Increased Demand In Online Learning Platforms In COVID-19

3 0 Ashwani Pundhir Wednesday, May 13, 2020

The whole world is hit by the pandemic, #COVID-19, or commonly known as Corona Virus. There are more than 3.9 million cases in the world out of which 0.27 Million have lost their lives. The whole world is struggling with this disease and there is no medicine or vaccine that is found or made to date which can surely cure the disease. All sectors i.e. Primary, Secondary, and tertiary are struggling. In a report, it was said that there are zero sales of Maruti in the Lockdown period which mean from approximately one month, there is not a single sale of a vehicle from Maruti.

#The Way COVID-19 Affecting the Environment

With this Pandemic all sectors are struggling, the education section is one of them, there is no scope of physical classes or meetings in the Lockdown period as it violates the Law. To conquer this, most of the colleges and educational institutes are coming with online classes for the students. The Delhi Government already announced to promote the students to higher levels on the basis of marks obtained in previous examinations. Most of the colleges and institutes run on the model of physical classes or where the students can meet the teachers physically at least at the junior level. But as the Pandemic is growing strong, there is a rapid increase in the number of cases, which increases the probability of further lockdown, thus, most of the institutes are shifting their resources to online mode. Earlier only classes of higher education students are taken the digital platforms and the junior level institutes are only limited to the concept of smart classes. But now, from junior to senior level, classes on online mode are going on across the nation, with the motivation that in the lockdown period there will be no loss of studies of students and they will be able to take classes from the comfort of their homes.

#COVID-19 #Online_learning

The major platforms that institutes are using to run their online classes are the zoom app and Google Meet. According to the report from The Print, There is a significant increase in the number of downloads of the apps, from 11 March to 5 April, the zoom app is downloaded 1.28 crore times across the globe and in India, it is downloaded 1.25 Lakh times with the period. It becomes the third most downloaded app in this period after Facebook and PUBG. This shows the increase in demand for the online meeting app that institutes are using to run their classes. Not only the online meeting platforms but the online teaching industry apps like Vedantu, BYJU’S, and Unacademy, there is a rapid increase in the number of downloads of these apps.

#NDIM #BYJU's #Vedantu

Taking a live example of online teaching, I would like to quote the example of my college, NDIM (New Delhi Institute of Management). Our college was able to shift all the learning process on online platforms on the very short span of time to fight strongly against #COVID-19. As a student, we don’t know how much hours our faculty works to shift all their resources to online platforms. Even our college has finished our curriculum on time with an effective one week of online study. In the time of the pandemic, they are able to conduct our examination on online platform for which they tested various ways by conducting a mock examination to check which method will be the most effective method, as NDIM has a rich base of students from all over the country, so there are certain areas which have network issues, to tackle that many mock examinations were conducted to check the effective way of examinations. At last, we have done our whole end term examination on online mode, so that there will be no delay in our summer internships. Our Honorable Prime give focus on digitalization, our college was able to conduct online examination and set an example and if this mode gives the good results, this can be used as a case study in future.

#UNSECO #Industrial_revolution_4.0 #Education4.0

According to the UNESCO report, “Schools in 165 countries around the world have closed due to the coronavirus outbreak”, which means there is a new era of online education is coming which is termed as Education 4.0. With the rise of the Industrial Revolution 4.0, there is a rise of technologies like data analytics, robotics, artificial intelligence which is becoming assets in developing Education 4.0. It is necessary for future graduates to mold themselves according to the requirement of the industry. This lockdown period provides the extra opportunity for the education sector to develop education 4.0 at a rapid pace and deliver it to the students. Change is the only constant, it’s time for students to grab this opportunity and mold themselves according to education 4.0 and become a better version of themselves.

The online learning has shown significant growth over the last decade, before #COVID-19, the market forecasts for the online education market as $350 Billion by 2025, but in this pandemic time the growth becomes more significant and it is to be sure that the digits need to be corrected for 2025. The one reason which is prominent in increased growth of online learning is the requirement of infrastructure, there is the bare minimum requirement of infrastructure for online learning and it is one option which is more affordable than traditional learning as it does not require any commuting costs, all the books, and resources are available online and most important it is useful in saving papers.

It’s a fact that online learning will be going to be a future in the field of education. The mobile platforms have given assistance to more people to provide benefit from online learning and this has created a huge database after that machine learning has given personalized solutions to the course content using big data. In the future, it will not be surprising to see more elements in the online learning structure such as virtual reality and augmented reality or more advanced machine learning algorithms to change learning more.