Of Pandemic and Pedagogic Reconstruction: An Epistemological Enquiry into Digital Education in India

Abstract

With the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, the year 2020 witnessed an unprecedented challenge and change in all known structures of existence. In the field of education, radical adjustments had to be made following the shutting down of schools, colleges, and all forms of tangible sites of learning. The classroom underwent a digital metamorphosis with educators across the globe attempting to modify the existing curriculum and reconstruct pedagogic practices around the digital domain. However, such revisions and modifications faced challenges due to the lack of any practiced models or theories of education that completely substitutes the classroom in a regular mode of learning. Educators and academic administrators in India already face immense challenges in designing a technology-mediated learning curriculum and implementing updated digital tools and techniques in the classrooms owing to Indian education being deeply enmeshed in the socio-politics of the nation. Under the present circumstances, with the outbreak of the pandemic and subsequent lockdown of public spaces, digital learning is no longer a choice but a necessity. Although academic institutions, especially those that are privately owned and those in the urban quarters of the nation have been implementing digital tools in their curriculum over the span of the last decade, in most cases it has been utilized as a supplement to the ongoing offline classroom interaction-based education. With this change and challenge, the article seeks to explore the following issues: (a) the way the teachers are adapting to this new mode of teaching–learning systems, (b) the effectiveness of the online learning management systems (LMS) in designing the course content and implementing a methodology grounded in theories of connectivism and collaborativism, and (c) the challenges that teachers are facing and the way they are mutating their pedagogic practices both in teaching and evaluating. The article aims to explore the above issues through an inquiry into the theoretical foundations of digital learning, understanding the rationale and impact of pedagogic alterations in the context of the pandemic, and drawing from the shared experiences of teachers and educators of graduate and postgraduate levels of education in the Indian context.