The school continue to remain closed since March 2020 due to lockdown mandated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The classroom teaching made a shift toward online education for which and schools were not trained. There were complains about bad on-line teaching and ill-effects of over-dose of digital screens.
Consequently, MHRD has come out with 'Pragyata Guidelines' for digital education for live online classes as follows.
Classes 1-8: Maximum of 1.5 hours per day; 2 sessions
Classes 9-12: Maximum of three hours per day; 4 seasons
Pre-primary classes: Maximum of 30 minutes: Integrated session of activities
Reasoning the norms, the issued guidelines informed:
Longer times with modern technologies creates severe physical and mental health problems
Age-appropriate digital sessions schedule require duration capping
10-15 minute break between sessions for relaxed transition for senior students
Home support flexibility for assignments
However, the issues of screen-time; infrastructure; connectivity and digital divide contin
ue to bother teachers, parents and students due to lack of resources, training and follow-up towards quality on-line education for most schools, especially the rural schools.
It requires to be clarified that an e-learning session time is the actual amount of time spent on a learning episode. Research studies inform that even 15 minutes on-line learning is a 'long time' per session since beyond that it can produce cognitive fatigue and result into bad health.
A well prepared session of 6-12 minutes has been found appropriate. In fact, the content of one to two pages of textbook forms the learning episode which should be concisely taught in about 10 minutes.
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