Role of Digital Social Media on Indian Higher Education: Alternative Approaches of Online Learning during COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis

Indian higher education can boast of being one of the torch bearers among many developing nations for its rich plethora of dynamic content. Due to the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, in all the higher educational institutions, which includes universities, standalone institutes, and colleges, a total of about 10 million academic hours are compromised, which will be rather difficult to compensate. The University Grants Commission through its advisory instructed all the institutes to continue classes in online mode as per feasibility and engage ICT tools available for use in academic discourse. Many institutions have been using different social media platforms for the dissemination of knowledge. The present crisis has revolutionized the entire higher education architecture of the country through videoconferencing based online learning since there’s no other option to compensate for the compromised academic activities. This paper aims at exploring the kind of social media used to disseminate learning resources to the students, and the role it crafting on their educational loss. It also elucidates the effectiveness of online classes, e-learning pedagogy, and through structured qualitative analysis.