Online Teaching

ONLINE TEACHING-LEARNING
GURU NANAK COLLEGE, DHANBAD

It was during the middle of March when the pandemic COVID 19 had started assuming dangerous proportions in the country. Academic institutions being the hub of youngsters and their activities had to be closed down with effect from 24^th of March, 2020. Meaning thereby that no academic activity whatsoever could be carried out in the College.

The teachers of the College took the lead by initiating online teaching to their students, right since the beginning of the period of the Lockdown 1. Till 16^th of April, i.e., during the period of Lockdown 1, classes were being engaged by teachers, mostly the youngsters among them through Google Classroom and Whatsapp Groups. By then it had become obvious that online classes will have to be carried out in a more organised manner, as it would be the only means of imparting teaching during the Corona times.

During the period of Lockdown 2, it was decided to give online teaching flesh and bones. Classes were organised in a more structured manner, with a time table in place and through a common platform.

The Principal, Prof. P. Shekhar organised meetings with the members of the faculty in four groups, maintaining all social distancing norms, and emphasised that online classes will have to become more meaningful and structured in order to be useful to the students. During the meetings, time-tables were made, classes allotted to teachers. There were many among the teachers - particularly the senior ones, who were not so proficient in this form of curriculum delivery.

Keeping in view the needs of the teachers, a Four Day Workshop from 10.06.2020 to 13.06.2020 was organised by Dr. Varsha Singh, Assistant Professor, Department of English. In each workshop about ten teachers were admitted and a detailed workout on online teaching was done by the resource person. This exercise worked wonders in the process of online teaching carried out by the teachers of the College. Soon everyone started organising classes with proficiency in Google Classroom and Google Meet. It was decided to get feedback from students at this point. Two sets of questionnaires were prepared for Students’ Satisfaction Survey. The response was huge, and it was obvious that online teaching had already become very useful for the students of the College.

As per the reports taken and compiled on a weekly basis it has been figured out that almost about eighty percent of the students had got connected with our online classes, which was surely not a mean achievement.

Our confidence grew to the extent that we carried out online internal examinations of the Sixth Semester students with multiple choice questions, and the response was still better. About ninety percent of the students appeared at the internal examination. Encouraged by these results, the online teaching process has gone from strength to strength, and will perhaps be carried out till it becomes possible to resume face-to-face teaching.