parents, resulting in an increase in student attendance by 18% and a decline in the course failures by 39% ( Bergman and Chan, 2017 ).

Another example is about a university that sent literacy tips along with text messages to the parents. The outcome was an increased parent-teacher interaction that increased the literacy scores for students. There is an increase in such apps that are parent engaging; a selected few are presented here with their success stories for learning purposes. B schools can adopt the same to enhance the learning experience for students.

ClassDojo is a popular tool that allows the instructors to provide feedback to the parents on students’ behavior. It allows communication in 35 languages. The parents can also obtain information about their child’s school experience and class through pictures and videos. The app is substantially popular among the K-8 schools and has successfully connected with 15 k new schools since 2019. This app can be helpful if implemented in Indian B schools to give parents community feedback about their children.

The Spotlight was developed by Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) in California while looking for means to reach the diverse families in a high-poverty urban district with just 28% of English speakers and above 50 languages spoken over. The video report card application of Spotlight was piloted in three schools in 2015 that 16 schools adopted till the year-end. Spotlight allows the texting of a link to the parents that land them to a personalized video that provides a detailed report on the student performance, including the performance summary in core subjects, areas of improvement, and guidance towards improved learning such as reference of library groups or open-source learning platforms.

Remind is used by Groton elementary school in rural New York to connect with the parents. The instructs can use the app to send personalized and class-wide and school-wide texts to the parents. The instructors send weekly texts about the learning and development of the students that can be translated into above 70 languages. The application also facilitates the sending of pictures of students in class and methods that parents can use to help the students with the homework. The instructors can identify the messages that are read and make decisions about follow-up through other means.

Seesaw was adopted by over 25,000 schools in the United States across 200,000 classrooms and in more than 150 countries for effective learning in the schools. Through this app, the students can describe their learning to the parents in live classroom settings. The student can document their project by video recording, pictures, and audio and show to parents. The text can be sent only after the approval of the instructor, and the parents can respond with questions. Several instructors use the app to communicate the student learning is to the parents. The authors share that these apps can be successfully launched in Indian Business schools to help the school make an inclusive and effective “online pivot” during COVID 19.

Taking cues from some established theories of learning, the authors furnish unique teaching initiatives in this paper to combat the challenges of online teaching put forth because of the novel COVID-19 pandemic (Refer to Figure 3 ). Covid-19 exerted several changes in the education system at a broad scale. The pandemic concurs with the increased potential of information technology. The outcome is likely to reconfigure the teaching pedagogies making use of the information technology. While one cannot deny the importance of the offline education system, the future would be directed towards blended learning guided towards online pivots and a digital mindset. When we move towards digital technology adoption for teaching, several issues need attention. First, the development of an appropriate interface for learning and engagement compatible with the extant infrastructure is required, given the financial concerns of institutes discussed in the opening sections. Second, the efforts must be guided towards the continued adoption of technology for education. Third, due to the limitations about the internships that enabled the B school students to learn in a natural working environment, the pathways for effective experiential learning that can also enhance the skillset and employability of students need to be determined. Lastly, techniques to fill the digital divide for all-inclusive learning need immediate attention. The COVID 19 pandemic has guided the education system towards a new paradigm that needs to be explored for effective blended learning. The authors firmly believe that B schools will rise to the occasion and adopt benchmarking teaching practices, leading to effective student-teacher virtual communication in India.

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FIGURE 3 . A pictorial representation of the main findings of the paper.

Future Directions

The study provides valuable insights on effective teaching practices in the online mode in the COVID situation. However, there are several limitations of the study that can be covered in future research. The study is limited to higher education in the context of B Schools in India. Future research can be extended to the other courses in various regions to understand the online teaching practices. Moreover, qualitative data collected through interviews with the beneficiaries and participants can provide a comprehensive understanding of the various online teaching pedagogies ( Adedoyin and Soykan, 2020 ). The shift to online teaching is still in the nascent phase, and the long-term implications and effects are still unknown. Future studies can conduct cross-sectional surveys to analyze the potency of the various teaching practices in online mode. It would be interesting to understand what factors would govern the continued use of the blended learning approach even when the pandemic is over.

Limitations of the Study

The study cannot be generalized in the absence of empirical analysis. Hence there exists a scope for further research by including data collection. The inferences drawn from the study can vary depending upon the size and availability of resources with various universities. The study talks about the extended infrastructure required to adopt online teaching methodology but did not throw much light on the methods in which this infrastructure can be developed. The study focuses on the continued adoption of technology for education. However, given that India is a developing nation and not all institutes and Universities have access to the high technology required for the said purpose, it might take some time for the universities to absorb online learning and teaching.

Data Availability Statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/Supplementary Material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Author Contributions

SC and SP contributed to the conception, structure of the paper, and interpretation of available literature. SC contributed to the development of the initial draft. MV reviewed and critiqued the output for important intellectual content. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: digital learning, experiential learning, effective teaching methods, blended learning, phygital learning, reinforcing resilience, business schools, COVID 19 pandemic

Citation: Chaturvedi S, Purohit S and Verma M (2021) Effective Teaching Practices for Success During COVID 19 Pandemic: Towards Phygital Learning. Front. Educ. 6:646557. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2021.646557

Received: 27 December 2020; Accepted: 28 May 2021; Published: 10 June 2021.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2021 Chaturvedi, Purohit and Verma. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Shakti Chaturvedi, [email protected]

This article is part of the Research Topic

Covid-19 and Beyond: From (Forced) Remote Teaching and Learning to ‘The New Normal’ in Higher Education

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Students' perception and preference for online education in India during COVID -19 pandemic.

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  • Muthuprasad T 1
  • Aditya KS 1
  • Aiswarya S 2

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Social Sciences & Humanities Open , 04 Jan 2021 , 3(1): 100101 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2020.100101   PMID: 34173507  PMCID: PMC7836920

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Students’ perception and preference for online education in India during COVID -19 pandemic

T. muthuprasad.

a Division of Agricultural Economics, ICAR- Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, 11001, India

S. Aiswarya

b Division of Agricultural Extension, ICAR- Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, 11001, India

K.S. Aditya

Girish k. jha.

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Educational institutes across the world have closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic jeopardizing the academic calendars. Most educational institutes have shifted to online learning platforms to keep the academic activities going. However, the questions about the preparedness, designing and effectiveness of e-learning is still not clearly understood, particularly for a developing country like India, where the technical constraints like suitability of devices and bandwidth availability poses a serious challenge. In this study, we focus on understanding Agricultural Student’s perception and preference towards the online learning through an online survey of 307 students. We also explored the student’s preferences for various attributes of online classes, which will be helpful to design effective online learning environment. The results indicated that majority of the respondents (70%) are ready to opt for online classes to manage the curriculum during this pandemic. Majority of the students preferred to use smart phone for online learning. Using content analysis, we found that students prefer recorded classes with quiz at the end of each class to improve the effectiveness of learning. The students opined that flexibility and convenience of online classes makes it attractive option, whereas broadband connectivity issues in rural areas makes it a challenge for students to make use of online learning initiatives. However, in agricultural education system where many courses are practical oriented, shifting completely to online mode may not be possible and need to device a hybrid mode, the insights from this article can be helpful in designing the curriculum for the new normal.

  • 1. Introduction

With the COVID-19 -a novel corona virus disease spreading across the globe, many countries have ordered closure of all educational institutes. Educational institutions have come to a functional standstill since they had to protect their students from viral exposures, which are likely in a highly socializing student community. In the beginning of February 2020, schools only in China and a few other affected countries were closed due to the proliferating contamination. However, by mid-March, nearly 75 countries have implemented or announced closure of educational institutions. As on 10th March, school and university closures globally due to the COVID-19 has left one in five students out of school. According to UNESCO, by the end of April 2020,186 countries have implemented nationwide closures, affecting about 73.8% of the total enrolled learners ( UNESCO, 2020 ). Even though the lockdown and social distancing are the only ways to slowdown the spread of the COVID-19 by breaking the chain of transmission, closure of educational institutions has affected large number of students.

As the schools and colleges are shut for an indefinite period, both educational institutions and students are experimenting with ways to complete their prescribed syllabi in the stipulated time frame in line with the academic calendar. These measures have certainly caused a degree of inconvenience, but they have also prompted new examples of educational innovation using digital interventions. This is a silver lining on a dark cloud considering the sluggish pace of reforms in academic institutions, which continues with millennia-old lecture-based approaches in teaching, ingrained institutional biases and obsolete classrooms. Nevertheless, COVID-19 has been a trigger for educational institutions worldwide to pursue creative approaches in a relatively short notice. During this time, most of the universities have shifted to online mode using Blackboard, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or other online platforms.

The educational institutions in affected areas are seeking stop-gap solutions to continue teaching, but it is important to note that the learning quality depends on the level of digital access and efficiency. The online learning environment varies profoundly from the traditional classroom situation when it comes to learner’s motivation, satisfaction and interaction ( Bignoux & Sund, 2018 ). The Community of Inquiry (COI) framework offers a convenient baseline for intervening in online teaching and learning ( Garrison et al., 2001 ). According to COI framework, success of web-based instruction is determined by creating a learners’ group. In this group (analogous to the traditional classroom situation), learning happens through three interdependent elements: (1) social presence, (2) cognitive presence, and (3) teaching presence. Study by Adam et.al . (2012) argued that there was no significant difference between online learning and face to face class with regard to their satisfaction and also, they supported the fact that online class will be as effective as traditional class if it is designed appropriately. These facts clearly show us that online learning is a perfect substitute for the traditional classroom learning if they are designed suitably.

Educational institutions in India have also made a transition to online teaching environment soon after Union Government’s decision to impose nation-wide lock-down for 21 days from 25th March, 2020 which was later extended for 19 more days. However, the major concern is about the quality of learning which is closely related with how well the content is designed and executed. Effectiveness of learning also depends on how the content is curated to online environment and also in understanding and addressing the constraints faced by students. The study is even more relevant considering that in India the system of online education has never been tried at this scale and this is like a massive social experiment. Further, in agriculture education sector, the curriculum of agriculture gives a lot of importance to practical aspects and adopting it to online platform can decide the effectiveness. In this line, we have examined Indian agricultural students’ perception regarding online education and various attributes which could make the online learning more effective and successful.

The results of the study are important for educational institutes in Agriculture for two main reasons. Firstly, the shift to online mode has been an abrupt one due to unprecedented lockdown imposed to manage the COVID-19, and the institutes did not had time to design and adopt the course contents for online mode. In this context, experience of students and the learnings can be incorporated to make online learning easy, efficient and productive. Second, even after lockdown is revoked, life after the COVID-19 pandemic will not be like before and online learning is here to stay, though in combination with regular offline classes. There is uncertainty about the length of the pandemic and chances of reinfections, the social distancing can become a new normal. So, all the educational institutes need to be prepared to shift majority of the course content to e-learning platforms and modify the course structure and curriculum suitably. The results of our study can be important input in deciding on the learning environment in online platform to promote effective learning. In the next section, we provide a brief review of literature followed by data and methods section where we describe the methodology used in the study. Then, we discuss the results and the implications followed by concluding remarks of the study.

  • 2. Review of literature

The current technological advancements allow us to employ several ways to design the online content. It is very important to consider the preferences and perception of learners while designing the online courses to make the learning effective and productive. Preference of the learner is related to the readiness or willingness of the learner to participate in collaborative learning and the factors influencing the readiness for online learning. In the section to follow, we summarie the learnings from the review of related literature.

Warner et al. (1998) proposed the concept of readiness for online learning in the Australian vocational education and training sector. They described readiness for online learning mainly in terms of three aspects:(1) the preference of student’s for the way of delivery opposed to face-to-face classroom instruction; (2) student’s confidence in the utilising the electronic communication for learning which includes competence and trust in the use of the Internet and computer-based communication; and (3) capability to engage in autonomous learning. The concept was further refined by several researchers like McVay (2000 , 2001) who developed a 13-item instrument which measured student behaviour and attitude as predictors. Subsequently, Smith et al. (2003) conducted an exploratory study to validate the McVay’s, (2000) questionnaire for online readiness and came up with a two-factor structure, “Comfort with e-learning” and “Self-management of learning”. Later, several studies were taken up for operationalising the concept of readiness for online learning ( Evans (2000) ; Smith (2005) ).The factors that influenced the readiness for online learning as put forth by researchers were self-directed learning( Guglielmino (1977) ; Garrison (1997) ; Lin and Hsieh (2001) ; McVay (2000 , 2001) ), motivation for learning ( Deci and Ryan (1985) ; Ryan and Deci (2000) ; Fairchild et al. (2005) , learner control ( Hannafin (1984) ; Shyu and Brown (1992) ; Reeves (1993) ),computer and internet self-efficacy (( Bandura (1977 , 1986 1997) ; Compeau and Higgins (1995) ; Eastin and LaRose (2000) ; Tsai and Tsai (2003) ; Tsai and Lin (2004) ; Hung et al. (2010) ), online communication self-efficacy ( Palloff and Pratt (1999) ; McVay (2000) ; Roper (2007) ).

