Kota’s coaching institutes are rolling out online classes and sending out study material in digital formats as the nationwide Covid-19-induced lockdown has impeded offline classes.
New sessions at the coaching institutions usually start in April, to coincide with the beginning of the school academic year. The admission process for the new batches are already underway at over a dozen Kota-based coaching institutes, and classes for some batches are about to start.
Continuity
A spokesperson for ALLEN Career Institute, considered the Big Daddy of coaching in Kota, said that thousands of students have already enrolled for the new academic year. He said the online teaching will simulate classroom sessions. The students are being organised into batches and assigned instructors. Once classroom teaching resumes at the campus, the students will continue to be guided by the same instructors to ensure continuity in learning.
He added that institutions are looking at various formats of away-from-classroom teaching for students who may wish to continue their coaching from home post-lockdown. It will include a combination of live online instructions, recorded video sessions, interactive learning and digital study materials.
The coaching institutes are also continuing revision classes and mock tests for students who are to appear for entrance tests such as Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) for admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology and other engineering colleges, and National Eligibility and Entrance Test (NEET) for admission to medical and dental colleges. These entrance tests have been postponed on account of the country-wide lockdown.
Students stuck at Kota
Coaching courses usually run from April to February/March for most students. Some wind up by December. The students normally return home when they complete their courses, but some stay back — like the more than 40,000 students who were still in the city when the lockdown was announced — to continue with their preparation and take the tests at centres in Kota. Over 1.75 lakh students were attending coaching classes in 2019-20 in Kota.
With classroom teaching unlikely to resume before July, the coaching institutes are working with Kota district administration to ensure all students who got stuck in the city due to the lockdown return home. So far, over 12,000 students from Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand have reached home as Uttar Pradesh government organised buses. Students from Madhya Pradesh are also set to go home on April 22 in buses the State is sending to Kota to ferry them home.
Most students at Kota are from the North Indian States, chiefly Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. There is also a presence of students from other States such as Odisha, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Punjab and Haryana.