How has INSD continued to teach design classes during the lockdown and in an online mode?

Covid-19 struck us without a warning and left head of all educational institutions scrambling to respond to its exigencies. It has also created a need to creatively deal with such unforeseen and once-in-a-century catastrophic events that are being predicted as the new normal.

All educational sectors around the world had to close their campuses down mid of March 2020 as the spread was rapidly increasing, so all educational sectors had to shift their academic programmes online and International School of Design, Kolkata was no exception. Schools and colleges were not prepared for such a transition from classroom‐based education to completely online education. However, ‘online mode’ was the only way to start the classes again so that studies would not get hampered so INSD Kolkata took some immediate measures by shifting the teaching process totally online as well on an untested and unprecedented scale, conducting online classes on a trial-and-error basis, creating design content suitable for learning using technology and tools among others. During the time, we INSD Kolkata used online applications (apps) like Microsoft Teams app and zoom app to conduct the classes making unique IDs and passwords for each student. However, like other institutions, INSD Kolkata has also faced a lot of problems as e-learning was a whole new way of teaching as it itself poses a great challenge to both our teachers as well as our students over technology and access. Comparing face-to-face learning with online learning brings forth significant deficiencies in the online mode such as lack of communication, network connection, absence of opportunities of collaborative learning, teacher’s supervision and the most glaring being lack of opportunities for hands-on learning in complex courses such as Fashion, interior, jewellery designing (in terms of designing courses), but it still was keeping everyone busy with work, video lectures and assignments.

There has been a lot of advances in educational technology in the last few years and the same proved to be immensely useful during the pandemic. Several online platforms to support online education were available. Nevertheless, it was a challenge for INSD Kolkata to map their educational activities in an online space. INSD Kolkata deserves nothing less than a pat on their backs for a swift response to the pandemic amid the lockdown restrictions.