Thiruvananthapuram: Amid school facilities getting concerned over the start of the new academic year, Kerala schools are gearing up to begin with online classes to make sure that students don’t miss their studies due to the pandemic and lockdown.
The state-owned KITE-Victers Channel will be providing the virtual classes to furnish advantage to about 4.5 million students from grades 1 to 12 of the schools following the state syllabus.
Pinarayi Vijayan, the Chief Minister of Kerala, in an address during his tele-speech announced the commencement of online classes at 8.30am on Monday.
“Each class will have separate time slot and schoolteachers concerned will have to constantly interact with their students to ensure that all follow the new routine of online classes,” said the CM.
Classes will have a repeat telecast and also as videos which will be made available on YouTube. This is being allotted for the students who would have missed the classes because of technological glitches or power failures.
If not for these virtual classes, the state of Kerala would have seen a hullabaloo with students rushing in schools for the new academic year from Monday.
Vice-Chairman and Executive Director Anwar Sadath of Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE), the source for IT-enabled education in over 16,000 Kerala schools reported to the IANS that they have been working on the project for a while. He said that because of prior preparation, the digital content required for the classes is ready, adding that the implementation of online classes wasn’t expected to be put into effect this quickly.
“We have prepared time-tables for all classes. The first class of the day was for Class 12 English subject for half an hour in which lectures recorded by two teachers were aired. This service reaches every student’s home through KITE-Victers channel, which is aired by cable TV network,” said Sadath.
There will be four periods every day for grade 12, three for grade X and two each for grades 8 and 9 and one period each for the rest of the classes. A 30 mins class will be conducted for each period of the schedule.
“KITE-Victers is holding online classes through broadcast, web and even offline. One or two teachers handle one subject for a 30-minute period. The telecast is watched by all the students of that particular class across the state. At the end of the day, the teachers concerned at every school interact with their students through mobile phones for feedback. It’s the responsibility of the teacher concerned to clear all doubts of his or her students,” said Sadath.
Teachers are recording lectures for the virtual classes. Videos for the first two weeks are already completed and recording for the third week has begun.
Special arrangements have been made for students who do not have TVs or smartphones.
“In state schools, there are 1.20 lakh laptops, 80,000 projectors and 4,500 TV sets. By now, teachers have identified students who do not have access to TVs. We have made arrangements to set up TV facilities which 5 to 10 students can visit near their homes and attend online classes while observing social distancing norms. All these students need to come for just 30 minutes daily,” the KITE officer said.
State Education Minister C. Raveendranth, a former college professor, said that the online classes were just a temporary provision and shouldn’t be considered as a replacement for the usual in-person classroom teaching.
“Once the situation normalises, students can return to their classrooms. All shortcomings in the online system will be rectified,” said Raveendranath.