Any efforts to strengthen the effectiveness of online learning needs to understand the perception of the users. Studies have documented both favourable and unfavourable perceptions by students on online learning. Several studies indicate that the instructor’s interaction with students has considerable impact on the student’s perceptions of online learning. Consistency in course design ( Swan et al. 2000 ), the capability of the interaction with course instructors to promote critical thinking ability and information processing ( Duffy et al. (1998, pp. 51–78) ; Picciano (2002) ; Hay et al.(2004) ) rate of interactivity in the online setting ( Arbaugh (2000) ; Hay et al. (2004) ), the extent of instructional emphasis on learning through interaction, the flexibility of online learning ( Chizmar and Walbert (1999) ; McCall (2002) ; National Centre for Vocational Education Research (2002) ; Petrides (2002) ; Schrum (2002) ; Klingner (2003) ; Kim et al. (2005) ), chances of engaging with teachers and peers in online learning settings ( Soo and Bonk (1998) ; Wise et al. (2004) ; Kim et al. (2005) ), social presence ( Barab and Duffy (2000) ; Kim et al. (2005) ; Jonassen (2002) ),academic self-concept ( Trautwein et al. (2006) ; Lim et al. (2007) ), competencies required to use the technology ( Wagner et al. (2000) were identified as the perceived strengths of online learning. Hence an effective online class depends upon well-structured course content ( Sun and Chen (2016) ), well-prepared instructors ( Sun and Chen (2016) ), advanced technologies ( Sun and Chen (2016) ), and feedback and clear instructions ( Gilbert, 2015 ).

However, several weaknesses related to online learning were also described in the literature. Delay in responses ( Hara and Kling (1999) ; Petrides (2002) ; Vonderwell (2003) , scepticism of their peers’ supposed expertise( Petrides (2002) ); lack of a sense of community and/or feelings of isolation ( Woods’, (2002) ; Vonderwell (2003) ; Lin & Zane, (2005) ); , problems in collaborating with the co-learners, technical problems Piccoli et al.(2001) ; Song et al. ( 2004) ), issues related to instructor (Muilenburg & Berge, 2005) higher student attrition rates ( Frankola (2001) ; Ryan (2001) ; Laine (2003) ), the need for greater discipline, writing skills, and self-motivation; and the need for online users to make a time commitment to learning ( Golladay et al. (2000) ; Serwatka (2003) are considered to be barriers or weakness of online learning.

Several researchers compared the efficacy of online or web-based tutorials with conventional teaching in classrooms. The types of possible encounters that might occur online as compared to conventional classrooms differ substantially, and the impact of communicating within one setting or another can have a direct effect on attitudes of the students and faculty. The studies explored perceptions of online learning experiences vs. conventional classroom experiences by students and faculty and reported mixed findings that demand further studies. Some of those areas include analysing the nature and amount of interactions that is available online ( Moore and Kearsley (1995) ), flexibility and accessibility of web - based instructions ( Navarro and Shoemaker (2000) ),the skills, motivations, time and perception of learner and instructor( Yong and Wang (1996) ; Shih, Ingebritsen, Pleasants, Flickinger, & Brown, 1998 ; McIsaac et al. (1999) ; White (2004) and whether some or all of these aspects are linked to academic achievement ( Brewer and Erikson (1997) ).It was also found that there was no significant difference between online learning and face to face class with regard to their satisfaction and also in terms of their academic performance ( Hara and Kling, 1999 ).Studies also supported the fact that online class will be as effective as traditional class if it is designed appropriately ( Nguyen, 2015 ).

The literature has highlighted different models which provides the basic framework to understand the students perception regarding online education. Papers have also highlighted potential bottlenecks for success of the online learning. However, not many papers have attempted to understand the students perception and preference in Indian context. It is understandable that only limited number of distance education platforms were using online mode of education before the Covid-19 pandemic. Further, to the best of our knowledge, study on these lines has not been attempted in the field of agricultural education, where online learning initiatives are even lesser probably because of higher share of practical learning aspects in curriculum. We try to fill this gap with our study, drawing insights from the literature in conceptualizing the problem, exclusively focusing our attention on online learning in agricultural education.

  • 3. Data and methods

3.1. Participants

Agricultural graduates were chosen as the respondents for this study as agriculture is the most diverse subject that includes subjects ranging from life sciences to social sciences where students work from lab to land. The participants were 307 agricultural graduates from different universities of National Agricultural Research System (NARS). It included 136 Under Graduates, 84 Postgraduates and 87 students pursuing their Ph.D. Among them 172 were female and 135 were male.

3.2. Procedure

A structured and unstructured preliminary questionnaire was designed with the help of literature survey and informal discussions with the students who are currently attending the online classes. Pre-testing was done with 12 respondents and their feedbacks were considered for designing the final questionnaire.

3.3. Domain of the study

First of all, we identified key-informants among different agricultural universities for online survey. The link for Google form was sent to the key-informants through the WhatsApp. After submitting their responses, they circulated the questionnaire among other university students like snowball sampling. We have disabled the link after 10 days of circulating the Google forms. In this way, responses from a total of 307 students were obtained from different universities of the NARS.

3.4. Data analysis

Data were collected on demographic features, followed by learners’ preferences, perception, advantages, constraints and suggestions. The statements were prepared based on extensive review of literature and discussion with experts to minimize researchers bias. To analyze and summarize the perception, statements were rated on a five-point continuum scale (five being most effective and 1 being the least effective). Frequency and percentage were calculated for most of the questions to summarize the data. Apart from calculating the percentage table for the perceptions, we used a measure of consensus for each of the statements. The consensus was calculated by the formula suggested by Tastle and Wierman (2007) .

p i = probability or frequency associated with each Likert attribute X i ; i ranges from 1to 5

d X  ​= ​width of X

μ X  ​= ​mean of X.

Further, each statement regarding perception of respondents based on effectiveness of online learning in comparison to classroom teaching was ranked based on mean rank obtained by Friedman’s test. Formula used for calculating mean rank in Friedman’s test is as follows

Where, k ​= ​number of columns(treatments); n r  ​= ​number of rows(blocks); R i = Sum of the ranks.

To identify the most important benefits and constraints of online learning, Garret ranking technique was used. For this, 5 benefits and 8 constraints were given to the respondents and they were asked to rank it based on their opinion. As a first step these ranks were be converted into percent positions based on the following formula

R ij  ​= ​Rank given for the ith Benefit/constraint by jth respondents

N j  ​= ​Number of Benefits/constraints ranked by jth respondents

As a second step these percent position of each rank was converted into scores using the table given by Garrett and Woodworth (1969) . And then for each factor, scores of individuals were added and divided by the total number of respondents to get the mean score of each factor. The Benefit and Constraint with the highest mean score was considered as the most important.

The perception study detailed above has a limitation that the responses are dependent on how the questions are framed. Insights can be drawn only on statements for which answers are recorded. In this context, to broaden the perception of students regarding the online course and factors determining the success, we have used content analysis. To analyze the open-ended questions conventional content analysis was done. Content analysis is defined as a generic name for a variety of textual analyses that typically involves comparing, contrasting, and categorizing a set of data ( Schwandt, 1997 ). We tried to perform content analysis to identify the trends in learners’ perspective regarding online classes. As a foremost step, two authors after looking into all the responses of the open-ended questions, created the themes and sub-themes which was checked for inter-rater reliability using Kappa Co-efficient with the help of the other two authors. The estimated Kappa co-efficient was found to be 0.72 which denotes substantial agreement between the two rater’s.

Findings from the analysis of qualitative and quantitative data gathered from the present study are presented below.

4.1. Demographic details of respondents

The demographic variables included age, sex, degree, and place of residence. The mean age of the respondents was 23 years. There were more female respondents 172(56.03%) than male respondents 135 (43.97%). Majority of the respondents were belonging to rural background 140 (45.60%) whereas 121 (39.41%) were from urban areas and only 46(14.98%) were from peri urban areas (see Table 1 ).

Table 1

Demographic details of the respondents.

4.2. Basic information regarding online classes ( Table 2 )

Table 2.

Basic information regarding online classes.

Among the respondents, only 145 (47.23%) were having prior experience of online classes and 162 (52.2%) did not attend online classes before. And 82% of the respondents said that online classes have already started by the universities where they have enrolled. When a question was asked how to cope up with curriculum during this COVID-19 pandemic, majority of the respondents (67.1%) indicated that online classes can be used as substitute for class room teaching to cover the syllabus, whereas 29.97% of the students wanted the curriculum to be suspended and very few (2.93%) wanted teachers to provide only assignments and reading material. The reasons behind the response of those 30% respondents who were not in favour of online classes can be traced to inability to focus on curriculum due to the fear of the pandemic or technological constraints they face for online learning. In the later part of the paper we will examine the constraint faced by students for online learning.

  • 5. Learner’s prefernce for online classes

5.1. Technical availability

Various devices preferred by the respondents for attending online classes were Smartphone (57.98%), laptop (35.83%), tablet (4.89%) and desktop(0.65%)which clearly suggests that if any organization which wants to develop an application for the online learning, it has to ensure that the platform is compatible with smartphone. Mobile data pack was the source of internet for 82% of the respondents. Majority of the respondents (62%) said that WhatsApp was the best way to communicate class updates ​(see Table 3a ).

Table 3a

Technical requirements for online classes.

5.2. Structure of online classes

Recorded classes uploaded at the university website/YouTube/any other application was the most preferred (54.4%) class format by whereas 27.04% of the respondents preferred live classes that can be recorded, 17.92% opined in favour of live classes and 0.65% preferred only reading materials.

Majority of the respondents preferring recorded classes and live classes that can be recorded since it gives them a flexibility in learning. Regarding the nature of reading materials majority of the respondents (84%) preferred video content supplemented with reading materials. More than half (53%) of the respondents preferred the instructor to teach using PowerPoint presentations (see Table 3b ).

Table 3b

Structure of online classes.

5.3. Frequency and duration of online classes

Around 58% of the learners wanted online classes for twice in a week with 46% respondents preferring 45 ​min duration for each class. Around 48% of the respondents desired to spend only two to 4 ​h in a day for online class and wanted a break of 15 ​min in between the two classes (See Table 3c ).

Table 3c

Frequency and duration of online classes.

5.4. Addressing the queries

Various methods preferred for clarifying the queries were a platform with option for posting queries (48.21%), through live chat (35.5%), email to the course instructor (14.33%) and WhatsApp (0.98%). Interestingly,40% of the respondents expect the instructor to clarify their doubts within a day (See Table 3d ).

Table 3d

Addressing the queries.

5.5. Plans and criteria for evaluation

Majority of the students preferred quiz (75.9%) and assignments (56.3%) at the end of every class for effective learning. Around 47 %of the respondents felt that one-week time should be given for submitting their assignments.

Surprisingly,60% of the respondents wished to attend online exams and around 70% of the respondents preferred objective mode of examination rather than descriptive examination (See Table 3e ).

Table 3e

Plans and criteria for evaluation.

  • 6. Respondent’s perception towards online learning

The frequency and percentage were calculated for each of the seven statements rated on a scale of five-point continuum as shown in Table 4 a.

Table 4a

Respondents’ perception towards online learning.

Where,1- online is or might be less effective

2- online is or might be somewhat less effective

3- online is or might be equally effective

4- online is or might be somewhat more effective

5- online is or might be much more effective.

Results suggested that, there was not much differences in the perception of Graduate and Post Graduate students towards online learning. Around 50% of the respondents agree with the statement online leaning improves their technical skills as compared to face-face classes. It also evident that around 60% of respondents are agree with the statement that online classes are less effective when it comes to communication with the instructor as compared to face-face classes. On an average 20–30% of the respondents perceive that online and face-face classes are equally good when it comes to the above criterions.

It should also be noted that the consensus varied from 0.40 to 0.56 implying that there was neither perfect disagreement nor perfect agreement between the respondents regarding the effectiveness of online learning. Difference in perception among the respondents could be attributed to lack of equity in internet availability, poor teaching skills or poor learning environment.

Further, to test for the presence of pattern in the data, we employed Friedman test. The ranking provided by the respondents might as well be random without any pattern and simply comparing them based on mean rank can be erroneous. So, mean ranks can be compared only after making sure that there is a pattern in the ratings provided by the users. The analysis revealed that there is a pattern in the data as the test statistics turned out to be significant. Mean value for each statement was used to rank the statements related to the perceived effectiveness of online classes in comparison with classroom teaching. The results revealed that enhancement in technical skills; instructors’ ability to understand the virtual environment and making the platform easier to learn and spending more time on assignments in comparison to classroom environment were ranked first, second and third respectively (see Table 4b ). The test statistic is presented in the Table 4 c and its level of significance indicated that the differences were highly significant.

Table 4b

Friedman rank test.

Table 4c

Test Statistics for Friedman Rank test.

  • 7. Benefits of online learning

Results of the study indicate that flexible schedule and convenience was ranked as the major benefits of the online learnings. Online education offers students the opportunity to study at their own pace and time of their convenience. Hence, flexibility and convenience are major drivers behind the demand for online education.

