The state government has imposed a complete ban on online classes for students of pre-primary and primary (grades one to five) classes besides putting a cap of two sessions per day for students of classes six to eight. Each session should not be of more than 30-45 minutes duration.
The government has also directed that recordings of online classes should be made available to the students and their parents so that they can view them as per their convenience and that the NCERT guidelines on ‘Safe online learning in times of COVID-19’ should be adhered to.
An order issued by the Commissioner, Rajya Shiksha Kendra said that decision has been taken in view of the problems being faced by students who do not have a digital device and who are facing problems in recharging data. It said that complaints had been received that some schools were conducting very long online classes, putting students and their parents to inconvenience.
In a related development, the MP Commission for Protection of Child Rights (MPCPCR) has also urged the government to put an immediate stop to online classes for students of grades one to five and to reduce the duration of distance teaching for the older children to a maximum of two hours every day.
An advisory issued by the Commission here on Thursday says that on the basis of consultations with experts, it has reached to the conclusion that exposing children to long hours of online classes accessed through mobile phones was detrimental to their health and learning process.
“Children become irritable and their physical, mental and emotional health is adversely affected if they are forced to peer into mobile screens for long hours,” the advisory issued by Brajesh Chouhan and Amita Jain, both members of the Commission said.
The advisory says that learning is a painstaking and slow process for small children even in the classroom environment. “It would be naive to believe that a six-year-old student of class one would be able to comprehend anything in the one-way communication that most online classes are,” Chouhan said.
The Commission wants that students of up to class five should be spared the torture of online classes till the schools reopen. In the case of older students, the classes should not be held for more than two hours a day. As an alternative, the schools can upload videos of lectures by teachers on their websites or send them to children through WhatsApp so that they watch them at their convenience. In the rural areas, community radio can be used for the same purpose, the Commission said.
