Project guide takes regular updates on our projects: Arun, Manipal
These are first-hand student accounts on how our young population is managing to keep their exam prep or college course work going from the confines of their homes. In case you want to share your lockdown study experience, write to us at publish@shiksha.com.
Like every final year students of any course, I was also starting to dream about the completion of my course in this April and get the tag of an MBA graduate. Well, the year 2020 is going to be remarkable in the history of mankind in the future as COVID 19 hit the world and all the sectors including education has been shut down.
Challenges keep rising at all points of our lives and career. After all, being a management student, I need to be optimistic about the situation.
Like every other institute, my institute and the parent university closed down its operations a week before the national lockdown. The exams and project submissions were moved to June and we were left with few final lectures of the subjects.
As my university is in a mission to go paperless from the past few years, online study materials and methods were not at all difficult for students to operate and access. Since the classes were almost ending, only a few add-on topic discussions and assignments were pending to finish our even semester. However, here are four notable ways our institute responded to this situation in order to avoid adverse effects to our studies.
- Uploading of course materials on the online platform
Complete and comprehensive study materials for each topic of all the subjects were uploaded immediately after the lockdown of the university. The resource materials included presentation slides, e-textbooks, research papers, video links and other additional readings. Further, the director of the institute also intimated a plan on how to access study materials in this duration of two months or so. - Regular periodic communication with the project guide
As one of the important course in the 4th semester is the final project, also called as thesis work, the faculty members guide each student is available over telephone and email. Regular periodic updates on the progress of our project need to be communicated with the guide and the professors are spending a lot of time over the phone to clarify our doubts. The report of the project is sent to the respective guides at regular intervals in order to seek feedback and suggestions on the work. - Online certification courses
Certification courses have always been an integral part of our curriculum ever since I joined my University. The Coursera platform is set free for all the students of the university and a student can do any number of courses free of cost. In this situation of surplus free time, the institute motivates us to take up more courses complementing our academic subjects and based on our interests to expand the domain knowledge. - Work from home assignments
Those subjects for which the evaluation components were yet to be completed, work from home assignments that are more complex at the same time knowledgeable and challenging have been given. There is a lot of time required for these assignments with comparison to those we were given on the campus but I am happy that it is highly practical oriented and is intended solely to evaluate the conceptual clarity.
Apart from these, the institute's placement committee is also been helpful for us by forwarding us various work from home jobs that can be accomplished over this two months or so. I hope the situation gets sorted soon and the world regains its health.
About the Author:
Arun S., an MBA - Healthcare Management student at Manipal Institute of Management, interested in Marketing & Business Strategy predominantly in Healthcare sector.