Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Break of 39 Days , Digitalization Driven by Covid-19 in Education Sector

Tired Sleepy GIF - Tired Sleepy Exhausted GIFs
Finishing the Semester

Since the Lockdown got implemented in India and school and colleges got shutdown , it took months for everyone to plan and find the right tools to continue the Lectures and progress with the ongoing semester  , my college also took a months time and decideded to use Microsoft teams as a platform for conducting classes and finishing of the planned lectures and using  it to conduct assignements by taking in submission in form of scanned handwritten answerscripts , which was well accepted and easy to use .

As the time went on and University remained closed Nationwide my College looked on for solutions to conduct the exams Online using a software called Pexa Lite by   company called Little More Innovation Labs and released the datesheets and notice for moving forward with the semester and conducting midterms which was ok but let to  huge clash between students and college administration  on the following points :

  • The Software was first time being field tested and had truck load of bugs from crashing and freezing , being shown as virus in all antivirus software including windows and antivirus software had to be disabled to use it 
  • Only worked on Windows OS and consumed lot of bandwidth which was not an option for students whose connectivity was being affected by natural calamities
  • The Input method for answers was inadequate with no support for tables , charts , diagrams , formulas 
  • The software & college expected us to write those answeres which involved the above and scan the text using webcam software inside the software which was like a cherry on top of the already bad webcam quality windows laptop have and then even detorating it even further with poor software to capture it  , there is a reason ppl use mobile to scan pages not webcam .

 Which let to massive response from students across social media with #boycottPexa to a point it was trending top 10 in India at one point  for conducting exams  , as soon as dates approched there was both confusion  among students how to solve and so many issues with the software until last 48 hrs on how to setup and get familiar with software and scan sheets ,and the mock tested ended up in disaster , 
Finally  , College postponed the exams for few days and cancelled the end terms exams with mid terms exams and labs and other project submssion on Microsoft teams , which ended well yesterday marking the end of Semester , unfortunately breaking my #100daysofMLcode and ML learning progress ,which i will resume as of today wich will not be true to  100 days of ML code challenge but might serve as reference  to somone else ,

There are plenty of articles and reports on adaptation of tech in education industry , but my word on it is  if the number of seats and size was limitation to good college and university and education if things are moving  digital , the fees and student intake capacity should be adjusted according to it :)

Time to resume back the ML and Project X