The fault in their gadgets

For many students, e-learning is a nightmare as their tabs — provided by the State Government — lack space and the screen keeps freezing often


Students using tabs provided by the State Government complain that the tabs are outdated, keep rebooting frequently, and lack space. As a result, students are losing precious minutes of their online education while restarting their devices. A student said: “We are supposed to attend classes for a few hours in the morning. But we are facing network issues and even if we manage to access the network, the tabs do not support the software and keep getting stuck.”

Another student said that lagging was also a common issue. This happened due to the system hanging. “The moment we reboot the gadget, we would have lost precious minutes by then. The lecturers get irritated if students continuously ask them to repeat the portions as they cannot do it for every student at regular intervals. So, we are asking the lecturers to send the recorded video later.”

While students complain that the tabs provided have lesser space as these tabs are of 2GB RAM and 32 GB ROM, lecturers have a different story to say. One of the lecturers said: “The tabs were provided by the government so that students can have an online education. As these tabs have less space, we advised the students not to download multiple apps as this will eat up the space and reduce the speed. However, the youths go on downloading different apps other than those required for listening to videos. This is one of the main reasons for the tabs to hang frequently.”

These tabs were rolled out as a result of an ambitious Rs 195-crore initiative by the State Government to promote digital learning and to bridge the digital divide in higher education.

The tabs were distributed to 1.55 lakh students amounting to Rs 163 crore. The government had claimed that this initiative was aimed at empowering students and would largely benefit the students belonging to economically weaker sections of the society who pursue their studies in government education institutions. The tabs were distributed to first-year students of 430 government first-grade colleges, first-and second-year students of 87 government polytechnic colleges, first,-second and-third year students of 14 engineering colleges.

The initiative was aimed at bridging the gap between offline and online, digital and physical, rural and urban, government and private, rich and poor and also English and native language barriers with respect to access for quality teaching and learning, besides providing a strong platform to implement National Education policy effectively.