Impact of COVID-19 on Students from Different Socioeconomic Groups In India

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic caused the greatest disruption known in recent history to the education system. The pandemic caused the traditional in-person classes to come to a halt and sequestered about 1.2 billion students worldwide in their respective homes. These circumstances brought about an extraordinary collaboration among all stakeholders to shift the process of teaching, conducting examinations, and everything in between to an online mode using innovative ways. A literature review has been done in this empirical paper to understand the known and researched effects of the pandemic enforced online learning on students. It is noted that this unprecedented situation has made students face several problems and caused a loss of learning, but it is also pointed out that the lockdown has given educational institutions an incentive to grow technologically and embrace new-age methods of teaching and learning. In the light of these observations, it can be said that it is already established that the pandemic has brought some negatives and some positives to the field of education. This research paper aims to study how these negatives and positives have been distributed among learners from separate socioeconomic groups by attempting to gauge the effect of e-learning and the shutdown of academic institutions on students from different socioeconomic backgrounds. For this purpose, student respondents from all over India were asked to fill in a structured questionnaire and statistical analysis was then performed on the data from this survey to infer the results that have been presented. Lastly, this paper also shares examples and suggestions that may be used to equitably impart education in distance mode, especially during unusual times like these.