Constant coordination and online communication has ensured we never stopped a single day, say JKBS faculty

In a conversation with Shiksha.com, experts at JK Business School talk about their strategy to fight the current situation due to COVID-19 outbreak. They have discussed all possible efforts that a university can take in order to keep the learning ongoing.

Here is the edited excerpt of the conversation:

Q: How has today’s scenario of lockdown and global pandemic impacted your education system?
A: We are one of the first movers to adopt this remote mode of education with the outbreak of the pandemic. We started our online classes, from the very day the first class was scheduled after Holi break, without any breach in the past schedule. Except for the mode of delivery nothing has changed for us.

Q: What are some of the interesting initiatives your institute has taken to make it easy for your students and also contribute to eradication of this pandemic?
A: JKBS has made every possible effort to ensure social distancing. There have been no contact classes after March 6. The faculty and staff members were granted the freedom to work from home. However, there had been constant coordination and online communication between us so that we never stopped for a single day and continued with Happy Teaching and Learning.

Q: How is the institute planning to conduct exams, evaluate and declare result online?
A: JKBS faculties have adopted Google Classroom as a preferred mode of course delivery. Google Classroom is an excellent platform as a one-stop solution for all course-related activities.
Evaluation options in Google Classroom come with the following features:

• Assignments and examinations may be scheduled for a particular day and time when the students would receive
• Faculty can schedule a submission time, beyond which any submission will be tagged late
• Submission can be in any format ranging from scanned handwriting images to a Python code file
• The assignment may be a quiz with MCQ auto-correction features
• There is an option to test for the originality of answers
• Faculties may put the grades of the students and under the progress tab, the summary of scores of all the students in the classroom is available
• The answer sheets (e-forms) of all the students are available here

Q: How are students responding to new initiatives?
A: Students and parents are grateful to JKBS for this initiative and are actively participating in all the online activities.

Q: What impact will it have on students’ interpersonal, team management skills?
A: In spite of all the negative outcomes, this pandemic has made us witness a new phase of digitisation, especially in education and knowledge sharing. Under this lockdown situation, JKBS is organising an ample number of webinars and guest lectures by industry experts and great personalities. Students are getting a golden opportunity to listen to them, interact with them, and take their interpersonal and management skills at higher levels.

Q: What are the best practices that the college is adopting to ensure seamless online learning?
A: JKBS has adopted Google Meet under G Suite as our preferred platform for the delivery of online lectures. Thanks to our enthusiastic professors and innovative and liberal initiatives of Google to allow online classes with a capacity of 250 participants and facility of screen sharing, video recording, and many more.

Q: How will today’s situation revolutionise online learning in India and abroad?
A: MOOC courses were already gaining ground all over the world when this pandemic hit us hard. But one silver lining is that the MOOCs now gained universal acceptance by the worldwide learners.
Universities will move to online mode to make quality education more affordable and allow more students to attend the lectures of great professors. Distance and money would not stand in the way of learning anymore, at least to a great extent. I see a true revolution in the field of education.