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The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown lives out of gear, disrupting a nation both holistically and integrally. The education sector hasn't been an exception; the fear of the virus's rapid spread has induced nationwide lockdowns, restricting the mobility of children, their parents and teachers, while limiting their outdoor recreational activities, which have adversely impacted mental health. Notably, the nationwide lockdowns brought to the fore several questions on the future of the young generation. On the other hand, this paved the way for many Ed-tech companies to mushroom. They looked to provide e-learning platforms, online teaching tools, communication technologies and software to support the transition from traditional (F2F Face to Face) classes to virtual classrooms. Education institutions quickly adopted new video conferencing platforms like Microsoft teams; Google meet, Zoom and WebEx to 'facilitate' e-learning. Smartphones and laptops were being extensively used for online classes, which were strictly prohibited in the pre-pandemic period, as they tend to adversely affect the children's behaviour. Though the 'digital drive' was the need of the hour for disseminating knowledge and was an indispensable medium of teaching, several teachers were not 'digitally' equipped and trained. A few others attempted and experimented with 'teaching supplements' like screen-share, chatbox and whiteboard to keep students engaged and provide an enhanced learning experience.
However, this sudden spurt of self-induced digitization has had negative effects, especially on primary school children, who became victims of long screen time exposure with minimal physical activities and social life, hampering their physical and mental capabilities. A study by the Indian Academy of Pediatrics revealed that 32% of the parents complained that their children had reported headache, dry eye syndrome, back, wrist and neck pain, along with weight gain, as they had to sit for long hours for online classes (Ghate et al., 2020). Other studies have even shown that the effect of increasing screen time due to excessive use of digital devices (e.g. laptops/smartphones/tabs) have caused Glioma (i.e. cancer of glial cells in the brain or spine), neck discomfort symptom, sleep disruptions, increase in obesity, impulse control disorder on children; in fact, they have also gone on to add that it could even negatively affect the interpersonal relationships (Demirci et al., 2015; Morgan et al., 2015; Hawi & Samaha, 2016; Straker, 2017; Fowler & Noyes,2017). Hence these impacts of online classes on children may create a negative learning environment. Researchers have even proven that children who learn in a negative environment are prone to learning and interpersonal problems. This means the online classes could affect the children's academic performance, learning effectiveness and even holistic development at a broader level.
Speaking about 'learning effectiveness', one could question how can it be defined/explained! Generally, 'learning' is considered effective when the desired outcomes of a course per se are achieved. Specifically, learning effectiveness largely depends on various factors, like the quality of content, delivered, the medium used, the instruction pedagogies used, the student's attention level, the pace of communication of the instructor, among others. Importantly, these aspects would significantly vary between traditional classroom setup vis-a-vis virtual teaching platforms (Zhang, 2006, p. 96; Singh, Rylander, & Mims, 2012; Cavanaugh & Jacquemin, 2015). The pandemic has brought about a paradigm shift in learning; thus, there is a need to study the impact of online classes on its learning effectiveness, especially the children of primary schools.