More comfortable environment, enhancing the technical skills, more interaction and greater ability to concentrate and self-discipline and responsibility were ranked two, three, four and five respectively (see Table 5 ).

Table 5

Benefits of online learning.

  • 8. Bottlenecks for online learning

Table 6 indicates that lack of connectivity was the ranked as the major hindrance in online learning. The situation is even worse for those from remote areas. The findings highlight the India’s digital divide and lack of equity in access to uninterrupted internet proving to be a hassle to many students.

Table 6

Bottlenecks in online learning.

The second and third constraints were data limit and data speed which were again the limitations of internet infrastructure. These give us an insight that if any country wants to move towards online education then as a pre-requisite it should focus on its internet facilities. Lack of traditional way of direct interactions in classrooms is also a major concern along with those mentioned above in conducting online classes.

  • 9. Factors affecting success of online classes

Qualitative analysis of the open-ended questions indicate that the majority of the participants recognized the following components for conducting online classes successfully such as nature of content, infrastructure, competency of the instructor, student readiness and follow up and various subcomponents were also discussed.

Majority of the respondents opined that nature of content and infrastructure were the major determinants for smooth conduct of online classes (see Table 7a , Table 7b ) The course instructor should spend quality time to design the content which should be well structured, concise, interactive and relevant. The students should be able to record the classes such that content can be accessed at any time based on their convenience. Recording will also come in handy for those students who have internet connectivity issues to live stream the classes.

Table 7a

Factors affecting success of online classes.

Table 7b

Frequency of themes identified for success of online classes.

Where TC-Total Count.

The online classes will succeed only if all the students have access to internet. Minimum technical requirements such as internet connectivity, devices and software requirements should be fulfilled for optimal learning experience.

  • 10. Factors that could lead to failure of online classes

Many participants in this research study reported that technological constraint, distractions, instructor’s incompetency, learner’s inefficacy and health issues were challenges in their online learning experience.

The biggest challenge reported by participants was technological constraints. The concern over technological constraints was also reflected across all the responses (see Table 8a , Table 8b ) . Lack of access to internet will exclude some of the learners from the online classes. Slow connections can also make accessing course platforms and materials frustrating. Online classes will be successful only if internet facility is provided to all by making it equitable and affordable.

Table 8a

Factors affecting failure of online classes.

Table 8b

Frequency of themes identified for failure of online classes.

The concern over a lack of community was also expressed by the respondents. It is challenging to build a comfortable environment for learning or a sense of community in the online environment. It will be important to think about ways that students and teachers can get to know each other and stay connected.

Incompetency of the instructor was also reflected from the survey. Efforts should be made by the instructor to make classes interesting and effective so as to sustain the interest of the learner. It is also important to feel comfortable using a computer and navigating the Internet.

In addition to discussing specific challenges and useful components, interviewees provided several suggestions for conducting online classes smoothly during COVID-19 pandemic. The major themes identified were general, content, connectivity, interactivity, flexibility, skills and follow-up (see Table 9a , Table 9b ) .

Table 9a

Themes identified for suggestions for online classes.

Table 9b

Frequency of themes identified for suggestions.

Where- TC-Total Count.

Majority of the participants opined that online classes are effective provided that the classes are well structured and interactive with flexible curriculum supported with uninterrupted internet connectivity and competent instructor.

  • 11. Discussion

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the preference and perception of students regarding the online classes.

Majority of the respondents preferred online classes to cope up with the curriculum due to lockdown in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic, whereas 30% of the respondents suggested suspending the classes or providing reading materials till the lockdown is lifted. In order to probe into this matter, analysis of perception of the respondents regarding online classes was required.

We also identified the learners’ perceptions of successful components and hindrances in online learning environment. Early work has provided some fundamental insights into the prospects of online learning ( Cereijo et al., (1999) ; Hartley and Bendixen (2001) ; Hill (2002) ). The components identified by the participants were in line with previous research. One of the primary factors listed for determining the success of online classes was structure of online classes. This finding is reinforced by the studies of Dempsey and Van Eck (2002) ;; Song et al.(2004) ; Allen (2011) .In order to enhance the productivity of the learners’ long duration classes should be avoided and sufficient break should be given between two consecutive classes. It will not only avoid cognitive load but also takes care of the physical strain caused due to prolonged use of electronic gadgets. It was supported by Thompson’s (2014) formula of work for 52 ​min and break for 17.

Technical proficiency of teachers and learners related to usage of computer and internet is a major factor determining the effectiveness of online classes. It was in line with the findings of Tsai and Lin (2004) ; Peng, et al. (2006) ; Convenience and flexibility were identified as the strength of online classes. Petrides (2002) claimed that respondents indicated that it was convenient to work in an online course in collaborative groups without rearranging the schedule for everyone as one would do in traditional classroom learning. Poole (2000) found that learners often accessed resources for the course from their home computers, the most convenient location for them. Hence care should be taken to fix the online classes based on the learner’s convenience and it will be better if recorded videos are uploaded in the university website so that the learner can access the videos as per the convenience.

Agriculture education system gives a lot of emphasis on imparting practical skills to the learners. But conducting the practical classes online is a difficult task. In the wake of adapting to the changed times, innovative solutions like 3D virtual labs are being devised. A teacher’s competency in communication as well his ability to use the multimedia contents for effective presentation are very important in this juncture. The results of the study clearly highlight that the lack of teachers’ competencies could be a major reason for failure of online classes and also calls for further exploration on the potential of the recent initiatives in online practical classes to further develop suitable models/applications to cater the real needs.

Interactivity was found to be one of the major driving forces for success of online classes. For example, the findings by Johnson et al. (2008) indicates that developing and sustaining a collaborative learning space within an e-learning environment is essential for maximizing the satisfaction of the participants. In addition to this Gunawardena and Zittle (1997) found a strong correlation between learners’ social presence and their overall satisfaction in the medium.

Online classes must engage participants through frequent, meaningful activities that helps to keep them focussed. The importance of frequency of interaction in making online classes was also explained by Huggett (2014) . It was also found that lack of immediacy in getting answers to their queries was also found to be a challenge in online learning. It was also reported by Hara and Kling’s (1999) ; Petrides’ (2002) ; Vonderwell’s (2003) . Hence care should be taken by the instructor to answer the queries of the learners’ immediately.

Suggestions were also taken from the participants to enhance the effectiveness of online learning. It was found that appropriate content, connectivity, recorded videos along with proper follow up makes online classes on par with the traditional classroom situation. Majority of the participants reiterated the point several times. Therefore, Online learning thus allows institutions and/or teachers to reach learners virtually, enhances convenience and strengthens educational opportunities ( Bourne et al.(1997) ; Owston (1997) ; Hara and Kling (1999) , ( 2001 ); Schrum (2000) ; Rourke (2001) ; Hill (2002) ; Hofmann (2002) ).

Even in countries with little digital divide, unlike India, and has better internet connectivity has never shifted to complete online mode before this pandemic. Reasons could be varied including the advantage of face to face interactivity, immediate feedback and sense of community amongst many other. One reason could also be related to difficulty in teaching skills, as in practical classes. In Agricultural Education, where the weightage to practical aspects of learning is more, shifting completely online mode may not be possible. In the immediate future, the universities may resort to a hybrid mode where the classes are conducted online and practical’s are conducted in small batches with social distancing. The findings of the study can be very useful in designing the content as well as structure for the online classes.

  • 12. Limitations

Due to time constraint the study was restricted only to Agricultural students from India. Further we have limited our analysis to understand the perception of learners and excluded the instructors for the sake of brevity and time constraint.

  • 13. Conclusion

With efforts to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, the contours of education system are changing with online education becoming the primary means of instruction. Universities and institutions are shifting to online platforms to catch up with the curriculum. It may be too early to say how students and teachers will cope with online learning as they figure out the constraints, reorient to address them but the perception and readiness of teachers and students is an important consideration which we have tried to document.

The findings of this study indicated that majority of the students evinced a positive attitude towards online classes in the wake of corona. The online learning was found to be advantageous as it provided flexibility and convenience for the learners. Students preferred well-structured content with recorded videos uploaded in university websites. They also indicated the need for interactive sessions with quizzes and assignments at the end of each class to optimise the learning experience. However, most students also reported that online classes could be more challenging than traditional classroom because of the technological constraints, delayed feedback and inability of the instructor to handle effectively the Information and Communication Technologies. Therefore, all these factors should be considered while developing an online course to make it more effective and productive for the learner.It’s possible that once the COVID-19 pandemic settles down, we may see a continued increase in education systems using online platforms for study aids, albeit in a hybrid mode in combination with regular classes. Hence this study will prove useful for reimagining and redesigning the higher education with components involving online mode.

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

  • CRediT authorship contribution statement

T. Muthuprasad: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Project administration, Writing - original draft, Validation, Investigation. S. Aiswarya: Conceptualization, Writing - review & editing, Formal analysis, Validation, Investigation, Visualization. K.S. Aditya: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - review & editing, Validation, Resources. Girish K. Jha: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - review & editing, Supervision.

  • Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

  • Acknowledgement

We whole-heartedly acknowledge all the respondents for spending their valuable time on filling our questionnaire. We also acknowledge the anonymous referee for providing valuable comments.

Appendix A Supplementary data to this article can be found online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2020.100101 .

  • Appendix A. Supplementary data

The following is/are the supplementary data to this article:

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A girl, who has missed her online classes due to a lack of internet facilities, sits on the ground in a circle drawn with chalk to maintain safe distance as she listens to pre-recorded lessons over loudspeakers, after schools were closed following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in Dandwal village in the western state of Maharashtra, India, July 23, 2020. Picture taken July 23, 2020. REUTERS/Prashant Waydande - RC2P6I9O9AW2

A girl, who has missed her online classes due to a lack of internet facilities, listens to pre-recorded lessons over loudspeakers in the western state of Maharashtra Image:  REUTERS/Prashant Waydande

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research paper on online education in india during covid 19

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  • The rapid shift to e-learning prompted by the pandemic has resurfaced long-standing issues of inequality and a digital divide in India that must be addressed by future economic, education and digitalization policies.

The education system in India is facing a new crisis thanks to COVID-19. Besides the effect on short-term learning outcomes, extended school closures will result in a loss in human capital and diminished economic opportunities in the long run.

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What does this mean for India and its people?

India has the world’s second-largest school system, after China . Shutting schools to maintain social distancing amidst the COVID-19 crisis was the most logical solution to avoid community transmission. However, this prolonged closure has a disproportionately negative impact on the most vulnerable students. The pandemic has not only caused the wide rift in educational inequality to balloon but also exacerbated existing disparities .

A total of 320 million learners in India have been adversely affected and transitioned to the e-learning industry, which comprises a network of 1.5 million schools . An NSSO 2014 report highlights that 32 million children were already out of school before the pandemic — the majority of them belonging to the socially disadvantaged class in the country.

While the government endorses India as the flag-bearer of the digital revolution and acknowledges that it is a diverse and multilingual country, as supported by the recently drafted new education policy , e-learning platforms cannot replicate the various dialects, varied contexts and different lived experiences that are brought together by physical classrooms. If e-learning is the “new normal”, the policy must go further to address the feasibility of digitalization to ensure equity and quality in education.

The operational burden

E-learning, as the name suggests, relies on the availability and accessibility of technology, but little or no availability of electricity is a significant challenge to taking advantage of education online. In a recent 2017-18 survey , the Ministry of Rural Development found that only 47% of Indian households receive more than 12 hours of electricity and more than 36% of schools in India operate without electricity. This suggests that while students from families with better means of living can easily bridge the transition to remote learning, students from underprivileged backgrounds are likely to succumb to inefficiency and a lack of adaptation, either because of the inaccessibility of the technology or the low education of their parents to guide them through tech-savvy applications.

Aside from the stresses of access and affordability, a daunting task for a student is to keep up with their studies and peers. Unlike an active classroom setting, e-learning does not accommodate one-to-one discussions or problem solving with tutors. Reports emphasize that the receivers (students) are not the only ones struggling – teachers are too. Teachers and institutions are not always trained and equipped to transition to online teaching. Many teachers are unqualified when it comes to using new technologies and interfaces.

The digital divide and gender bias

NSSO 2014-2015 data suggests that economic factors are critical to children dropping out of school in India. The pandemic and lockdown have affected 1.4m migrant workers and others working in the unorganized sector (90% of India’s population is engaged in disorganized work). The migrant workers have either moved back home along with their children or are unable to send remittances home this season. In such a situation, the emphasis on technology-driven education is preventing many children in the country from continuing school education.

According to the Key Indicators of Household Social Consumption on Education in India report , based on the 2017-18 NSSO, fewer than 15% of rural Indian households have internet access (as opposed to 42% urban Indian households). A mere 13% of people surveyed (aged above five) in rural areas — just 8.5% of females — could use the internet. Girls in vulnerable households face increased domestic duties inducing their inability to access online education either because of inadequate access to the internet and gadgets or because the male child and his teaching are prioritized. This silent exclusion of children belonging to families in distress may cause child labour and child marriage.

