How online education is increasing inequity for underprivileged students
That online education is the panacea for education woes of children affected by the pandemic across the country is a myth. It needs to be challenged if we are to find more suitable alternatives that do not further exacerbate the educational inequality that exists between the haves and the have-nots, especially in rural India.
2020 has been a difficult year academically as children across the world have had their studies disrupted due to the extended closure of schools because of the pandemic. In India, the effect has been particularly severe with complete lockdowns ensuring that the children had no recourse to any of their support systems including schools, teachers, tuitions or group studies. In such a scenario, online education has been propagated as the solution both by private schools as well as the governments (Centre and state). The system is working beautifully for children with well-resourced parents especially in urban areas, but the underprivileged children in rural hinterlands where the bulk of our student population resides, have been left woefully behind.
Let us examine the prerequisites for online education for a child. The first and foremost requirement is access to the internet. Second, there is a need for an appropriate device to render the content. Third, the content itself should be of such a quality that the child should be able to grasp it remotely. Fourth, the resources to gain access to a host of supplementary learning material available online. Lastly, the ability of parents to support their child in online learning through technical as well as pedagogical support.
As you can see, each of the necessary conditions above is an exclusion criterion as far as underprivileged children are concerned. I will share certain key statistics in order to underline my points.
As per TRAI data, while the internet penetration in India stood at nearly 40 per cent in 2018, states like Uttar Pradesh with a huge student population had internet penetrations at just about 30 per cent. To further complicate matters, rural India amounted to just 30 per cent of internet penetration. Furthermore, as per the IMRB report, 97 per cent of the users accessed the internet through mobile phones in India. Only 36 per cent of those accessing internet on their mobiles had smartphones capable of opening presentations, word documents or graphics that would be required for a digital learning experience. Add to that the fact that the literacy rate in rural India stood at just 71 per cent as per NSSO 71st round, and more than a quarter of the population in rural India lived below the poverty line. A simple probabilistic calculation would reveal the chances of a child in rural India, meeting all the exclusion criterion of online education stated above and parents being able to support their child through an online learning experience was just about two per cent.
That means for every 100 students in rural India, only two were well-equipped to take advantage of online learning as compared to their more privileged peers.
Enterprising schools in rural India have been trying to work around the problems posed by the closure of schools by forming WhatsApp groups where teachers send notes, assignments and videos. However, the quality of content leaves a lot to be desired and the learning outcomes are minimal. Factors leading to such abysmal results include the fact that studies indicate that only about one in three people having phones and internet were on social media platforms including WhatsApp, while other problems ranging from low connectivity, absence of recharge on phones, the prevalence of ‘dumbphones’, etc, plague the learning of children in rural India. Not to mention the fact that even those children whose parents have smartphones and a functional data pack, find learning and doing assignments on the phone extremely difficult. Couple that with frequent power outages and the learning window, and the subsequent learning outcomes are negligible when compared with classroom teaching.
The government should consider innovative means to impart classroom-based learning experiences in rural India. This should be done with all due precautions which could include alternate-day teaching based on the even-odd scheme of roll numbers, which will allow for social distancing and small group learning. Another measure could be no-contact teaching where students are handed notes as supplementary materials and there is no submission of notebooks. Assessments could be based on the Continuous and Comprehensive Evaluation (CCE) system, championed in the Right to Education (RTE) Act. Schools can open in a staggered manner, starting with older children who are better positioned to undertake precautions.
In conclusion, I would argue that while online education can be supplementary to classroom efforts, it can never be a replacement of the classroom model of learning for the millions of rural and underprivileged students in India. Quality education is a right of every single child and if enough precautions are taken, then schools should be allowed to reopen so that learning can take precedence again for even the last child of India.
Also Read: The coronavirus pandemic pushed learning online. What does the future look like?