Colleges in Coimbatore have taken to various online platforms to conduct classes and tests. While a few colleges use proprietary software to help faculty reach out to students during the COVID-19 induced lockdown period, others use open source or free platforms.
The objective behind conducting classes is to ensure that academic activity goes on. It is also to enable the faculty use modern technology available to reach out to students and convey to the students in no uncertain terms that the colleges mean business, says the correspondent of an arts and science college near the city.
The faculty have started not only using the tools that the colleges ask them to reach out to students but also looking for online content available on the Web.
The faculty then share the resource (online content) with the student at least a day before the start of the virtual class so that the student has some idea of what the faculty is going to teach, says the chief executive officer of a college.
And, invariably, in cases where the faculty has shared the content in advance, the class begins with a quick online test with objective questions to assess where the students stand, he adds.
The faculty and students log in to a common platform and the virtual class begins with the faculty talking to he students about the subject on hand. The technology also enables him to share his screen, in case he is writing down something to explain a concept.
The students get to raise doubts and at the end, the faculty conducts a quick test, again. The whole process is monitored and whoever has logged in is marked present, says a college correspondent, saying that the management has said it is taking a serious view of online presence as it amounts to attendance.
The correspondent of another college says the interesting aspect of using online tools to conduct tools is that the student are very interested. Be it class or test, he has seen students attendance dropping not below 95%, which is otherwise not the case in his college.
Using the online software available, a few of the colleges under the Bharathiar University have also conducted internal (model) tests.
A college head says that the objective and descriptive questions are timed, meaning that students will have to answer each question within a specific time. The clock starts ticking once a question is chosen and at the end of the time, the screen freezes, leaving the students with little time to alter or manipulate the answers.
At the Bharathiar University, the faculty are engaged in conducting guest lectures for faculty and students by invitation. Using the lockdown period, the University is also engaged in drawing up its plan for the next decade, says Vice Chancellor P. Kaliraj.
The Tamil Nadu Agricultural University too has followed suit by starting online classes a couple of days ago. A release from the institution says 344 students of 33 post-graduate programmes and 172 research scholars from 29 disciplines are benefitting from online classes.
