The future of the classroom is online

The government must support universities as they move to embrace virtual teaching-learning practises.

The prospects and possibilities of online education, or e-learning, have been experimented with ever since the advent of the internet and the subsequent development of interactive virtual platforms based on it. Some idea of distance or remote learning was already in discussion and practise, with different modalities including snail mail, radio or, lately, television to deliver lessons to students. But until the novel coronavirus pervaded the world with unprecedented speed and wrath, the scope of online education was deemed only a supplement or an alternative to the physical, universally-employed mode. Some 'open universities' certainly tried hard to make online courses a mainstream practice in tertiary education but not without considerable caveats on their trust, efficacy, quality and accreditation.