MyVoice: Views of our readers 24th August 2020

Virtual learning helps improve skills

During the time of global pandemic, teachers, parents, and students made the largest pivot worldwide from face to face learning in brick and mortar colleges to online classrooms. While for professionals across industries it has been an easier transition as many of them work on their laptops and smart devices even in office.

But students have had to make far bigger adjustments as learning has always been in classrooms which they can't go to now. Besides, many of them may not be that well equipped with technology tools to avail of remote learning. Virtual classrooms and various online tools today allow us to make the engagement between the teacher and students as close to a real, in classroom type experience, as possible.

These tools can also make the teachers and parent meetings as well as staff/management meetings more time and cost saving while providing the necessary interactivity. Educational process becomes more flexible, especially in terms of time. Students are free to work at their own pace. Everyone can read the texts and watch the videos as many times as they need to understand the topic.

Having permanent and free access to all the learning materials, students can easily align their studies with other plans, and it gets simpler for students to continue education even having a full-time internship or job. Since learning can be done online, there is less need of books to learn the concept.

The virtual learning system also facilitates a non-stop educational process as one can continue studies even on vacation, business trip or lying in bed with a cold. This makes high-quality education available for disabled people as well as for those living in remote areas or even on other continents.

Classroom learning has certain limits, but virtual learning goes beyond, students have plenty of options to understand one topic in multiple forms like video lecture, Power Point Presentation, short notes, e-Books etc. During Covid-19 pandemic, students can easily update their skills by virtual learning and keep themselves busy with some appropriate or meaningful work.

The virtual learning environment is friendly to experiments with formats of content and new approaches. It empowers educational roadmap with online tests and quizzes and videos. Make sure to avoid surfing the web excessively. It is easy to become distracted by the news or your favourite celebrity gossip site.

Stay focused, and avoid social platforms like FB, Twitter, and other social media tools when you need to concentrate on your studies. This can be the best time to be enrolling yourself into an online course.

The course might not be necessarily related to their academics but there is a vast variety of online courses available for practically anything nowadays. They can take up a new hobby or perfect an already existing one. This way, you can easily learn a new skill which might come in handy for your future job.

Virtual Learning is not the perfect substitute to the classroom setting, but there is no better alternative for now. Learning should never stop and technology is the best channel for that. There should also be some provision for clearing the doubts. Besides, the students should utilise this time and learn life skills.

P C Chhabra, Executive Director, Sanskriti University, UP

Srisailam fire mishap an eyeopener to authorities

It was extremely shocking and painful to read about the fire accident at the 900 MW Srisailam left bank hydro-electric plant on August 20 late at night. This appears to be one of the rarest fire accidents in the history of the hydro-electric projects.

This incident took away the lives of 5 young engineers and four young persons present in the plant on duty. Sympathies are with the bereaved families and we wish God may provide them with the required strength and courage to face the situation and come out of the grief as early as possible.

This incident caused huge loss to the nation which in turn severely affect the people at large. This incident should become an eyeopener to the sector and all precautions and planning should be taken not to occur such incidents anywhere in the country. It is expected that the investigation in the incident will bring out the facts.

Y G Krishna Swamy, Rajahmundry, AP