Online Classes Are A Boon During This Quarantine - And Here’s Why
Shivani Manohar
July 11, 2020
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5 min read
After weeks of consuming content in the form of movies and shows, trying out every workout under the sun and cooking every meal in your recipe book until you get it just right, you’ve probably run out of ways to keep yourself occupied. It happens to the best of us. Luckily, this blog has the solution to your dilemma!
The popularity of online classes had been on the rise even before this quarantine forced everyone indoors. But now that all of us are settling into being home all day and are slowly exhausting all sources of entertainment, online classes are proving to be a true saving grace.
A little while ago, I spoke to Sourabh Mutha, a professor of finance, accounting and tax, about this recent surge in digitisation of classes and I got to see the whole situation from the perspective of a teacher.
While he found the level of interaction more in regular classes, as compared to those online, he attributed this to the fact that he had been taking offline classes for years but had shifted online only recently. Given that everyone is pretty much new to the concept of online classes, accessibility was a bit of a challenge for him.
The whole ordeal of muting, unmuting, choosing whom to give access to was kind of a hassle. However, one benefit that appealed to him greatly was the time-saving aspect of online classes. The time that you would otherwise spend getting ready for class, physically and mentally, and commuting to and from class gets taken off your hands completely. According to Sourabh, those students who were eager to learn were profiting greatly but those students who were accustomed to sitting in classrooms, learning via diagrams, preferred to not diverge from that norm.
It is clear that online teaching has not reached a state of perfection, yet. But that doesn’t imply that there aren’t some pretty great advantages of taking online classes.
As a matter of fact, in a recent conversation with Rhea Shah, a language teacher who specialises in French and Mandarin, I found out how she has been able to continue her classes through online teaching. She and her students are saving a lot of time after the classes have shifted to a digital platform.
Her students are utilising the saved time for self-study, and are becoming a lot more independent. They are making an effort to find out the answers to their doubts on their own.
Rhea did, however, express some concerns about productivity, in terms of how much portion she can cover in one class and how well the students grasp her teaching, and also about the number of different platforms that need to be accessed to acquire all the tools of an offline classroom.
She is currently giving Reportcard a go to organise herself, feel free to try ReportCard if you have a few minutes.