Television for remote learning

                       After the Covid-19 crisis, the world is now looking for different modes of learning. The world has started to respond in a way never before. While the internet has taken the world by a huge movement of free information, and free learning to greater extent. For remote learning it has not been able to do much. Internet cannot be accessed in most of the places. And it is also not very reliable compared to the Television. Although, we could see people hustling towards the internet for learning. According to UNESCO around 50% of the students around the globe could not access the facility.

    Television, is surprisingly one of the effective ways to reach people in places where others medium don't really have a proper grasp. It is an audio-visual media that is very surprisingly effective. According to A.W. Bates television has a distinctive delivery, presentational, and control characteristics. Television can provide live-broadcasts, pre-recorded contents, and edutainment programs. But having said that, there are challenges that need to be addressed. Problems such as; not enough content, lack of collaboration with other entities that are related to the same field, etc, make it harder to become fruitful in the near future. It is a race that we need to seriously get working on. Africa seems to have been doing a good job in this aspect of remote learning.

          Some benefits of television is it can be very reliable as its sources are controlled by higher authorities in the government. Whereas, the internet is a pool of misinformation, and it can be very difficult to find information, and knowledge that we can trust. However, the internet is dynamic in a way that the learner is not bound by content subject, and time. The television is not dynamic in time, and subject. A learner has more control over what he/she wants to learn than what is televised. 

    However, TV doesn't allow the teacher and the student to have two way communication which also makes it almost impossible to make assessments. Exams also cannot be held in Television learning. It is also very difficult to teach various subjects where teachers need to be constantly monitoring students and giving them feedbacks. Subjects can be very much limited in Television learning. Also in a country like Nepal, where power cuts are still an issue, can we really rely on this method completely? 

                                The government of Nepal initiated audio-visual television teaching-learning programs through Dish-home, Max TV, and Net TV. It was focused on school students from grade 1-8. General subjects like Maths, English, Science, Health, and others were provided. Sadly, it was run only for a month.  

Resourses: 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0260741880140305

https://blogs.worldbank.org/education/educational-television-during-covid-19-how-start-and-what-consider

https://en.unesco.org/news/learning-through-radio-and-television-time-covid-19

https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/156651

https://www.examsanjal.com/2020/tv-audio-visual-teaching-learning-program-routine-nepal-govt/