Back to school norms: Strategies for social distancing in education

An edupreneur, who runs a large private university, had recently sought ideas to implement social distancing at his institution. And it prompted an inquiry into social distancing-centric models that could be used by higher education institutions in the post Corona world.

Connecting classrooms to hostel rooms could help students attend classes form the hostel. The idea is to allow only a third of the students to sit in classrooms with the remaining two-thirds attending from the hostels using their own devices – be it a laptop or a smartphone. The batch attending face to face classes could be put on rotation week after week. A class of 60 could have only 20 students attending on any given day. This will make it easier to maintain social distancing. Also, on campuses with large tracts of open areas, classes and examinations could be arranged in open spaces.

Industrial tie-ups can also enable half the students to be sent out on long internships so that the campus crowd can be reduced to fifty per cent. The one-semester long internships can help batches to be swapped at the end of each semester. This way an engineering student would effectively stay only for two years on campus during the 4-year duration.

While these are only temporary solutions, we need to think of efficient long-term solutions that offer sustainable advantage to both institutions and students. The Local Shop model of an e-tailer offers customers access to a greater selection and faster deliveries from local shops. Besides, it also helps shopkeepers expand beyond their usual area using the e-tailer’s technology, training and enablement capabilities. It is a marriage of e-retail technologies with the local reach of the kirana stores that offer customised and personalised services to its customers.

Our unit of planning is the school, college or unitary University. But better solutions can be developed for clusters of Institutions, such as large affiliating universities, institutions that are part of some associations or having some common accreditations. Then we can think of ecosystem level models. Take the case of Anna University with its large number of affiliated colleges. We can easily decongest the university and its affiliated colleges if a certain percentage of the courses are offered online so that the students would attend face to face classes only for the remaining courses. The best teachers from the ecosystem can be assigned the task of delivering the online courses. In some cases, even experts from outside can be invited to offer online courses. This model would free precious faculty resources from the routine teaching job. They could now concentrate on research, consultancy and extension activities.

Pure play online education companies are making the most of the lockdown now. But the future will reinvent education in many different formats. Apart from the traditional face-to-face models, we will have purely online as well as hybrid and blended models. Different blended models can be developed by judiciously mixing the three elements, namely, face to face classes, online asynchronous classes using recorded lessons and synchronous online virtual classes. Several educational technologies are under development. We already have seen the introduction of robots for teaching jobs. There are AI based solutions that customise education to individual needs. One thing for sure is that education will not be the same as we know today.