LocalCircles, a community social media platform, has been keeping a track of the responses of the parents to understand the issues with online classes necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic since April 2020.

In the last LocalCircles survey conducted in late December 2020. It gathered more than 16,000 responses from parents located in 294 districts of India covering 24 states.

The survey revealed that 69 per cent of parents were in favour of schools opening after April 2021. 67 per cent of parents are in favour of schools opening between now and next 60 days while only 32 per cent of parents want the reopening to be pushed to June/July.

The survey also noted that only 19 per cent of the surveyed parents rated online school classes as effective; 79 per cent found them less effective than in-person school.

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The Ministry of Education, Government of India in June 2020 released guidelines for conducting online classes. This included duration of classes for each age group given the screen time concerns raised by parents.

However, parents via LocalCircles raised several concerns about online classes ranging from children not keeping their videos on to checking out and chatting in parallel groups while classes were going on.

Additionally, surveyed parents maintained that most schools did not have the infrastructure to keep the classes within a firewall and restrict parallel activity or make videos mandatory.

While parents of younger children i.e., up to classes 5 commonly reported children checking out of the class or losing interest and teachers finding it difficult to keep the momentum.