The problem of access has proved debilitating for school education.
It is fortunate that the Center is considering a repository of online university courses in partnership with private actors, to host courses from online and global education platforms and stand-alone online education providers. More so, in the context of the recent UGC approval of the online delivery of 40% of university courses. The pandemic has made the need for a robust online education ecosystem glaring, and although India has had to catch up, partially releasing online degrees through universities after the pandemic, the decision is not too late. nor too small. While the new repository will organize courses to suit Indian academic programs, the government should consider tapping into Swayam, the massive MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses) platform launched in 2017. Remember that Swayam, since its launch, registered nearly 1.85 crore registrations. for various courses run by 203 partner institutes. There were over 11 lakh exam registrations and nearly 1.2 lakh certifications passed. Of course, Swayam is also home to upper secondary and qualification courses, but it is likely that a significant portion of success will be in higher education. Regarding the courses of the foreign universities and those developed by the private education platforms, since they will be organized according to the Indian university curricula, the need for significant regulatory oversight is removed.
However, the biggest hurdle for the country to overcome remains access to online education. While it is expected to be better at the university level than at the academic level, the fact that students at all universities have cited issues of access and delivery of online education to demand the cancellation of the exams underlines the need to resolve these problems. The problem of access has proved debilitating for school education. As the ASER suggests covering the first months of last year’s pandemic, there is a strong inequality in terms of access to devices and the internet among children enrolled in public schools (more likely to belong to households the poorest) and in private schools (probably belong to relatively better-off households). As this journal has already pointed out, this inequity is likely to further exacerbate the learning gaps between the two cohorts and push children from poor households into even greater future financial and professional insecurity than they risk. already. While some studies have indicated a greater willingness of households to invest in devices and the internet to provide online access to services, the question of how this can be possible and to what extent it can be sustainable, especially with the pandemic exacerbating the risk of unemployment at the bottom of the pyramid. Three-quarters of those polled in a recent survey reported, among other factors, connectivity and affordability as barriers to digital access to education, with the poorest regions of the country most affected. Concerns are compounded by the likelihood that girls are worse off than boys. Even though the Center is working on the online repository of university courses, there is a need to significantly improve access at all levels. That said, it is the states that will have to take the lead, especially for households supported by their schools.
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