Regional disparities in internet access in India

Economic reform policies have always leaned towards hyper-digitalization. For a long time, they have discussed how to innovate working and studying with at-home technologies. However, the implementation of these policies has not addressed the educational inequalities that have today emerged as a crisis in the caste and class struggle in India.

The scope of e-learning is enormous and can help realize the potential of each student. There lie both opportunities and challenges for the government and the private sector. The aim should be to ensure equal and adequate access to such platforms as the country continues to globalize and catch up with advanced economies. If the Indian education system aims to transit to online learning in the future, it must emphasize policies that bridge the digital divide and move the country closer to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

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Online education and its effect on teachers during COVID-19-A case study from India

Affiliation.

  • 1 Area of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Management Indore, Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India.
  • PMID: 36862704
  • PMCID: PMC9980775
  • DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0282287

Background: COVID pandemic resulted in an initially temporary and then long term closure of educational institutions, creating a need for adapting to online and remote learning. The transition to online education platforms presented unprecedented challenges for the teachers. The aim of this research was to investigate the effects of the transition to online education on teachers' wellbeing in India.

Methods: The research was conducted on 1812 teachers working in schools, colleges, and coaching institutions from six different Indian states. Quantitative and qualitative data was collected via online survey and telephone interviews.

Results: The results show that COVID pandemic exacerbated the existing widespread inequality in access to internet connectivity, smart devices, and teacher training required for an effective transition to an online mode of education. Teachers nonetheless adapted quickly to online teaching with the help of institutional training as well as self-learning tools. However, respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of online teaching and assessment methods, and exhibited a strong desire to return to traditional modes of learning. 82% respondents reported physical issues like neck pain, back pain, headache, and eyestrain. Additionally, 92% respondents faced mental issues like stress, anxiety, and loneliness due to online teaching.

Conclusion: As the effectiveness of online learning perforce taps on the existing infrastructure, not only has it widened the learning gap between the rich and the poor, it has also compromised the quality of education being imparted in general. Teachers faced increased physical and mental health issues due to long working hours and uncertainty associated with COVID lockdowns. There is a need to develop a sound strategy to address the gaps in access to digital learning and teachers' training to improve both the quality of education and the mental health of teachers.

Copyright: © 2023 Surbhi Dayal. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

  • COVID-19* / epidemiology
  • Communicable Disease Control
  • Education, Distance*
  • Educational Personnel*
  • India / epidemiology

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Indian government E-learning initiatives in response to COVID-19 crisis: A case study on online learning in Indian higher education system

Madanjit singh.

1 Department of Computer Science, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, India

Sulaimon Oyeniyi Adebayo

2 Department of Computer Engineering and Technology, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, India

Munish Saini

Jaswinder singh, associated data.

An online survey is conducted to collect the data.

Not applicable.

Recently, the whole world has faced the deadliest and dangerous consequences due to the transmission of infectious novel coronavirus (nCov). With the outbreak of COVID-19, the education learners, practitioners, and other stakeholders were at the sake of a loss, as it causes the suspension of physical classes and physical interaction of the learners. In these circumstances, Electronic learning (E-learning), Online learning, and the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) tools came in handy. It helped the learners in the dissemination of ideas, conducting online classes, making online discussion forums, and taking online examinations. Like the government of each country, the Indian government was also caught off-guard but the existing E-learning infrastructure was able to leverage on while devising plans to tailor them to new situations and launching new ones. The initiatives at the forefront of this noble battle launched by the Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD) includes Diksha, Swayam Prabha Channel, Shiksha Van, E-Pathshala, and National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER). It worth noting that apart from the Indian central government efforts, each state has various online education initiatives that are tailored to their needs. This research evaluated each of these initiatives commenced by central and state governments and present a detailed analysis of most of the relevant initiatives. Additionally, a survey is conducted to get insights of learners in concern to online learning. Despite the issues raised in this learning, the outcomes come to be satisfactorily favoring online learning.

Introduction

Electronic Learning (E-learning) is the acquisition of knowledge with the help of electronic media or devices such as laptop computers, desktop computers, mobile phones, iPods, and iPads (Bakare & Orji, 2019 ). In the modern world, E-learning (online education) meaning can be extended to the use of different applications of computers such as Artificial intelligence (Gams et al., 2019 ), Quantum Computing (Cox, 2013 ), and Machine learning in knowledge acquisition (Lykourentzou et al., 2009 ). It also gives students the liberty to be in charge of their learning activities (Gomes & Gomes, 2011 ) and can be interpreted as virtual learning as only the electronic copy of the learning materials is available and not the hard copy.

A noteworthy development in E-learning over the past decade has a great impact on educational and training practices in the information society (Khan, 2015 ). Educational institutes are investing huge capital in E-learning systems to align with the new developments (Levy, 2006 ). E-learning development is not limited to academia alone. With the arrival of the internet and online learning methods and emerging technologies, E-learning has become more acceptable in the workspaces. (Khan, 2015 ).

Manual or traditional ways of learning are becoming more obsolete day by day because of the evolvement of ICT. Employment of ICT is becoming more popular in the modern education system (Sood & Saini, 2020 ) and the majority of the students do not find it interesting to learn with the physical copy of books or other study materials (Rambli et al., 2013 ). Furthermore, the manual ways of learning require more space, money, and time in maintaining the learning materials than electronic ways, physical materials can be misplaced, stolen, or damaged easily (Iwayemi & Adebayo, 2019 ).

ICT is one of the major tools driving the learning system in the twenty-first century (Oliver, 2002 ; Khlaisang & Koraneekij, 2019 ). The manual ways of learning are being faced out in academia as well as various industries in the world. According to research conducted by Quinn in 2011, it was established that the percentage of companies planning to provide E-learning support for their staff has risen from 38.5% in 2007 to 51% in 2011 (Quinn, 2011 ). Different researchers have the opinion that traditional learning methods should be used alongside ICT-driven learning methods (Yom, 2004 ; Hameed et al., 2008 ; Ariana et al., 2016 ). Another example is Adzobu in his 2014 research, where he opined that online learning platforms will co-evolve with traditional learning platforms in the future (Adzobu, 2014 ). Also, Iwayemi and Adebayo gave the same opinion that automated systems should not eliminate existing manual systems but should work side by side with the existing system (Iwayemi & Adebayo, 2019 ).

The significance of E-learning can no longer be veiled. The evolvement has been rapid over the last decade and several agencies, companies, and government bodies are embracing the changes. This evolution sees limelight in the mid-1990s as an initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (Cerón-Figueroa et al., 2017 ) and has been massively engraved into our daily activities since then. E-learning can be segmented into two approaches, asynchronous and synchronous (Shahabadi & Uplane, 2015 ). Asynchronous gives a flexible approach and enables learners and teachers to learn and teach at a convenient time without being dependent on each other and is mostly used in online courses (Hrastinski, 2008 ). The synchronous approach on the other hand gives real-time feelings of physical classroom experience (Hrastinski, 2008 ). The experience is more social and enables real-time interaction between teachers and learners. Typical examples include video conferencing and webinars. Educational Institutions, Organisations, and Government Agencies should be aware of the cons and pros of the two approaches for them to make productive decisions in their online learning initiatives.

The highly transmissible Corona Virus (Shereen et al., 2020 ), also known as COVID-19 which emanated from China in December 2019 (Zhang et al., 2020 ) has since its inception date claimed over 2,000,000 lives with over 120,000,000 infected worldwide. 1 United States of America (USA), India, Brazil, Russia, and the United Kingdom (UK) are the most affected countries. The USA has over 30,000,000 confirmed cases to date and UK has the lowest among the five has over 4,000,000 confirmed cases with 120,000+ deaths. 2

The advent of COVID-19 called for the closure of physical classes (Pal & Vanijja, 2020 ), which left government and educational bodies with the only option of virtual learning to curb the novel coronavirus. Government with working E-learning systems and procedures find it easier to transit to the online learning space (Uju & Olofu, 2020 ) while those without solid E-learning programs or systems take a longer time to adjust to the sudden development.

Aim and objectives

This study aims to evaluate the Indian Government Initiatives for E-learning especially during the COVID-19. In extension, we intend to perform the following objectives:

  • (i) Assess the E-learning (online learning) initiatives of the Indian government in response to the COVID-19 outbreak.
  • (ii) Evaluate student’s and teacher’s responses to E-learning initiatives and their tools.
  • (iii) To examine the insights into the outcomes (or responses) of online teaching in Indian higher education institutes.

To attain the above-mentioned objectives the study is conducted in two phases (refer to Fig.  1 ). Phase 1, emphasizes explaining and exploring the various online learning initiatives taken by the government of India in the period of COVID-19. In Phase 2, we have conducted an online survey to access and explore the responses of the online learners (students and faculty members) specifically belonging to higher education institutes or organizations.

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Phases to conduct the study

Organization of the Paper

This paper is organized into the following sections. The “ Related Work ” section covers a review of research work on E-learning (online learning) and the educational initiatives taken by the Indian central and state governments in response to COVID-19. The Section “ Modern Perspective of E-learning ” encompasses an overview of the Merit and Demerit of E-learning as well as requirements for developing a standard E-learning system. Necessity, History, and modern perspectives of Open Education Resources (OER) are discussed in the “ OER ” section while E-learning tools evaluation is given in the “ Evaluating the use of E-learning and its tools ” section. Indian Government E-learning initiatives are covered in the “ Indian Central State Government Initiatives ” and “ Indian Central State Government Initiatives ” Sections. The “ Case Study ” section provides insight into Indian Government Initiatives for E-learning. It mainly consists of the data collection process, data pre-processing, methods, and algorithms employed in conducting and evaluating responses of the respondents (teacher and student). The elaborative explanation of the conducted research is provided in the “ Discussion ” section highlighting a detailed analysis of the conducted survey. The later part of the study concludes the major findings and also specifies the possible future recommendations.

Related work

E-learning is a concept that has been in existence since the 1960s but became widespread with the advent of the internet and the web (Bezovski & Poorani, 2016 ). Observing the growth of E-learning from the early 2000s, there has been increasing research on internet technology which is the bedrock of E-learning (Elango et al., 2008 ; Verawardina et al., 2020 ). Since then, scholars around the world have been assessing and evaluating the E-learning systems and giving recommendations that will optimize the process.

The novel coronavirus which broke out in 2019 acted as a catalyst in boosting the outreach and usage of E-learning. E-learning has been raised to be one of the major driving forces in the academic space. It has been a key player in ensuring the continuation of teaching and learning during the COVID-19 outbreak (Chang & Fang, 2020 ).

It is observed that before the COVID-19 outbreak, there have been several government initiatives relating to E-learning. Virtual School of the National School of Government in the United Kingdom established in 1970, GoLearn now known as USALearning by the United States of America, the Canada School of Public Service Campusdirect initiated in 2004 and the Civil Service College Open Academy of Singapore established in 2001 (Chen, 2014 ) are few of the old government initiatives towards E-learning. Government initiatives on E-learning have increased tremendously over the last decade, Indian government’s SWAYAM 3 and DIKHSA 4 both initiated in 2015 are typical examples of this.

It is no doubt the advent of COVID-19 is sudden, governments are left with no choice but virtual learning, especially amidst lockdown. The COVID-19 outbreak has elevated E-learning solutions by making it mandatory (García Vazquez et al., 2020 ; Radha et al., 2020 ). Though some governments had to pause learning activities because of the unavailability of working E-learning strategies, this research piece will help in solving similar problems in the future by collating detailed information about E-learning initiatives.

As the government trying to get acquainted with the latest development of a complete virtual learning environment, teachers and students are also in the process of getting used to the new development brought by the COVID-19 pandemic (Abbasi et al., 2020 ). Though teachers show better growth in the development than students. More than half of the student population face challenges with electricity, internet among other factors that affect their E-learning experience (Subedi et al., 2020 ). Students’ negative experiences also affect the teachers as they get disturbed during classes (Subedi et al., 2020 ), but teachers are performing better on the E-learning platforms (Gohiya & Gohiya, 2020 ).

Different researchers have successfully accessed the E-learning platforms, users’ (tutors and learners) perspective, developers, and government efforts in enhancing these platforms and initiatives before the COVID-19 outbreak. Shahzad et al. ( 2020 ) having performed an empirical analysis on Malaysian students dataset gathered with the help of google survey established that male and female have different usage levels of E-learning in Malaysian Universities.

Research conducted at the University of Tabuk established that above 60% of faculty members’ overall responses range from negativity to uncertainty (Albalawi & Badawi, 2008 ). Hoq ( 2020 ) argues otherwise in his 2020 survey performed to verify teachers’ preference towards diverse features of E-learning. He found that majority of teachers have a positive opinion towards E-learning.

Assessing the quality of E-learning in the Middle East, Elango et al. ( 2008 ) revealed that students attest to receiving all the needed support similar to the classroom environment. In the same manner, Loh et al. ( 2016 ) affirm that students perceive better learning outcomes in E-learning though they still have concerns about the flexibility of self-paced learning, lack of human interaction, self-motivation, and fostering teamwork.

