Schools need to orient and ready themselves for on-line teaching as new normal due to COVID crisis

According to UNESCO, the COVID-19 outbreak has translated into a major educational crisis due to school closure and children's normal learning routine being disrupted. It has been urged that on-line learning should be attempted to mitigate the effects of such disruption despite the challenges related to preparedness, infrastructure and capacity, as well as the digital gaps. There is a need to find e-learning solutions to ensure that learning never stops despite the crisis and the location of the child.

In India, rural elementary education with challenges of dispersed population and remoteness with on-line learning becoming a new norm has first to be experimented with by establishing a teacher's home-based two-hour on-line school in one room in the areas where internet access is reasonable.

Some experiments elsewhere, with primary teachers trained e-learning and making use of adapted day-wise content outline in rural areas have shown that small on-line learning classes (10-15 students), pre-recorded digital lessons and assignments; such education can be made viable since it reduces the time, stress, and money required to commute to the nearest government school, private school or NGO-run education centre.

Many home schools in US have started enrolling children in online learning programs with features like video lessons, interactive media, and remote teachers along with those who were already working at the home-schools which were earlier the community schools with home-grown learning curriculum and print material. Now, everything has been digitized for on-line education. The established home-schools have successfully transformed their methods, classroom processes and learning material into digital formats to take advantage of the new technologies and efficient internet access.

It has been articulated that online schools can be public or private but recognition or registration is must. For home schools, the parents and the school staff together work out the fee structure to meet out the cost of the schooling. For on-line primary schools, single teacher teaching all subjects within two hours to 10-15 students of a given grade level is being considered to be most appropriate for on-line classes.