Currently in professional communication English language is becoming more widespread and significant in almost all areas of expertise. Skills are especially in demand in communication in English in field of medicine.The world recently went through the unexpected emergence of coronavirus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic and severely crash all aspects of human life. Moreover, the biggest thing is the sudden lockdown announcement of the pandemic affected health systems, the world economy and education systems across the globe. Because of the pandemic, schools and universities were closed, offline education was suspended and a shift to emergency online teaching was instituted. English language teaching took its share in this transition and several studies were conducted to investigate effects of the pandemic on online teaching and learning of English. Online teaching and learning of English mainly created many problems due to the internet problems and student access to computer and smart phones. In addition, best thing is that India’s higher education system is the world is third largest in terms of education. India’s higher sector has witnessed a tremendous increase in number of University level Institutions & Colleges since independence. The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the economic and educational health of India. The first decision by the Central government took in the field of education was to close school and colleges, and including higher education universities. The Indian government and higher educational institutions announced that online classes would be conducted by the institutions.And the transfer from traditional Offline teaching method to Online teaching poses technical difficulties that affects the efficacy of Teaching-Learning Process. The survey has been conducted with various stakeholders of all higher education courses to know the effectiveness of TeachingLearning process. Moreover, more than 60 percentage of the students were not ready (because of lack of technical, infrastructural, and high-speed internet access, and power supply, limited network data per day) for the online classes. In addition, the Survey indicated that the online sessions of tricky subjects are difficult, but one good thing is that theoretical subjects are easy to understand. Students felt selected portions that are covered during lockdown period through online, needs to be revised in offline classes after reopening of Colleges. The suggestions and recommendations are made to improve the effectiveness of online teaching learning process. In addition, the precautions are taken by the universities to avoid rapid spread of COVID-19 cases, if colleges or universities are open before vaccinations.
Reference:
- Arasaratnam-Smith, L. A., & Northcote, M. (2017). Community in Online Higher Education: Challenges and Opportunities. Electronic Journal of e-Learning, 15(2), 188-198. Retrieved from
- https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1141773.pdf
- Arkorful, V., & Abaidoo, N. (2015). The role of e-learning, benefits and harmful of its adoption in higher education. And the International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, 12.(1), 29-42. Retrieved from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jan_15/Jan15.pdf.