SCHOOLING DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC AND SYSTEMIC ISSUES IN ONLINE EDUCATION

The world has experienced many dangerous diseases like Ebola, Swine Flu, and Plague which have a devastating impact on all the aspect of human life, including social, political, economic, cultural, and education. Likewise, COVID-19 has also so much disastrous impact on human life including all sectors of our society around the world. During this pandemic, almost all the countries of the world have been put into lockdown and all activities and services including the teaching-learning process have been affected adversely. Almost all the educational institution around the world is closed due to the spread of COVID-19 pandemic. In such situation to continue the teaching-learning process the focus is drawn to online learning platforms from the traditional mode of the face-to-face classroom. This pandemic has brought both positive and negative impacts in the education sector. On one hand, the whole world is experiencing and experimenting with the teaching-learning process in online platforms looking at it as a new world of educational opportunities. But on the other hand, in a country like India, there is lack of sufficient resources, lack of adequate knowledge to use information and communication technology tools which becoming a hindrance to conduct and operate online teaching-learning. The large poor population, electricity problem, network issue, lack of personal computer, and other digital devices have created a new kind of inequality in online education platform. Some students have accessibility to the online learning platform and some are not and the main sufferers are students with disabilities leading to a new kind of digital dividend in education. This paper focuses on the impact of COVID-19 on school education in India, where the impact of COVID-19 has been highlighted with the major issues and transition from the traditional system of education i.e. face to face classroom teaching-learning to focusing on online learning. This paper looks into the major challenges that exist in India in conducting online teaching and learning. It seeks to create a forum that can be referred to all the stakeholders of education sectors i.e. the policymaker, administrator, teachers, students as well as the government.