Ragupathi

Might be like no other crisis, COVID-19 has highlighted the role of technology in education in particular, online technologies. With almost all of their students out of school, over 90 percent of the world’s high-income countries and 60% of upper-middle income countries turned to online learning to provide educational continuity to their students. No other distance technology medium combines so many “channels” of learning—text, audio, video, multimedia. No other distance education medium can approximate the classroom experience and connect learners in real-time to their teacher, to each other, and to expertise across the world. However, online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has struggled under the weight of such expectations and failed to live up to its considerable potential. Online learning has been indeed been “disruptive”, but not in the ways technology companies and educational futurists had hoped. Many of our students, long presumed to be digital aficionados, are not e