Online learning for agricultural courses during COVID 19 : Students’ perceptions about its effectiveness

Abstract

The coronavirus pandemic has imperilled the teaching-learning process, forcing to adapt to online modes from kindergarten to the tertiary level, globally. In this setting, a study was conducted among randomly selected 120 undergraduate agricultural science students of Kerala Agricultural University regarding their experience based perceptions on the online learning effectiveness for their courses. As per the results, online learning was considered effective in terms of learning material supply, ease of taking exams, cost-effectiveness, doubt clearance and learning flexibility while it was considered ineffective with regard to team feeling and motivation. Connectivity issues, technical problems and lack of interaction have negatively affected the interest and the attention span of the students. The social science subjects (Agricultural Extension and Home Science) were recorded as easier to study online, though the conceptual clarity was negatively impacted in Agricultural Economics and Statistics. Plant Pathology, Agricultural Entomology and Plant Breeding were counted as hard to learn online. This study tries to call for change management in the online teaching-learning process in agricultural education system so that the prevailing uncertainties due to pandemic can be overcome and the teaching-learning activities can be resumed with quality and effectiveness.