Liaw ( 2008 ) surveyed 424 university students with a standard questionnaire to examine the learners’ satisfaction, behavioral intentions, and effectiveness of the Blackboard E-learning system. It was revealed that self-efficacy influences learner’s satisfaction with backboard E-learning. The same study also established that multimedia instruction, interactive learning activities, and E-learning system quality can influence the effectiveness of E-learning. In a similar direction, Al-Fraihat et al. ( 2020 ) gave the main determinants of E-learning perceived satisfaction as technical system quality, information quality, service quality, support system quality, learner quality, instructor quality, and perceived usefulness.

Kanjilal and Kaul ( 2016 ), while examining the Digital India initiative of the Indian Government gives more insight on Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds (SWAYAM) and other initiatives like National Mission on Education Through ICT (NMEICT), National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), a joint program of IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) and IISc (Indian Institute of Science). Similarly, (Chandwani et al., 2010 ) in their E-learning initiatives in India established that the Indian government always has given preference to the use of ICTs as a means of mass education.

Al-Rahmi et al. ( 2019 ), after evaluating the responses of 1286 students using E-learning systems in Malaysia observed that six perceptions of innovation characteristics (Relative Advantages, Observability, Trialability, Perceived Compatibility, Complexity, and Perceived enjoyment) have impacts on students’ E-learning behavioral intention. A similar study, (Salloum et al., 2019 ) while examining the impact of Social Medica Practices on E-learning systems acceptance established that social media practices have significant positive impacts on Perceived Usefulness (PU) and Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU).

Smaili et al. ( 2021 ) proposed a sustainable E-learning system to tackle school dropout. The new model was achieved with an adaptive E-learning system by manipulating the traces left by users’ interaction with their learning environment.

After referring to all these previous studies, we concluded that they gave different views on the usage, needs, advantages, and disadvantages of E-learning. The researchers are driving the common conclusion that the E-learning system will serve better and be more productive if properly implemented (Ristic & Stefanovic, 2020 ). These key points serve as the foundation on which we build the present research work. Although several studies have been conducted on COVID-19 and E-learning, few delve into the realm of government responses and initiatives on E-learning during the COVID-19 outbreak which is the main focus of this research. Furthermore, we also look forward to evaluating the responses of 354 students and 49 teachers, studying and working in 7 universities and 15 colleges (targeting only the higher education institutes/organizations) by surveying their online learning and teaching feedbacks especially in the period of this pandemic. We expect the outcomes of this study to help students, parents, and teachers in employing the best online education platform(s). Further, it will assist the Indian government as well as other governments in taking swift action in the future.

Modern perspective of E-learning

Usage of modern ICT for teaching and learning in the Indian higher educational institutions has become paramount (Arkorful & Abaidoo, 2015 ). The development that information technology has brought to the field of education cannot be overemphasized (Chen & Lien, 2011 ). The modern perspective of E-learning is becoming more diverse as it is being influenced by many factors. Sun et al. ( 2008 ) categorized these factors into six dimensions; student, teacher, course, technology, system design, and environmental dimensions. Though user satisfaction is one of the salient factors in determining the success of a system (DeLone & McLean, 1992 ), the students are more concerned about the quality of course content in terms of E-learning systems (Sun et al., 2008 ). Ease of use, usefulness, system quality, information quality, and computer self-efficacy are major determinants influencing user’s perception of E-learning systems (Hammouri & Abu-Shanab, 2018 ). Faculty members on the other hand have different perspectives that influenced their perception of E-learning. Abdekhoda et al. ( 2016 ) established that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influences, and behavioral indentation have a direct impact on faculty perception of E-learning. Novice faculty members as well as lecturers from Computer Science, Engineering, Education, and Arabic show more positive perceptions than other faculty members (Albalawi & Badawi, 2008 ). Voluntary participation of teachers in the E-learning initiatives is also a major factor that will directly influence their perception (Hrtoňová et al., 2015 ).

Advantages of E-learning

With the recent COVID-19 outbreak, universities and other educational institutions around the world are able to continue the teaching activities with the help of E-learning (or online learning) initiatives. This is a major indicator that E-learning is paramount to the global educational system. E-learning provides useful content that will prepare learners for their studies (Chen & Yao, 2016 ).

The most significant advantage of E-learning is the flexible feature of the system (Kimiloglu et al., 2017 ). The system can be accessed anyplace anytime (Nedeva & Dimova, 2010 ). Compared to traditional learning, there is a huge savings of cost (Arkorful & Abaidoo, 2015 ) and time (Talebian et al., 2014 ).

Kimiloglu et al. ( 2017 ) ironed out other advantages of E-learning as; convenience & accessibility, customization, outsourcing, cost-effectiveness, as well as employee commitment and motivation. In a similar pattern, (Puri, 2018 ) listed five (5) advantages of E-learning as; Consistent, scalable, personation, better retention, and time & cost saving. While examining the merit and demerit of E-learning within agricultural students in Iran, (Talebian et al., 2014 ) gave advantages of E-learning to include; Time and place accessibility, equity, enhancing group collaboration, direct access to other training resources, enhancing international dimension of educational services and determining the rate of progression in courses.

Disadvantages of E-learning

E-learning systems are attracting more users day by day. However, these users also face some challenges which are preventing them to derive the full benefits of E-learning and eventually make some of them give up on its usage. A major shortcoming of E-learning is the inability of the tutors and cohorts to discuss course contents and subject matter frequently (Elango et al., 2008 ). Some of the basic challenges of E-learning include Credibility, Technical issues, Computer Literacy, Time Management, and Self-Motivation.

  • Credibility

Everyone deserves to get value for time and resources invested which is justifiable but it does not work that way all the time on E-learning platforms. Since the struggle is not visible like attending physical classes or attending seminars/workshops, people tend to have some doubts about the credibility of E-learning (Mungania, 2003 ). Also, there are certain discriminations between online degree programs obtained through E-learning and the ones obtained physically in the college (Motlik, 2008 ).

Technical issues can be referred to as problem (s) that arise from hardware/software resources of the platform. Most users of E-learning platforms lack the basic technology requirements for the course they are enrolling for (Alkharang & Ghinea, 2013 ). Platform portability, which is the ability for the platform to be accessible from any device, weak internet bandwidth, unstable power supply, and hardware challenges such as weak monitor display can be a threat for the users in deriving the full benefits of the platform.

Although an average twenty-first-century student will be computer literate. However, most users lack knowledge of computer usage (Gagnon et al., 2007 )) such as basic skills to troubleshoot hardware failure, file handling, and word processing. Users with a lack of the above skills are likely to create the problem (s) for themselves even though the entire platform is working well. Furthermore, this may make it hard for them to follow the designed Learning Management System and their learning experience becomes problematic which may eventually prevent them from being on the same level as their virtual classmates.

Online courses are as time demanding as their offline counterpart. While E-learning gives freedom to students to learn at their desired time (Nedeva & Dimova, 2010 ), extra care must be taken to schedule the learning because of the regular day-to-day engagements of the students. The vague (Claxton & Murrell, 1987 ) and digital nature (Kumbhar, 2009 ) of E-learning indicate that bad-time management could lead to failure.

E-learning requires self-discipline which is lacked by many students. The distraction of being on the internet (Azlan et al., 2020 ) is already there. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, news websites, Ads are enough to distract students. Users should manage their internet usage closely to avoid wasting precious study time. E-learning (online learning), unlike classroom learning, lacks check and balance. If a student lacks proper discipline, he can lag with his virtual classmates which may eventually arise the desire to quit the course.

Open education resources (OER)

Open Education Resources (OER) is a movement for openness in higher education that can be attributed to larger trends such as Open Source Software (OSS) and Open access (Hylén, 2006 ). Mainly, OER includes educational resources like textbooks, curriculum maps, course materials, streaming videos, multimedia applications, podcasts, and other learning & teaching materials that are openly available for the use of students and teachers without the need to pay royalties or license fees (Butcher, 2015 ). OER works with Creative Commons, founded in 2001 to revive the shrinking public domain for content owners to retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions (Atkins et al., 2007 ).

Need of OER

The primary need of OER is to serve as a robust platform that encompasses learning and teaching materials that are readily accessible to students, teachers, and open source contributors. It is believed that openly licensed education materials can contribute to increasing the quality as well as the effectiveness of education at a reduced cost (Butcher, 2015 ).

Historical perspective

OER came to the limelight in 2002 during the conference held by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). UNESCO convened a group of academics, majorly from developing countries to access a new development – the Open Course Ware (OCW) initiatives of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (D’Antoni, 2009 ). The Mission coined the term “Open Educational Resources” as;

“The open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use, and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes. (UNESCO, 2002 )”

OER movement is still new as it is less than two decades since its inception but significant initiatives have been undertaken since its inception to ensure its development.

Modern perspective

Traditionally, OER includes textbooks, course readings, and other learning materials for educational purposes (Gerald & Mary, 2020 ). With the tremendous evolution of the internet and online platforms, OER also advanced to be more efficient, effective, and productive. One of the major challenges of the early OER is the end user’s accessibility to high-speed internet connections, most especially in developing countries (Johnstone, 2005 ). This problem is deteriorating with modern OER as the high-speed internet connection is becoming widely spread than it used to be, especially with the advent of 4G and 5G technologies. Also, modern OER platforms have undergone several modifications from open source contributors and this has made it to be more user-friendly, cost-effective, more accessible, efficient, and productive.

Tools, platforms and other open educational resources (OER)

The longest-running and largest OER initiative named OpenCourseWare Project was released in 2002 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Gerald & Mary, 2020 ). The initiative now provides course materials for more than 2500 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) courses.

Another OER initiative is Connexions founded in 2000 by Richard Baraniuk and his colleagues at Rice University. It was changed to OpenStax CNX in 1999. The new OpenStax was based on the philosophy that scholarly and educational content can and should be shared, reused and recombined, interconnected, and continually enriched. 5 Connexions’ resources are still available under a CC BY Creative Commons license, which indicates that the content can be used, adapted, and remixed as long as attribution is provided (Kelty, 2008 ).

Another OER initiative is the California-based non-profit organization founded in 2007 named the CK-12 Foundation. It aimed at reducing cost and increase access to K-12 (from kindergarten to 12th grade) education in the USA and the world at large. CK-12 foundation tools are used by more than 38,000 schools in the USA alone alongside a growing number of international schools (Hepler, 2014 ).

OER tools have evolved widely today that we almost lost counts, there are hundreds of tools for Open Education Resources. Educause, Cloe, Open Class, Google in Education, Ariadne, WikiEducator, ATutor, Open of Course, The Open University, Olat, Canvas, Citizendium, Commonwealth of Learning, SchoolTool, are few among them.

Indian government E-learning initiatives

In this section, we present the content on prominent and effective E-learning initiatives taken by the Indian central and state governments, pre and peri COVID -19 pandemic.

Central government pre COVID-19 E-learning initiatives

The Indian government has always been giving preference to the use of ICT as a means of mass education. CLASS (Computer Literacy and Social on Schools) project was launched as far back as 1984 by the Indian government to make computer literacy a compulsory project for class XI and XII. 2598 and 2371 schools started computer literacy in the seventh five-year plan and eight five-year plans respectively (Chandwani et al., 2010 ).

A communication satellite is known as EDUSAT (Educational Satellite); the satellite primarily devoted to the education sector was launched on the 20th of September, 2004 by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) (Khanchandani et al., 2015 ). EDUSAT provides education to millions of people at their doorstep and enables information to be disseminated in local languages and dedicated long-distance learning in India (Chandwani et al., 2010 ).

SWAYAM, a major initiative of the Indian Government on E-learning was initiated to provide an integrated platform and portal for online courses in the education sector of India (Kanjilal & Kaul, 2016 ). SWAYAM was developed by the Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD) and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) with the help of Microsoft and was specifically designed to benefit working professionals, college dropouts, and students from remote areas (Nayek, 2018 ). The strength of SWAYAM lies in its qualitative evaluation system, recognition of credits and equity access, and affordability (Kaveri et al., 2016 ). Its history can be traced back to 2003 with the initiation of the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) by the IITs and IISc. Though it focused on courses in Engineering, Science, and humanities stream, the horizon was broadened to all disciplines in the higher education sector in 2009 with the launch of the National Mission of Education through ICT (NME-ICT) (Kanjilal & Kaul, 2016 ).

Other Indian government pre-COVID19 E-learning initiatives includes; Consortium for Educational Communication (CEC), National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), Online Education Broadcast and Virtual Classrooms, Sakshat, Institute of Life Long Learning (ILLL), and School of Open Learning (SOL) E-learning Gateways.

Response to COVID-19 outbreak

The Corona Virus Outbreak was sudden and unexpected, the government and educational institutes are not adequately prepared. The government ensures learning continues even during the lockdown. State and UTs individual efforts to take education to the doorstep of every child is commendable and a strong indication that E-learning remains one of the tools that leverage the effect of COVID-19 in the country.

