Degrees of change

In the age of online courses and webinars, the chalkand-talk format must reform itself

- REKHA DIXIT

There is an unprecedented quiet across university campuses. At a time when students would have been setting out with their parents to compare different campuses and been dreaming of dormitory living, they are cooped up at home. The Class 12 results have only just been declared, and as colleges announce cut-off percentages over the next week, the activities will all be online, the campuses remaining silent. Seniors, who would have been strutting around corridors, planning fresher parties and college society inductions, are listlessly playing PUBG or surfing through stale programming on Netflix, as they wait for their online semester to begin, maybe in August. Final year students of Central universities are still not sure whether they will have exams or not. While the University Grants Commission (UGC) said all final year exams should be done by September, state governments are protesting the need to conduct them.

Academic year 2019-20 will be remembered for the abrupt way it ended—for many, without even a farewell party, let alone a proper convocation ceremony; for some, midway between exams. Academic year 2020-21, on the other hand, will be another experiment entirely, what with the uncertainties around the pandemic forcing authorities to repeatedly change plans. By how much should the curriculum be reduced to fit into a shrunken semester? What component of instruction should be online, and would there be any offline classes at all this semester, or even this entire academic year? What about courses like hotel management, medicine or physiotherapy, where the bulk of learning is on the job and not in class?