After six months, rebooting campuses has its fair share of problems. From the outset, institutes will open their hostels, albeit in stages, to students of postgraduate studies as necessary. While some are on campus again, laboratories have limited time to prevent overcrowding and strict implementation of social distance requirements.
Agrees Yogesh Simmhan, professor of association, department of computer and data sciences (CDS), Indian Science Institute (IISC), Bangalore. Their tutorial losses make it seem long.
The pandemic has limited the physical independence of researchers. The real difficulties may lie in the wet laboratories, where the difficulties are much harder as heavy products may have degenerated from lack of usage. It was a little less of a concern in our data science and computer laboratories because a server could go down every 2-3 weeks and it can take 2-3 days for people to manage critical equipment to work in the hometowns.
The purchase of analytical tools is another area that had to beat. “As the global logistics supply chain slows down, import servers can take about three months and even 20-30 percent of their prices are rising. “While the government funding is available for our equipment, growing costs can impede our progress in research,” Simmhan says.
It says that online class preparations take time and that analyses which need to take a backrest with semesters starting on 1 October. The low consumption of scholars as a result of the pandemic may have an effect on the results of the study as its Institute may not have sufficient university students to perform current analytical activities or to start new ones.
lockdown was a necessity, but its impact can not be undermined for researchers at the end of the PhD programme, as some experiment would need to be complete.
While it has proven beneficial to a large number of students working on programming and modelling, virtual laboratories have restricted their use in generating and calibrating data using those instruments during the lockdown.
However, given the life risk involved, the dilemma is inevitable. We have also allowed students to select experimental studies based on the literature that would otherwise be carried out when students run experiments. It will allow them to increase their expertise so that researchers at an advanced stage of their Ph.D. are ideally prepared to perform the studies as they are returning to campus when we prepare their return.
Simmhan believes that digital laboratories are ‘a step down from physical laboratories’ and while many researchers can use them at the same time, they are a good place to educate highschool and UG students and can by no way respond to higher study schemes even during the pandemic.
“Students lose their drive by working abroad and appear to become lethargic at home. Brainstorming promotes the blue sky thinking and a great deal of study happens in corridors and in laboratories and adhoc interactions with colleagues, which obviously does not happen when campuses are reopened.”
As organisations strive to ensure that the pandemic is documented with minimal or zero disruption, a resilient plan and hope to sail with minimal losses through the catastrophe is essential.