Digital Publishing From Past to Now

The Covid-19 has caused the school and universities to shut down around the world creating a major issue in Learning and Education. As this virus spreads through the interaction and if social distancing is not kept it can spread rapidly at an enormous pace. It can be said that if schools and universities were kept open for just one more month, the cases now would be more than 10 million. The closure of school and universities have not just interrupted the learning but also has postponed the assessment exams for an indefinite time. So in order to continue the Education without wasting months of time, online education was the solution. The term electronic publishing, Epublishing, and digital publishing all three describes the same technology, however, the term "digital publishing" is most frequently used.

Digital publishing means creating something like magazines, books, or any printed work digitally for the reader. Blogs and Ebooks are the major examples of digital publishing. In the beginning, we use to convey our ideas and thinkings on stones or metal and after some time it got shifted to pages, and then came the radio technology in which Radio broadcasting started in which there is the transmission of audio (sound) to radio receivers belonging to a public audience. Analog audio is the earliest form of the radio broadcast which began in the 1930s. After it, the broadcasting started digitally with the advancement in technology so televisions were used for it. Now, the Internet has made the world a Global village which means everyone is connected to each other digitally and the person living in the corner of the world is just one call away. Once, it used to take days to convey the message to another city but now just one click and that message is available to every person of the world. Many online platforms were made like Twitter, Facebook, and Medium which started to have millions of online traffic. Facebook alone has 2.5 billion active users and thus showing the importance of the digital world. Now newspapers are also available digitally and have become E-newspaper.

As now, the school and universities are closed distance teaching tools have become more important than before. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in the closure of the vast majority of schools and universities worldwide. Many schools moved to online distance learning using many platforms. Universities have different schedules as compared to schools and many universities are not going to open and have decided to go online for the complete Semester. Learning and Education have changed significantly in this pandemic and from the school classroom now there are digital classrooms. Although there were many online platforms before the outbreak of Covid-19 but now there has been a drastic surge in online platforms available.

Distance learning is very much effective as there are more resources available online rather than the limitations in traditional classrooms. For example, Students can learn at their own pace, re-read it if needed, and can skip the unnecessary parts. In the classroom, the traditional outdated textbooks are used which are having information that can be already obsolete. So, Digital Learning helps with the relevant information without wasting time in the outdated version. Now E-books and magazines are also available and in them, you aren't confined by the length of the work as you would in the conventional publications.

In the past, Major world events have always created a chance of new innovation. This pandemic has also paved the way for education going online as most of the schools and universities have gone online. It will be interesting to see the Post Pandemic Learning but one thing is sure that no one can rule out the importance of Digital and Distance Learning from now.