English

It is important to realize that education at all stages is inherently a political process but much more so at higher education stage, where values and ideas are discussed and debated, and the very choice of a course, a research problem or how these are chosen, framed and delivered, is reflective of these ideas and values.

… we are possibly going to have to move entirely online in many cases—at least in the short term. In public universities, this has multiple implications. What we might gain in sterile efficiency, we will lose in the rich messiness of exposure that our campuses provide….. in moving online, we lose that space of social, political and cultural discovery.

Covid-19 decimated supply chains, economic systems, and close social interactions. It also had crippling effects on educational institutions and systems worldwide. For an education-driven economy like India’s that produces the highest number of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) graduates worldwide, the situation is particularly dire. One of the fundamental components of these courses is laboratory experiments, which may become difficult, if not impossible to conduct safely in absence of a vaccine for Covid-19. In this article we outline a number of free, open-source, curated, verified, physics-based simulation resources that can be used to design virtual lab courses for introductory or advanced undergraduate physics curricula.

Shifting online is more than converting class-notes into PDFs or a collection of video lectures and e-books. Digitized learning content has to be contextualized and ‘byte-sized’ to make it crisp, engaging and understandable. Although there is no replacement of the field trips, social and cultural interactions during academic exchanges it may be possible to make the e-learning more user friendly through customization.