During the last two years of covid-19 pandemic, online course was the buzzword. For several months the students sat at home and studied; in fact, there are thousands of students who have still not returned to campuses.

However, with the next school year starting next week (many private schools are resuming classes from next Monday), schools across the city have decided to no longer hold online classes.

Mansoor Ali Khan, Board Member, Delhi Public schoolsaid, “We have decided to now only offer offline courses at our member institutions.”

Principals are of the opinion that with the facilities being closed for almost two years now, it has had a huge impact on students in terms of memory loss and learning.

“The need of the hour, however, is to return to school. This approach would bring great relief not only to students who lacked social interaction and connections, but also to parents who were stressed to manage work-life balance.

Although teaching can be undertaken at home in a limited way, only physical learning in the classroom cultivates a holistic personality in children. Extra-curricular activities at school would also enhance children’s development, which cannot be achieved within the confines of a home. The reopening of schools will be key to bridging the gap created by online education. What we do with young children this year will lay the foundation for the future,” said Aloysius D’mello, Principal of Greenwood High International School.

Shubhra Johri Sinha, headmaster of school, Ekya Byrathi, said different children in the same class would have had different experiences of the pandemic. They will also have varying levels of adaptability and resilience to these experiences.

“We understand that there are many types of losses that students may have experienced; students may not be able to learn at the same rate as before and may exhibit disruptive behavior. On the other hand, others may be eager to start learning again and make sure they make up for lost time. Young people react in different ways to difficult experiences. We advised our teachers not to reject any behavior of concern,” she said.

Rudra Kumar Sharma, COO, JAIN International Residential School (JIRS), said teachers had a lot of difficulty leading both online and offline earlier. “Over the past eight months, there have been mainly offline courses. Online is also there for students who cannot come to school. The challenges are there as teachers have to manage both students.

If there is physical interaction with students taking offline classes, which proves to be very effective for their personality development, students taking online classes move away from it. During online classes, students and teachers usually have to deal with technical issues which, on the contrary, have no place in offline classes because there is face-to-face interaction in offline classes” , did he declare.

Hybrid Ready

However, many schools said they would be ready for the change in the event of a covid surge. Noorain Fazal, Managing Director and CEO of Inventure, said, “We need to be ready to transition to online or hybrid education at any time.

According to JIRS’ Sharma, even if there is another wave, it is unlikely to be so severe as to warrant the closure of educational institutions as all are fully vaccinated. “In the event of a possible next wave of covid and schools are again advised to switch to online lessons as per a government order, there is the option of online education, which cannot be predicted for the moment.

In this case, online lessons will be delivered online and teachers will take lessons with smartboard tools from classrooms with students at home,” he added.