Central government Covid-19 era E-learning initiatives

With the demanding nature of COVID-19, the government had to provide alternative means for teaching and learning, especially during the lockdown. The first initiative is to access existing systems and leverage them to meet the current demand. DIKSHA (Digital Infrastructure for Knowledge Sharing) launch in September 2017 was one of the tools the government leveraged in the COVID-19 era. VidyaDaan was launched in April 2020 as a national content contribution programme to leverage the DIKSHA platform.

A comprehensive initiative of the Indian government called PM eVidya aimed at unifying all efforts related to digital, online, and on-air education was announced on the 17th of May, 2020. It was aimed at enabling equitable multi-mode access to education. 6

Further E-learning initiatives that are employed during this COVID-19 era include; Swayam Prabha TV Channels, For open schools and pre-service education, On Air, For the differently-abled, E-textbooks, and National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER). 7

Swayam Prabha TV channels

MHRD dedicated thirty-two (32) channels to broadcast high-quality educational programs. It provides separate channels for school education and higher education. The initiative is still undergoing development and upgrading as the content & topics are expected to be organized by chapter and topic-wise in the future to ensure asynchronous usage by everyone anywhere, anytime.

For open schools and pre-service education

Approximately ninety-two (92) course contents relating to the National Institute of Open Schooling from grades 9 to 12 were uploaded on the SWAYAM portal. The contents can be accessed through SWAYAM.

Radio broadcasting focused on learning-based activities are being used for children in remote areas. 289 community radio stations were also employed to broadcast NIOS for grade 9–12 students. Shiksha Vani Podcast with 430 audio contents owned by Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE) is being used to deliver all the subjects of grades 1 to 12.

For the differently-abled

One Direct-to-Home (DTH) channel is dedicated specifically to hearing-impaired students. Study materials in sign language are developed in Digitally Accessible Information System (DAISY) for visually and hearing-impaired students; the materials are available on YouTube and NIOS website. 8

E-textbooks

Electronic textbooks are available on the e-Pathshala web portal and applications. It has mobile applications for android and iOS as well as windows desktop app. 9

National Repository of open educational resources (NROER)

NROER has approximately 17,500 pieces of e-content of The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and other collaborative partners. The materials are available for various school subjects.

The struggle of the central government in upgrading the existing E-learning tools and working on new initiatives is a continuous task. More initiatives on E-learning are expected to be inaugurated in the nearest future even after the COVID-19 phase.

State governments’ E-learning initiatives

Alongside the efforts of the Central government, State and Union Territories are not leaving the task to the Central government alone as the majority initiated several E-learning initiatives to meet the demand of the present situation. States/UT like Delhi, Rajasthan, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh, Kerela, Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal, Meghalaya, Punjab, Ladakh, Telangana, Tripura, and many others also leveraged DIKSHA solutions for their E-learning initiatives. In particular, there are 28 states and 8 Union Territories (UT) in India. 10 It is found that covering and exploring the initiatives of each state is not possible in the present form of study, as we have faced the following set of problems and considered the subsequent inclusion and exclusion criteria:

  • i. As the complete count of E-learning (online learning) initiatives and the total number of states is high. It is not feasible to perform the fine-grained analysis with the present set of research objectives.
  • ii. A limited number of initiatives are taken by a specific state 11 in comparison to other states. Therefore, we have excluded the states based on the frequency of initiatives taken by them.
  • iii. We specifically, included the state of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). As it among the most disturbed and sensitive states in India. 12
  • iv. Few states (like Delhi) have executed and implemented the most renowned initiatives.
  • v. The level of education (or literacy rate 13 ) is also taken into consideration while the selection of the states.
  • vi. Excluded the states those have taken a limited number of E-learning initiatives but are utilizing the initiatives taken by central or other state governments.
  • vii. The state-wise rate of population 14 below poverty is also taken under consideration while finalizing the state for consideration.

With the consideration of all the above-mentioned criteria and limitations, we have selected only five states (Delhi, Punjab, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, J&K) from the sample of around 28 and 8 UT’s.

E-learning schemes by some of the States/UTs selected using the above parameters are given below.

School Education: Chief Minister (CM) of Delhi launched “parenting in the time of Corona” on 4th April 2020 with the theme “Every home a school, every parent a teacher”. Other school education schemes are live online classes, digital entrepreneurship mindset class, Online happiness class for family among others.

Teacher Education: The government also established programs for the training of teachers and faculty members. These include among others; Online Capacity Building Programme (OCBP), 15 and Learning Never Stop (LNS) lecture series.

The department of school education, Punjab initiated schemes to bring online education to each student. These involve; Creation of Mobile Application & System (iScuela Learn) which have hit over 100,000+ downloads as of January 2021, YouTube channel (Edusat Punjab), Radio & DTH/Cable TV channels, EDUSAT Contents through Satellite Network (Receive Only Terminal), E-books & month-wise e-book distribution, ICT Computer Labs, and Smart Classrooms.

The government of Andhra Pradesh has the following initiatives as part of her efforts to provide quality education to students; Abhyasa APP for teachers and students, E-contents for students, Toll-free voice and video calls for students in clearing their doubts and understanding critical topics, Facebook live training program, Radio and TV lessons, Webinar based ICT training, among others.

E-learning schemes in Bihar include; Digital Education Portal, 16 Social Media Based Learning (Facebook and WhatsApp), YouTube Channel, TV Channel, and Mobile Applications (Unnayan: Mera Mobile Mera Vidyalaya, Vidyavahini Bihar).

Jammu and Kashmir Knowledge Network (JKKN) Samadhan AI-Based Educational Chatbot, Radio & TV Classes, Teachers Initiatives, are part of the tools used in ensuring learning continues during the COVID-19 era in Jammu and Kashmir.

Analyzing the outcomes of online teaching and learning with the conduct of online survey: A case study

In this section, we present the case study to investigate the ground truth on the usage of E-learning tools, online classes, and other initiatives of the Indian Government by stakeholders (teachers and students) of the Indian higher education sector. It provides insights on data analysis and methodology along with the outcomes of the conducted case study.

Data analysis and methodology

The data analysis methodology presents the information on the process of data collection and design of the questionnaire, data preprocessing, methods, and algorithms that are used to conduct the survey and to process the collected data.

Data collection and design of the questionnaire

An online survey was conducted to record and gain insights into the feedbacks of Indian students and teachers (or faculty members) on the conduct of online learning (online classes) during the COVID-19 situation. The survey contains a questionnaire, designed to collect information on the experience of learners for online study (learning), various issues faced by the learners, comparative responses with offline study, suggestive changes, and feedbacks from respondents. Specifically, A questionnaire is a research instrument consisting of a set of questions intended to capture responses from respondents in a standardized manner. 17 The quality of the data analysis in the survey process depends upon the quality of the questions asked in the questioner (Williams, 2003 ). The richness of the questionnaire depends on many factors like the content of questions, topics covered, their wording, format, and sequencing, all of which can have important consequences for the survey responses (Williams, 2003 ).

In this study, a total of 33 questions was asked in the questionnaire. The questions were divided into three categories; the first one is general information (including personal and online learning experience), the second is about possible issues/problems faced while using online learning, and the last one is the suggestion part (consisting of feedbacks and comments from the respondents). For deciding and making the efficient list of questions, we have referred to the specification of designing survey by Blair et al. ( 2013 ) in their research. For more details on the designing of the questionnaire, on inclusion (or exclusion) of a specific question, how to choose the appropriate set of responses, we suggest the readers explore the work of Blair et al. ( 2013 ).

An online version of this questionnaire was prepared and specified links were shared over e-mails, social media (like WhatsApp, Facebook, etc.), and other academic groups, targetting the audience consisting of students and teachers of higher education institutes (universities or organizations). We have preferred to conduct an online survey than offline to target a wider range of audiences while keeping in place all the COVID19 guidelines by the government (Wright, 2005 ). Additionally, the data was collected for the fortnight and stored in the database linked with the form. Samples were taken from each part of the audience (including students and teachers) of diverse age groups, levels of education, education institutes (colleges or universities), gender, streams (education specializations or fields), and from the parts of the country as shown in Table  1  (Acharya, 2013 ). A total of 403 responses have been collected, including 49 responses from teachers and 354 from students. It is also noted that the percentage of male respondents who participated in an online survey is more (approx. 55%). We also examined that most of the students belong to the age group of 20–30 years, whereas 63% of the teachers reside in the age group of 30–50 years.

Descriptive statistics of collected data

Data preprocessing

Data preprocessing includes data cleaning, data transformation, and filtration of the collected data. It helps in removing the anomalies from the dataset and make it ready for the analysis phase. In particular, Data cleaning refers to the technique of cleaning data by removing outliers, replacing missing values, smoothing noisy data, and correcting inconsistent data (Gupta & Sabitha, 2019 ). It is a significant step as the missing, incorrect, and erroneous data can pose a significant problem to the reliability and validity of study outcomes (Salkind, 2010 ). In our study, we prepared the data for further processing by following two methods.

Conversion of response to Likert scale

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Pre-processing steps sequence

Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis (or opinion mining) is a Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach to investigate the emotions, polarity, attitude, and opinion of the people from the written text (Liu & Zhang, 2012 ; Wook et al., 2019 ). In our survey, we have taken the feedbacks (suggestions or comments) from the respondents expressing their experience with the online conduct of the classes (online teaching and learning). Further, we performed opinion mining on the quantitative responses of the respondents, to examine and analyze the behavioral responses of the stakeholders.

Each feedback comment presents a sort of emotion that dignifies the acceptance or rejection of the online classes by teachers and students. The sentiment analyzer classifies the quantitative feedbacks as positive, negative, and neutral based on the extracted emotions (refer to Fig.  3 ). The working of the sentiment analyzer is shown in Algorithm 1.

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Sentiment analysis of respondents feedback

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The results of the sentiment analysis depict the presence of around 57% of the positive and 11% of the highly positive feedbacks by the faculty members. The students responded with only 45% of the positive comments in total. From the observed results, we may conclude that Indian higher education faculty members seem much satisfied with the online learning methods and tools in comparison to the students. Stickney et al. ( 2019 ) also presented similar outcomes, indicating the satisfaction of Higher education faculty members for online education. Furthermore, we have discussed the possible reasons for obtaining such results in the discussion section of this paper.

Moreover, there are some comments (of the respondents) specifying neutral sentiments (no emotion). We found the existence of approximately 6% of the neutral comments by both categories of the respondents. The negative feedbacks illustrate the unhappiness of the respondents with the conduct of online classes and learning. In the future study, we plan to perform an in-depth quantitative analysis on the negative comments. We also look forward to conducting the thematic analysis, to get insights into the limitations, problems, or issues faced by the learners in online learning. The negative emotions of students indicate their dissatisfaction with online teaching methods and other common problems like electricity failure, internet issues, disturbance by other participants, among others. In the collected data, we observed a total of 49% and 26% of the negative emotions (including the sum of negative and highly negative) from students and teachers respectively. This outcome pinpoints the presence of resistance and dissatisfaction among the respondents. Exploring the appropriate reasons for such a behavior is a topic of future research itself.

Topic modeling

Topic modeling is the statistical method to extract the relevant topics of discussion from the corpus of documents (Setiawan et al., 2020 ). It allows performing the semantic analyses and grouping (clustering) of the set of words (or similar expressions) from the documents corpus. The data points in the same group (cluster) are more similar to each other, in comparison to the data points in other groups (Saini et al., 2020 ). In this case study, we have applied the LDA (Latent Dirichlet allocation) algorithm, to analyze the comments (feedbacks or suggestions) of the respondents (teachers and students) concerning the conduct of online teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. LDA is among the most prominent and widely used algorithms for extracting the topics of discussion from the set of documents. This extraction of semantic topics from the respondent’s feedback helped us to investigate the pros and cons of online learning, other problems faced by respondents, areas of improvement, the success rate of online learning, and future suggestions for online learning and teaching. With all these extracted scenarios, it will be a huge task to explore deeply into all the topics. We take it as a future challenge to explore thoroughly all the possible reasons for these scenarios. The results of the LDA algorithm are shown in Fig.  4 . The findings indicate the formation of 5 clusters, with the five most frequent and important topics in each cluster.

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Topic modeling using LDA

Finding the relation among teaching and learning parameters

The conducted surveys illustrated the presence of variations in the responses of the teachers and students. We have used the Karl Pearson coefficient of correlation (Blyth, 1994 ) to get the degree of the dependency among the responses of both responders group. The value of the coefficient is expected to range between 0 and 1. The 0 signifies there exists no dependency among responders, whereas 1 signifies the perfect correlation (fully dependency). The degree of the correlation can be computed by using Eq. 1 (Blyth, 1994 ).

N represents the number of the questions on which analysis has been observed.

‘T’ is used to represent the value of the response of the teacher and the symbol ‘S’ is used to identify the student response value.

We have applied the Karl Pearson correlation method to the overall gathered responses of the students and teachers (faculty members). With the implication of eq. 1 , we got a strong relation (r = 0.712) among the responses of the two respondents (Benesty et al., 2009 ). It pointed to the fact that both respondents have shown a similar degree of acceptance (or rejection) for online teaching methods, tools, and problems faced.

