Pakistan education system, who has always taught students in traditional classroom setting, had to go through many hardships since the Covid-19 took place from March 2020 and onwards. Schools, colleges and universities were closed to slow down the spread of the virus, both the teachers and students faced problems from delivering the lectures to learning them online.
Being a third world country, Pakistan was not prepared to bear this loss and online learning was a complete failure till this day. It has more of negative aspects than positive. Talking about few of the negative aspects of online learning, lets begin with if the educational institutes were able to buy the software for online teaching/learning as most of them are available only for one week trial. Secondly, students belonging to rural areas, who had come to cities for higher education, had to go back to their homes where internet was not available, or even if it were, it could not work properly. Thirdly, the students were less interested in virtual learning and wasted their time doing nothing. And the list goes on…
Most of the teachers did not know how to operate the computers and how to have access to a software to teach. They were burdened with the delivering of the lectures and then to put the same data online for the students to use it for later. Sometimes the software could not work properly for the students and sometimes for the teachers. With so many features in that software, both the teachers and the students had to learn and not miss the lectures at the same time which resulted in wasting the time.
Suffering since the last year, online teaching/learning was not at all a success. It has brought negative impact mostly on the students because the teacher only had to come online, deliver the lecture, upload the material, and go offline, and neither they were given proper training for it. While the students had to attend the online classes which they were least interested in taking, download the material, do the classwork and homework, virtually perform the tests also allowing to have the access to google and books to solve the questions which limited their creativity.
Educational institutes either it be school, college or a university, they should not be teaching online as it has already damaged the student’s creativity, learning process, upset the daily routine, excessive use of gadgets and made them dull. Teachers knows nuts and bolts of traditional classroom setting which has been in use since the beginning. We should start to open the institutes following the strict SOP’s so that there should be no more wastage of studies and bring back the normal daily life of everyone.
