Higher Education in India: Challenges and Opportunities of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The higher educational institutions and universities were forced to be shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic and came up with an alternative to resume the teaching-learning process via a digital mode of education. Due to many shortcomings in the digital mode of education, it is now necessary to reopen educational institutions. As students are important stakeholders, the views and suggestions are necessary before actually taking a decision on reopening the educational institutions. With objectives on reopening of educational institutions, modification in the course curriculum due to many problems faced by students during online teaching-learning process, health and safety protocols to be followed, etc, 21 questions are designed. Likert scale is used in data collections and analysed using various statistical tools. The students have different views on the reopening of the institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The practical or project-based course curriculum irrespective of offline or online mode of teaching is suggested by most of the students. On the health and safety protocols, the percentage of students giving priorities for creation of disinfection room, hand sanitization station entry and common places and regular health checkup are 74.82%, 80.69% and 74.48%, respectively. On the issue of the health and safety rule implementation, 92.4 % of students committed to pledge to adhere to the health and safety protocols, but 72.9% of students expressed that it would be difficult to enforce health and safety measures to the students inside the institution.