Outcomes of the case study

Table  3 shows the results of general information collected from the respondent responses. It is seen that in Q1, almost all the responders have their own devices for teaching/learning. The percentage of both types is above 90%. Furthermore, it is observed that the most frequently used device by both the teachers and students is the Smartphone. Laptop and desktops are the next in the series based on the usage. Google Meet; an online meeting tool for attending virtual classes is the leading service used by both groups of responders as depicted from the results of the Q5. The outcome of Q6 specifies that the majority of the teachers deliver lectures by turning their cameras on, whereas large groups of students prefer to attend lectures by keeping the camera off.

General Information from the respondents

Furthermore, one of the sections of the questionnaire is used to collect the issues (or problems/challenges) faced by the respondents during the online teaching and learning. The results pointing to these challenges are presented in Table  4 . Network (or Internet) and electricity are among the foremost challenges that are faced by the learners. Around 76% of the teachers and 49% of the students have confronted network-related problems. 74% and 61% of teachers and students have encountered the problem of electricity during online teaching and learning respectively. Almost half of the respondents have also affirmed the presence of disturbance (or noise) in online classes. They specified different reasons like lack of specific student interest, network issues, hardware problems, disturbance from the surrounding environment, among others.

Issues faced in Online Learning

Furthermore, for the success of online classes (or education), it is worth knowing the average class size (number of participants). It is pointed that the appropriate size is a must for successful learning in online classes (McDaniel & Dickens, 2004 ). An oversize group or group with less than 2 participants can affect the overall outcomes of the online classes. For this purpose, we have asked the responders to specify the average number of participants attending online classes during COVID-19.

Figure  5 presents the graphical illustration of the collected responses on this data. Approximately 35% of responders mentioned that they attend an online class with around 100 other students. With these findings, we feel that it is very difficult to handle such a large size group in an online class. Moreover, in an outsized online class, it is obvious that students and teachers have to encounter common problems like disturbance, lack of interest, dissatisfaction (Ake-Little et al., 2020 ). Additionally, the teacher (or faculty member) cannot make an appropriate discussion with students and will not handle the queries of the students in a better way.

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Participants in a single session

In further analysis, we have explored the average duration an online learner/teacher spent for attending and delivering the lectures or conducting the discussion sections. We observed that the average daily time spent by both teachers and students on online learning is approximately 3–4 h (refer to Fig. ​ Fig.6). 6 ). Students are likely to spend more time as they have several lectures to attend daily whereas teachers are bound to take only 2–3 lectures. Moreover, it is also found that the average weekly time spent by the student for attending online classes (or for online study) is approximately 20 h. Whereas, the average teacher’s per-week teaching workload is 17–18 h (approx.) as per the data provided by them in the survey. With these findings, it is further a topic of research to find the impact of online learning duration on the health of the learners. In the future, we want to explore this challenge in a detailed and elaborative manner.

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Daily time spent on online learning

The end section of the survey is dedicated to taking suggestions from the users. The results of the suggestion part of the questionnaire are shown in Table  5 . It focuses on gathering information from respondents on the level of discussions, online examination, security, and their learning experience. Around 64% of teachers are in the view that online exams cannot be taken as an alternative for offline exams, whereas students are in the favour of online exams. On the other hand, both parties agree on the fact that online classes will not be able to replace offline classes.

User Experience of Online learning

Furthermore, we have asked the respondents to provide feedback (or suggestions) on the ongoing central and state government initiatives to promote education during the period of the COVID-19 outbreak. Additionally, we have requested the respondents to provide the name of initiatives they are using and rate them based on their usability (or performance) on the rating scale of below-average to excellent (refer to Table  6 ).

Rating of Government initiatives by respondents

In particular, Table ​ Table6 6 presents the compiled rating outcomes of the most popular initiatives marked by the respondents. It is observed that among all initiatives NPTEL gets the highest rank, mostly ranging between good to excellent scale. It also validates the fact that NPTEL assists the learners (students and teachers) by providing more flexible learning options in comparison to other initiatives. 18 Further, we noted the higher rating (or acceptance) for SWAYAM and Social media-based e-contents. Paul et al. ( 2018 ) also pointed that SWAYAM has a wide spectrum of audiences and received the peak attention of its learners. The popularity of social media and the availability of study material on different platforms like YouTube, blogs, websites, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. cannot be eliminated (Cinelli et al., 2020 ). Social media is now being utilized as a pedagogical tool in institutes (or classrooms) to implement effective learning and teaching (Hamadi et al., 2021 ). iScuela Learn perceived the least rating in comparison to other considered initiatives. One of the possible reasons for such a behavior is the limited scope of the audience (only school students) targeted. 19

Online learnings have become a vital part of education, especially with the Coronavirus outbreak. With such a vast education system in the country, it is an obvious challenge for online learning methods to meet the requirements of the education sector. The present study is conducted on exploring different online learning and education initiatives taken by the Indian government during the COVID-19 pandemic. We focus to provide elaboration of the online learning environment and acknowledge why it is so important in the pandemic period. Particularly, the conducted research is distributed into two phases: the first phase provides detailed information about the Indian government (both central and state) initiatives. Moreover, while exploring these initiatives it is found that the Indian government has commenced several new platforms along with the enhancement of Open Education Resources to make online learning reachable to each learner. The central government already uses several E-learning platforms to promote education in the country, but with the sudden outbreak of COVID, many new significant initiatives came into the limelight. The Indian government promotes a few existing systems like DIKSHA, free access to e-books, radio channels, etc. Several other online programs like PM eVidya, Swayam Prabha TV, the channel for differently-abled persons, providing e-textbooks have been started in the COVID period (Kadam, 2021 ). Along with the central government, several state ministries also took comprehensive steps to assure continuity of education in corona time. The majority of the states participated in this process by either upgrading the current systems or starting new ones to meet the demand of the education sector. The success of these initiatives is determined by the feedback from the responders. In the second phase of the paper, a questionnaire-based survey was conducted to confirm the success of the online learning system. Though the outcomes indicated that online learning is the future of the education system, still it has certain hurdles in its path.

Question wise analysis of the conducted survey:

  • (i) All online learners (respondents of the survey) have their devices for learning except a few would like to share with others (possibly the family members) or use cafes or departmental labs. Indian is a nation with a lot of diversity and divergence in terms of financial status (Ghosh et al., 1998 ). Everyone cannot purchase a smart device with internet data packs for attending classes. Moreover, there are certain geographical areas (even states) where it is limited or no access to the internet facility. It will become a real challenge for the Indian state and central governments to cover this digital inequality among the citizens of India (Pandey & Pandey, 2018 ).
  • (ii) It is analyzed that SmartPhones are the most widely used device for online learning. Affordability, availability, portability, easier operation are the possible reasons for its high usage. Moreover, for online learning, accessive use may have adverse effects on the health of learners. The findings of this study pointed that teachers (or faculty members) preferably use a laptop or desktop to conduct online classes. Whereas, the other set of participants (students) prefer smartphones.
  • (iii) In this digital era, it is expected that every educated person knows how to use digital devices especially mobile phones. Since our respondents are from the higher education sector (including colleges/universities) and between the age of 20–40 years. There is a good chance of them having excellent digital/computer proficiency. Age is certainly a prominent factor in determining the digital proficiency of a person. Young peoples are more familiar with the usage of modern technology as compared to older ones (Paul & Stegbauer, 2005 ; Hargittai & Hinnant, 2008 ; Broady et al., 2010 ). We also observed in our findings that the computer proficiency of the students is comparatively higher than that of the teachers. Further, our results also claimed that all responders have average or good knowledge of operating digital devices. Moreover, the success of online education depends largely on the digital proficiency of the participants.
  • (iv) With online teaching (or education) various set of ICT tools comes in trending. In this study, we observed that the majority of the education stakeholders preferred to use Google Meet, followed by Zoom meet, CISCO Webex, Classdojo, etc. The preference for a specific tool depends largely on additional services provided by the host (or company) along with the services for ensuring the security of the users.
  • (v) Online teaching preferably comes as a replacement of offline classes in the corona pandemic period. The virtual classes create an environment where students and teachers interact face to face. It is reported in our research that some of the teachers sometimes keep their camera off, while most of the students always attend classes in camera off condition. It may be considered as a serious limitation of online classes (or education). For the success of two-way dialog, participants and hosts must have a virtual face-to-face interaction. Ultimately, it will help in building a classroom environment, forces you to stay attentive and focused, allow teachers to have a better gauge of the needs of their classes, and make the session more interactive.
  • (vi) Teaching and learning will be more effective only when both (participants and hosts) can understand the language used for the process of teaching (or to disseminate the knowledge, ideas, or discussion). The results of the survey present that Indian higher education stakeholders (students/teachers) mostly interact in the English language. We have also found the trends where faculty members and students favor the use of more than one language (like English and Hindi, English, and other regional languages). The feedback from the faculty members also specified that some of the students are not able to properly understand either English or the regional language. In that case, it becomes mandatory to deliver lectures in the language on which students agreed.
  • (vii) Every education method, methodology, or technique has a certain set of problems associated with it (Pelekh, 2020 ). The case of online learning and education is not an exception (Piwek & Savage, 2020 ). In many Indian states, continuous electricity is a problem itself (García-Herrero & Goldhammer, 2020 ). The respondents in this study have also specified that a barrier in the successful conduct of virtual classes. The electricity problem can also create other problems like a disturbance in the lecture, a lecture miss, or a part of the lecture will be missed.
  • (viii) Network (or Internet) issue is also among the most cited problem faced during online education. It can initiate dissatisfaction for the learner, lack of interest, disturbance, voice (or video) distortion, inability to join class, and connection loss during the class. Moreover, some users may have limited access (amount of data) available for internet usage. They have many lectures to attend/deliver daily. It may cause exhaustion in the internet data. It can be considered as one of the reasons for not attending the classes.
  • (ix) Since most of the users attend classes from their homes. They are on a higher verge to get disturbance from the surroundings. Moreover, in India, it is not possible in every household to have a personal space for attending classes. The results show that both teachers and students agreed that they faced disturbance during their classes while taking (or attending) classes from their respective homes.
  • (x) For attending the virtual classes the learner must sit for multiple hours in front of the digital devices. Moreover, with social media additions (for some users) and the use of other digital devices by the learners, it may go to an alarming range. This will surely raise health issues for the digital device user. The most common health issue is the problem in the eyes (like watery eyes, weakness of the eyesight, tired eyes, etc) (Mohan et al., 2021 ).
  • (xi) The size of the class also affects the quality and success of the online lecture (Toth & Montagna, 2002 ). A large number of participants (or oversize class) will lead to many problems in the online session like higher disturbance, lesser individual interactions, affect the network traffic, etc. In our survey results, it was observed that most of the respondents have class(es) of an immense number of participants.
  • (xii) Effective and efficient teaching is never considered as the method of one-way communication. The success of teaching and learning depends largely on discussions, interactions, questioning, and timely evaluation of students (Kyriakides et al., 2013 ). In the era of online teaching (or education) these factors may get escaped if teaching and learning compromise on the primary objective of education.
  • (xiii) Online classes are taken as an alternative to offline (physical) classes. Can the exam be also taken online effectively? Can online exams be a good alternative to evaluate student’s performance? These are the few questions that arise while considering the option of virtual learning. It was seen in survey outcomes that most of the teachers agreed with the statement that online exams cannot evaluate a student’s performance in a better way. Whereas, several student respondents have shown a favoring trend in the conduct of online exams. The possible reasons for students supporting online exams will be (a) it saves the travel time (b) in the situation of COVID-19, it reduces the chances of transmission of disease (c) if classes are online why should the exams not be.
  • (xiv) There exist significant differences between the online and offline classes. Therefore, a change in the present exam evaluation (or marking system) in the online mode is required. It will be better if assignments, projects (minor or major) based evaluation are made part of old systems. In offline mode, students write the answers using pen and paper, while in the online environment it can be done either by typing (or writing on paper using a pen and then scan copy the document). Both of the techniques are time-consuming and practically difficult. For such reasons, the evaluation system for online learning should be implemented differently.
  • (xv) Security is a major concern in the digital era. Mixed reactions about the security in online learning have been reported from the respondents. The compromise of protection and privacy due to hacking (or other activity) may cause theft of personal data and information, which is considered as the major threat to online learning.
  • (xvi) In India, online classes are chosen as an alternative to the offline in the urge of imposed traveling restrictions (due to lockdown) in the corona period. Therefore, the question arises here if the online classes can fully replace offline classes in the future or not? In our survey, the feedback comes in the favour of offline classes considering online classes only as a substitute in the corona era. The possible reasons may be the lack of one-to-one interactions, fewer possible discussions, and all other issues discussed above.
  • (xvii) There is a wide range of government initiatives to aid education in a COVID era specifically focusing on the level of education, streams, languages, category of study materials, etc. These initiatives help in providing study content in the form of video lectures, radio broadcasting, TV channels, and e-books. The success or failure of the initiatives is best portrayed by its users. The responses revealed that these initiatives are very valuable for students and teachers considering the unavailability of offline classes.
  • (xviii) The feedbacks of the users rectify the acceptance or rejection of any system. In the last question of the questionnaire, users were asked to provide their valuable views/suggestions in concern to their online learning experience. The responses are collected, preprocessed, and finally analyzed for evaluating their core emotion and extracting the topics of discussion. It was observed from the results (see Fig. ​ Fig.3) 3 ) that most of the teachers have given positive feedbacks for online learning. It may be considered as their acceptance and satisfaction with the online learning methods. Whereas a mixed set of opinions (positive, negative, and neutral) are seen in the responses of the students. Students seem not to be impressed with the online learning environment as revealed by their comments. Furthermore, merely knowing the positive and negative emotions will not fulfill the purpose, there is a need to know the factors that are responsible for the observed results. For such reasons, we have applied a topic modeling technique to fetch the most repetitive topic of discussion in the feedback. The outcomes of LDA-based topic modeling will assist in knowing the pros and cons, issues, limitations, areas of required improvement in online learning.

