Odisha Govt’s Initiative Of Live YouTube Classes Comes A Cropper!

Bhubaneswar: The state government’s digital learning initiative seems to have failed to enthuse the majority of students as they are skipping classes on a regular basis.

Though according to the School and Mass Education department, almost 22 lakh students have access to online learning during the pandemic, the combined views of Odisha School Education Programme Authority’s (OSEPA) all channels on the YouTube platform is not even half of what is claimed.

For the live streaming of lessons on YouTube, the OSEPA has created 10 channels — one for each class. However, the traffic generated on these channels till 6.30 pm on Thursday was only around 10.3 lakh. The count could be even less than that as there is no provision to count how many of these views were by the students.

According to data, only views for Odia lessons of Class VII was over one lakh. The total views for Odia were 78,000 and 74,000 for Classes VI and VIII, respectively.

Only 78,000 traffic was generated by the OSEPA channel for the Class IX Odia lesson at the secondary level. The traffic for Class X history during the period was 1.6 lakh.

For mathematics classes, online attendance at elementary and secondary was equally disturbing as around 43,000 views were recorded for Class I and only 1 to 2 lakh for other classes.

According to OSEPA State Project Director Bhupendra Singh Poonia, district authorities have been asked to issue an instruction to school teachers to contact the parents and encourage them to guide their wards to access YouTube classes at any time during the day.

“Though we are streaming the classes live, students can access them anytime on OSEPA channels on the platform and parents must find time to facilitate viewing of the online teaching programme for their wards, especially at the elementary level”, Poonia was quoted as saying by The New Indian Express.

The students of Primary School and high school in the campus of Project Upper Primary school in Lamtaput block’s Ankadeli area of Koraput district have been visiting the school as they can’t attend the classes from home.

“I had to come to school as my mobile is not able to stream the Youtube classes. We also need a big datapack. We have a broadband at school which is good enough to watch Youtube classes being live-streamed,” Class IX student Payal Majhi was quoted as saying by Hindustan Times.

The live streaming of classes on YouTube for students of Classes I to X was launched by the state government on June 22.

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