The Curious Case of Online Classes

If you are aware of the mind-numbing pace at which internet penetration and smartphone usage has skyrocketed in India over the past few years (circa when Jio dismantled the tyranny of Indian telecom operators) you’d be thankful that the COVID-19 pandemic has struck us now of all times. Not that it should have struck us in the first place, but all I’m saying is, as a nation, perhaps we would have never been better prepared to tackle the challenges this pandemic has imposed on us. Even the corona virus was considerate enough to allow us to prepare ourselves for bracing the crisis. Unlike what Modi Ji did to Chinese Apps. The Sheer Suddenness!

The dramatic revamp of the education sector during the COVID-19 era is a shining example of what I am on about. If you’re studying in a half-decent educational institution, be it a school or a college, there is a high chance that your institute has resumed dissemination of education in some sort of online mode. Some have gone the fancy route of splurging on a comprehensive enterprise-level solution with all the bells and whistles such as Microsoft Teams or Google Classroom. Many have succeeded in ensuring that the name ‘zoom’ no longer reminds us of an erstwhile music channel on Indian TV. Some have even resorted to teaching via sharing recorded lectures on WhatsApp for what its worth. And then there are people who are using JioMeet, but why though?

After having completed a highly precious 2-month virtual internship and nearly 6 months of learning to live with these pseudo-teleportation services, I shudder to think of our world just a few years ago. At the risk of sounding like a boomer, I am sharing the state of the Indian middle-class internet experience less than a decade ago. So, Hamare Zamane Mein… I had to plug in a Tata Photon Dongle to the side of my laptop and wait for the dial-in connection to do its thing. After five valuable minutes passed I would’ve barely managed to establish a feeble link between my clunky IBM Thinkpad running Windows XP and the World Wide Web. Never mind, let’s carry on. Oh, wait, Internet Explorer has crashed even before it could load the home page, now my laptop has gone into the ‘hang ho gaya hai’ mode and the usual routine of Ctrl+Alt+Del followed by a flurry of F5s to refresh ensues. (Please don’t judge someone for using Internet Explorer. All of us have done it at some point in our lives, all of us have to live with the trauma that it has put us through). With Jai Mata di on my mouth and fingers trembling with trepidation, I relaunch Internet Explorer and after a few tongue-in-cheek fake hang moments, it finally loads up google.com with all its serif typeface glory at the blistering speed of a few hundred kilobits per second. Back then, even Google wasn’t the mentalist it is today and you had to type what you wanted pretty accurately. When Google debuted “Did you mean ….” in 2008, it was met with the same mystic mind-reading enthusiasm as self-driving cars are met with today. And finally, after having read the Wikipedia article I wanted and hitting the back button to go on to the next task, the slightest squirm of my body dislodged the dongle from its magic working position in the USB port, bringing an end to my ephemeral web-browsing experience. And at the risk of sounding like Raju Rastogi’s mother from 3 Idiots, this excruciating experience was sold to you at the scandalous rates of more than a thousand rupees for a paltry 5–6 Gigabytes of data a month.

A pandemic of the scale of COVID-19 would have brought education to its knees had it struck back then, when internet of any kind, let alone fast was a luxury few understood and even fewer could afford. Fast forward a few years to the present where we have toddlers with spittle dripping from their mouths and hands the size of lemons holding iPads as big as they are. On the iPad is a video of an engineer who has “turned his career around” and is now teaching infants three-letter words while dressed as a clown using “advanced end-to-end encrypted AI-powered audiovisuals that are scientifically proven to develop the prefrontal cortex in children under 5 years”. Come on, you’re just teaching little Parth how to spell ‘CAT’ because his parents are too busy with work to do so.

While online education and the entire ed-tech startup playground are being hailed as the next big thing for investors looking to turn their millions into billions, for old-timers like me, Google Classroom can never hope to replace the humble brick and mortar classrooms at schools and colleges. You see, the subject isn’t the only thing that is taught in these classrooms. Going to lectures in physical classrooms is an entire ritual that these virtual platforms can never replicate.

My college lectures commence at 9 in the morning and as any honest engineering student would tell you, 8:50 is the earliest you need to wake up to be able to comfortably attend the lecture. Back at IIT (BHU), if I woke up in the morning at 9:02, a hard-wired automation routine would go off in my head — my roommate would be woken up with a shrill rebuke, the first piece of clothing that covers my entire legs would be worn (no this isn’t a religious requirement but a prerequisite for being allowed inside classes), a register and a pen would be grabbed, the door hurriedly locked and a dash to the hostel gate would be made, praying someone who owns a vehicle would share our fate and be present at the gate. On lucky days, a comrade would be about to whizz away on his 3rd hand Activa when we would jump on behind him, the poor Japanese scooter scraping its underbelly bearing the weight of three more than fully-grown Indian adults and reach the lecture in a record time of 2–3 minutes dodging cows on our way. The more courageous of us would even stop for a cup or two of tea. On unlucky days, which were almost always, we’d half-run, half-dawdle our way to the lecture hall reaching a tad late than was deemed acceptable by the professor and would be reprimanded publicly, sweating way too profusely to be able to pay attention to the insults being hurled at us.