Conclusion and recommendation

COVID-19 came all of a sudden and none of the countries were ready to tackle the situation created by this influenza. Over time, the governments have taken immediate and urgent actions in response to the outbreak caused by this deadly disease. The government of different countries had imposed the lockdown, forced people to stay in their houses and living places. Work from home moto has been initiated throughout nations. Likewise many other sectors, the education field also got largely affected by the spread of this pandemic. The Education institutes started to become digitized in that period and online learning became a necessity. Every country promoted the use of E-learning during the covid period. The Indian government had also responded in the best manner to tackle the consequences of this deadliest and infectious disease. For rescuing education from the effects of COVID-19, the Indian government promoted the use of ICT in the field of education, especially during the lockdown period. The central government of India and the state governments of different regions have taken many initiatives to make education reachable to every student of the nation. The government publicizes the existing E-learning projects like CLASS, EDUSAT, SWAYAM, NPTEL, CEC, ILLL, etc., and also launched new tools for encouraging E-learning. The VidyDaan was first in the series of the newly launched tool in the corona outbreak period. PM eVidya launched in the mid of May also aims to provide multi-mode access to education. Furthermore, the central government also employed and promote education TV channels like Swayam Prabha, Gyaan Darshan, etc. Other initiatives like open school and pre-service education, education on air with the help of radio channels, special classes for differently-abled students, providing free of cost e-books and digital libraries like the National Repository of Open Educational Resources are taken by the central government. The state governments also play a major role in promoting online learning in the situation of the pandemic. Most of the states incorporated the initiatives of the central governments along with their methods for providing the facility of online learning. The state of Delhi started several special classes and services like the Online capacity Building Programme, Learning Never Stops, parenting in the time of corona. The Punjab state is no behind the capital state for taking positive initiatives in concern of E-learning by creating a mobile application like iscuela learn, starting channels on youtube, TV and Radio, providing content through EDUSAT, e-book distributions, and promotion of Smart Classrooms.

The success of these initiatives can be better rectified by the reactions of the targeted audience. For such reasons, a survey was conducted to get the insights of the teachers and students of different colleges and universities throughout the country in concern to online learning. The outcomes are satisfactory, where most of the respondents favor online learning and find these initiatives as an appreciable step in maintaining the continuity of the study in the era of COVID-19. Although a wide range of users took online learning as a vital and necessary asset for education, they do not prefer it as a future replacement of offline classes because of certain limitations and issues. The issues like network connectivity, electricity problem, a large group of participants in a single class, disturbance faced during classes, and health-related issues are highlighted by the conducted study. Even though the issues affected the performance of the learning over web method, the users respond that the overall experience of the online learning is good to above average and it successfully filled the need of the education during the lockdown period in the country. Additionally, the conducted study provides insights into the learners’ perspective towards the government’s initiatives and online learning. Although the study covers a lot about the effectiveness of these initiatives still certain unavoidable limitations are existing in the study. First, we have not listed all the initiatives, we have selected only a few based on their popularity. In specific, popularity is measured by the number of daily users, the downloaded content, the rating, etc. There is a chance of getting false information while measuring these parameters. Secondly, only a few states have been selected for our observations, we might have missed the states where these initiatives are implemented precisely. Third, the chosen sample (responses of the respondents) may have certain constraints: a) the majority of the respondents might belong to a similar course and locality, b) they have used the same initiative, c) experienced similar kinds of problems. In the future, we are focused to overcome these limitations by adding more clarity to the proposed system and sample chosen for the study.

Data availability

Code availability, declarations.

• The research meets all applicable standards concerning the ethics of experimentation and research integrity and the following is being certified/declared true.

• As an expert scientist and along with co-authors of the concerned field, the paper has been submitted with full responsibility, following the due ethical procedure, and there is no duplicate publication, fraud, plagiarism, or concerns about animal or human experimentation.

No clinical investigation is carried out on humans and animals.

The authors declare no conflict of interest, financial or otherwise.

1 https://covid19.who.int/

2 https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

3 https://swayam.gov.in/

4 https://diksha.gov.in/

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStax_CNX

6 mhrd.gov.in

7 https://www.education.gov.in/hi

8 https://www.nios.ac.in/

9 https://epathshala.nic.in/

10 https://knowindia.gov.in/profile/the-union-and-its-territory.php#:~:text=India%20comprises%2028%20States%20and%208%20Union%20Territories

11 https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/India_Report_Digital_Education_0.pdf

12 https://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/centre-bestows-on-itself-powers-to-declare-any-area-in-jk-disturbed-under-afspa-119110100967_1.html

13 https://www.businessinsider.in/education/news/these-are-indias-most-literate-states/slidelist/77991055.cms

14 http://socialjustice.nic.in/UserView/index?mid=76672

15 www.chalklit.in

16 http://www.bepcssa.in/en/digital-learning.php

17 https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-hccc-research-methods/chapter/chapter-9-survey-research/

18 https://www.thehindu.com/education/nptel-will-offer-students-flexible-options-for-education/article32703310.ece

19 http://www.iscuela.com/projects/digitise-punjab/

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  1. How has education technology impacted student learning in India during

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  2. How COVID-19 deepens the digital education divide in India

    research paper on online education in india during covid 19

  3. The rise of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic

    research paper on online education in india during covid 19

  4. How has education technology impacted student learning in India during

    research paper on online education in india during covid 19

  5. Impact of COVID-19 on School Education in India: What are the Budgetary

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  6. Impact Of Covid-19 In Education

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  1. Students' perception and preference for online education in India during COVID -19 pandemic

    Papers have also highlighted potential bottlenecks for success of the online learning. However, not many papers have attempted to understand the students perception and preference in Indian context. It is understandable that only limited number of distance education platforms were using online mode of education before the Covid-19 pandemic.

  2. PDF Online Teaching and Learning of Higher Education in India during COVID

    In this section, students and faculties were asked about the curiosity of online courses. 72% of the respondents are not curious in online teaching during the lockdown of COVID-19 pandemic. The results comprising the opinion of both students and faculties. 19.2% of respondents showed they have moderate curiosity.

  3. Students' perception and preference for online education in India

    PMID: 34173507 PMCID: PMC7836920 DOI: 10.1016/j.ssaho.2020.100101 Abstract Educational institutes across the world have closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic jeopardizing the academic calendars. Most educational institutes have shifted to online learning platforms to keep the academic activities going.

  4. Students' perception and preference for online education in India

    1. Introduction With the COVID-19 -a novel corona virus disease spreading across the globe, many countries have ordered closure of all educational institutes. Educational institutions have come to a functional standstill since they had to protect their students from viral exposures, which are likely in a highly socializing student community.

  5. Students' experience of online learning during the COVID‐19 pandemic: A

    Online learning has been widely adopted during the COVID‐19 pandemic to ensure the continuation of K‐12 education. Student success in K‐12 online education is substantially lower than in conventional schools. Students experienced various difficulties related to the delivery of online learning. What this paper adds

  6. [PDF] The impact of online learning during COVID-19: students' and

    The impact of online learning during COVID-19: students' and teachers' perspective Deepika Nambiar Published 25 June 2020 Education The purpose of this study was to conduct an online survey regarding teacher's and student's perception and experience related to online classes.

  7. Education during the COVID-19 Pandemic in India

    Summary The Indian government has imposed one of the longest school closures globally as it suffered through multiple waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. These school closures have revealed the inequities between urban and rural populations, as well as between girls and boys, in adapting to online learning tools.

  8. How has education technology impacted student learning in India during

    US Unika Shrestha Social Sector Economist - Asian Development Bank August 23, 2021 6 min read Editor's note: This blog summarizes the report, " Ed tech and educational opportunity during the...

  9. Academics' attitudes towards online education amidst the Covid-19

    Extensive research has been undertaken to investigate the context of online education from the perspective of students, but less emphasis has been given to examining the views of teachers. Thus, the study aimed to explore attitudes of academics towards online teaching during the Covid-19 outbreak.

  10. Online education and its effect on teachers during COVID-19—A case

    Surbhi Dayal x Published: March 2, 2023 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0282287 Article Authors Metrics Media Coverage Reader Comments Abstract Background COVID pandemic resulted in an initially temporary and then long term closure of educational institutions, creating a need for adapting to online and remote learning.

  11. Problems Faced by Students and Teachers During Online Education Due to

    Schools and colleges in India have a different pattern of education where one cannot physically attend classes but has to attend classes virtually, a new problem occurs. here we will analyze some issues like internet connectivity problems and basic understanding of technology and other such problems, to understand the problem more closely we mak...

  12. PDF Education through ICT Initiatives during the Pandemic in India

    The COVID-19 pandemic has created the largest disruption of education systems in history, affecting nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 190 countries and all continents. In response

  13. Online education in the post-COVID era

    The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the world to engage in the ubiquitous use of virtual learning. And while online and distance learning has been used before to maintain continuity in...

  14. Frontiers

    Following the outbreak of COVID 19 in February 2020, Indian universities were shut down and used digital platforms to teach their students since then. Drawing from Kolb's Learning Theory, John Dewey's theory, Jack Mezirows transformative learning theory, and Jean Piaget's theory, the authors in this paper offer a viewpoint on some of the practical teaching practices which can be adapted ...

  15. Impact of COVID-19: a particular focus on Indian education system

    Abstract. The COVID-19 pandemic has stirred up the world, and its overwhelming impacts can be seen from micro to macro level, that is, from an individual's day-to-day functioning to the broader level—health sector, finance sector, and off course, the education sector. The younger generation is considered to be the torchbearer of the society.

  16. Students' perception and preference for online education in India

    When a question was asked how to cope up with curriculum during this COVID-19 pandemic, majority of the respondents (67.1%) indicated that online classes can be used as substitute for class room teaching to cover the syllabus, whereas 29.97% of the students wanted the curriculum to be suspended and very few (2.93%) wanted teachers to provide ...

  17. PDF An analysis of COVID-19 Impacts On Indian Education System

    This paper aims to analyze the Impact of COVID-19 on Indian Education System, focusing on education during online teaching and assessment of students getting online classes in this pandemic from settings at home. INTRODUCTION

  18. How COVID-19 deepens the digital education divide in India

    How COVID-19 deepens the digital education divide in India | World Economic Forum Lengthy school closures and a rapid transition to e-learning have highlighted long-standing issues of education inequality and a digital educational divide.

  19. Online education and its effect on teachers during COVID-19-A case

    10.1371/journal.pone.0282287. COVID pandemic resulted in an initially temporary and then long term closure of educational institutions, creating a need for adapting to online and remote learning. The transition to online education platforms presented unprecedented challenges for the teachers. The aim of this research was to investigate the ...

  20. PDF A Comprehensive Study on Covid-19 Pandemic: an Impact on School

    It is an empirical paper where a literature review is done to understand the concept of Indian schools in the context of online education, the importance of education and COVID 19 impacts on education from the perspective of parents, teachers, and students.

  21. Impediments to child education, health and development during the COVID

    As India nears normalcy after facing three waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, clearer evidence has emerged about the profound negative impact of the pandemic upon the well-being of children in the country. Although the interventions by the Union and the state governments have helped in minimising the disruptions to the overall child health and development, certain challenges still continue to ...

  22. Online education and its effect on teachers during COVID-19—A case

    Background COVID pandemic resulted in an initially temporary and then long term closure of educational institutions, creating a need for adapting to online and remote learning. The transition to online education platforms presented unprecedented challenges for the teachers.

  23. Indian government E-learning initiatives in response to COVID-19 crisis

    Indian government E-learning initiatives in response to COVID-19 crisis: A case study on online learning in Indian higher education system - PMC Journal List Springer Nature - PMC COVID-19 Collection PMC8220884 As a library, NLM provides access to scientific literature.

  24. PDF The Impact of The Covid-19 Epidemic on Education System in India

    This paper is a review article; presenting a brief literature review on the COVID-19 epidemic and education system in India. Different online hunt machines, such as- Google scholar, base.org and semantic scholar has been operated to collect the information on the subject impact of Covid-19 on education system in India.