Challenges and design opportunities for online schooling in India

ABSTRACT

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the education system, there has been a consistent effort by schools to make it as effective as it was before. Many schools in India had to adapt to the online mode of education for the first time. Due to lack of experience and insufficient training, it became very challenging for teachers and students to learn and follow the new protocols. Many schools primarily adopted video conferencing platforms like Google meet, Zoom, etc., for the synchronous mode of education and tools like WhatsApp to enable asynchronous mode of education. Although these platforms are the immediate measures to respond to the pandemic situation, many teachers complain that they do not enable certain teaching-learning practices that are crucial. In our study, we aim to understand the dynamics of student-teacher participation in the online school context. We conducted contextual inquiries with fourteen secondary school teachers, eight students and three parents from tier-1 and tier-2 cities of India. We report teachers' difficulties in preparing digital content and making the class engaging. Similarly, we outline the challenges related to students' attention and collaboration. Finally, we provide design directions for building future systems for online schooling. © 2021 ACM.