The other day, when I woke up at home at 9:03, I was struck by the same panic but then realised, there was nowhere to go. Without even getting off my bed, a hand reached out to grab the laptop from the bedside table, logged on to MS Teams and without the professor becoming aware of my audacious intrusion, I was camouflaged with the rest of the class. 50 years from now, I’d much rather narrate the sprint to the lecture hall to my grandchildren than the laptop-grabbing digital intrusion.

The differences don’t end there. Unless you’re Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper, it is highly probable that you get bored during the endless lectures and look for ways to distract your mind.

Be it passing flustered looks to your friend sitting across the bench or casting a quick glance at your phone’s notifications or even a full-blown game of PUBG suppressing cries of anguish when you get killed. We all are aware of how insidious these guilty pleasures are and how much we are going to curse ourselves one night before the examinations but boy are they so enticing! But these won’t be half as thrilling if it weren’t for the imminent danger of being caught by the professor. A crimes isn’t a crime if you don’t have the fear of being caught. The invisibility of switching off our mics and cameras takes the ‘guilty’ out of these guilty pleasures.

And remember how we couldn’t leave the classes until the professor had put the chalk down on the desk, gathered his belongings and was about to leave himself? Even then we waited for someone else to leave first, just in case. In online classes when the professor utters the words: “Okay, I guess we’re done for the day” the alacrity of the exodus of students is so enormous even Google doesn’t bother to count and just says ‘Several participants have left the meeting’. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that the speed of a student leaving an online lecture is beaten only by the speed shown by his parents to change the channel when an ad for a contraceptive comes on TV.

While students are revelling in the online class era, teachers have to bear the brunt of re-learning how to teach for the first time in their careers. For a demographic which often struggled to connect their laptops with the projectors in lecture halls, asking them to install a new ‘app’ on their laptop, create a ‘virtual classroom’, ‘invite’ all the students to join the classroom, ‘schedule a meeting’, ‘Present their screen’, ‘post’ assignments and juggle with toggling their microphones is too steep of a learning curve. I believe the effort teachers are putting in to ensure minimal disruption of the curriculum is under-appreciated given many of them are near the age of retirement and generally not so tech-savvy. But then the frequent exclamations of ‘Hallo, Can anyone hear me?” “Am I Audible?” and “Is my screen visible now?” are all way too amusing to not giggle at.

It goes without saying that the nefariousness of students knows no hurdles. Come what may, students will find a way to pull a trick. Be it muting a teacher while she is speaking, or kicking each other out of the meeting, students never fail to make a class too boring. It is a well-known fact that more than half of the total attendees of any lecture are actually sleeping while being logged in. The inclusion of a chatbox, while failing to serve its intended purpose of a discussion platform has become the breeding ground for BINOD Memes. The other day when I wasn’t allowed into the meeting for joining late (the virtual equivalent of the teacher bolting the class shut from the inside) I simply asked my mate to share his screen via Google Meet and completed the ongoing quiz. These antics wouldn’t have worked in the real world, would they? Though these mischiefs have breached their shelf life and we, the students as a community need to figure out newer tricks that the world hasn’t seen yet. At this point, I’m just waiting for the day when someone uses the virtual hand-raising feature and asks for permission to go to the loo. Such a harmless crime :’)

In spite of all the hype surrounding online education at the moment, the entire ecosystem is so early on in its infancy that any claims on its efficacy or ineptitude are about as useless as Rakhi Sawant’s attempts to ward off the Coronavirus. While the fluid integration of audiovisual aids in teaching is making the learning experience a lot more immersive, the sheer relaxation of discipline allowed by the absence of an authority figure such as a teacher makes it much easier for the students to ignore studies altogether. In addition to this, the Indian education system was already infamous for its dearth of practical education and now, online education completely decimates the scope of laboratory practicals and experiments. And while conventional examinations were by no means the ideal way to gauge a person’s intellect, the un-proctored land of untimed online assessments is equivalent to the Wild West where students are free to act on their will and can very well pass through assessments without studying anything at all thanks to the World Wide Web and the indomitable spirit of camaraderie.

So, are virtual classes the undisputed future of education? Absolutely not. Students and teachers alike are dying to return to schools and colleges. Are virtual classes the best option available to us at the moment, given the pandemic? Definitely! Who’d have wanted to lose out a year of education sitting at home just because some guy in China ate a bat? But keeping all the teary-eyed nostalgia for in-person classes aside, it’s funny how we yearn to return to the places we despised and gave flak to while we were there. But then, distance does make the heart grow fonder! So while the memories of the crowded cafeterias, sunlit corridors, pristine laboratories, wild hostel rooms and infinite lectures continue to ravage our hearts, all we can do, is speak for a minute before realising our mic wasn’t on.

“Yes, am I audible now?”