By: Dr. Arshed Iqbal Dar
Well, in education, peace is a state where teacher, teaching, taught, structure and infrastructure becomes one. The ultimate goal of teaching is to promote learning that is why education means enabling the mind to find out the ultimate truth, which emancipates us from the bondage of dust and which gives us wealth not of things but of inner light, not of power but of love.
The storm of covid-19 has almost converted the entire education structure cum infrastructure into quarantine centres, the students are caged in their homes, some were declared Covid positive and some were shifted to administrative quarantine centres, some are not reachable and some are hauled up in the net of mental trauma, some are begging for the android phones and some are pleading for the restoration of internet connectivity, some are demanding mass promotion and some are worrying for their future and a handful of students enrolled in online classes are showing a poor response in the malfunctioning virtual platform.
In the meantime, notifications were circulated for the students to join the virtual classrooms, teachers were ordered to teach the students via different means of online education and were asked to submit the weekly report of students enrolled in their respective subjects. Unfortunately, most of the students were not able to join online classes due to lack of android phones and many other reasons. As per the reports from the different academic institutions, a handful of students are enrolled in online classes and are showing poor response just because of the interruption in the internet connectivity, sometimes with no G and sometimes with low G.
The grievances of the students, write-ups of the writers and the requisitions of every stakeholder were forwarded in a pleading manner from time to time to the central government for the release of this G, but unfortunately, this G has been kept under lockdown for unknown reason. Later on, administrative heads were asked to get the feedback from the students enrolled in online classes.
In this context, University of Kashmir has authorized all its affiliated colleges to conduct the examination of different semesters by using different modes and methods of assessment. All the colleges were given liberty to determine the mode and method of evaluation for the convenience of the students viz. assignments, online viva, MCQs, group viva, projects etc. In this regard, one of the notifications from one of the colleges reads, that college doesn’t bear any responsibility, if any student fails to appear in online examination which shall be in the form of short type questions and very short type questions. As per my own perception this notification clearly violates the assessment model and demands a strong revisit. Some of the students have been intimated by the teachers of their respective colleges that the evaluation shall be on the basis of assignments which shall be given to them by their concerned teachers and some of the colleges are demanding a pdf of the same submitted to be in an online portal without any delay. It is clearly evident that different colleges have decided to evaluate the students on their respective modes of assessment.
In this connection, fact of the matter is that most of the students are not enrolled in online platform and dire need is to trace them and equip them with the study material before we develop any model of assessment. Now question arises, how to trace them? For this student tracing, every academic institution is having a record of admission details mentioning the contact details of the students and with the help of the same, we can trace those students who are not enrolled in virtual platform and we should get in touch with them before the development of assessment model.
Before designing the models of assessment, academic institutions should get acquainted with the ground reality of virtual classrooms and that is possible only by taking the feedback from the students related to their online classes as it is one of the pivotal parameter to evaluate the ground reality and final outcome of virtual classes, which in turn, help the policy makers in education system to devise a good strategy in the time of Covid-19 pandemic for the betterment of student community.
We are hopeful that academic institutions, who have already designed the model of assessment have a 100% student enrollment in their virtual platforms and those academic institutions, who are still in the process of designing their model of assessment are requested to fill the gaps in their virtual platforms with 100% student enrollment. It is expected that the academic institutions will design the model of assessment in the time of Covid-19 pandemic by keeping the feedback of all the students in consideration.
In drawing things to a close, we are hopeful that the policy makers in education system will not only flip or skip the pages of student feedbacks but will get the context out of their feedbacks for the generation of powerful future strategy for modifying the educational scenario of Jammu and Kashmir amid lockdown in particular.
– The writer is Assistant Professor, Govt. Degree College Sumbal Sonawari and can be reached at drarshediqbal@gmail.com
