Back to square one for educational institutions

Deepkamal Kaur
Tribune News Service
Jalandhar, March 19

On March 16, 2020, all schools and colleges had been ordered to remain shut owing to the fear of spread of coronavirus. All school boards and universities had cancelled their ongoing examination. Hostellers had been sent back home.

Exactly after one year, it is the same situation as of today. After a sudden spurt of cases in Punjab, the state government on Friday ordered all schools and colleges to remain shut till March 31. All ongoing examinations which were being conducted by Guru Nanak Dev University (GNDU) and IK Gujral Punjab Technical University have been postponed till further orders. Even the state government has ordered that all ongoing examination at government schools to be

postponed. “We will decide the fresh date sheet seeing the situation after March 31,” said Education Minister Vijay Inder Singla.

The attendance at schools and colleges had just begun to normalise by January-end or February when the spurt in cases started. Even nursery schools had opened. Almost all schools had planned to hold examinations on campus. But by the time the exam dates neared, the cases saw a spike and it was announced that examination for only Classes IX and XI would be and the remaining students would take examination digitally. The government schools, however, were holding offline examination for even the non-board classes till today but these got cancelled all of a sudden after an announcement by the Punjab CM this afternoon.

All local colleges today announced to cancel their ongoing examination. All offline classes have been suspended. GS Samra, Principal of Lyallpur Khalsa College, said, “Since today we have got instructions from the government to cancel all offline classes and ongoing examination, we will surely abide by them. We will have online classes from tomorrow. Students have been asked not to come to campus. Teachers, however, have been called. We will hold a meeting and decide to how to proceed further. If teachers insist that they should also be allowed to operate from home, we may allow that as well after some days.” Regarding hostellers, he said, “We need to plan about their stay as well. We will take the final call tomorrow.”

Anjali, a first year collegiate, recalled, “Last year, at this time, I was taking my Class XII CBSE examination, which got cancelled midway. A year thereafter, I was taking my first semester examinations now in the college, which have once again got cancelled midway. It had been just two months since I had begun to attend college and I am again at home now as things again seem to have taken a wicked turn.”

Interestingly, Lovely Professional University, which has had students from almost all the states of India and abroad, could not hold offline classes even for a single day for the whole last academic year. Aman Mittal, LPU director, said, “Since things were beginning to look better, we were planning to hold regular classes from March but the plan had to be shelved again. In any case, the pandemic gave us a very good chance to develop our online mode of teaching and take it to a new level. We have invested very heavily into it. We have a single application where the students mark their attendance, attend classes, get assignments and take examination. They do not have to open multiple accounts for anything. Another good thing that we managed to handle is that our sessions are running as per the 1-year-old schedule and we did not have to wait for months to hold examination or prepare results. We were prompt with our decisions and developed hi-tech mechanisms to ensure that the students were being closely monitored while attempting exams online.”