The coronavirus pandemic has had a profound impact on education. Higher education institutions including public campuses have followed the recourse of online learning as an alternate to the face-to-face learning to minimize this impact and keep the students engaged during the pandemic. This paper discusses the changing scenario of delivering education in higher educational institutions in Nepal. The purpose of this study was to explore teachers’ perceptions on online teaching. It also tried to identify the challenges and opportunities of online teaching in public campuses of Nepal. The study adopted a qualitative research design. Three faculty members of three different campuses from Rupandehi were taken as research participants purposively. The main finding was that the faculty members are ready to adopt online teaching to mitigate the learning loss of the students due to COVID 19. But there are some challenges for conducting online classes like unwillingness of campuses to implement the online classes, lack of physical infrastructures, lack of clear policy, and limited motivating factors for faculty members and students.

Teacher professional development (TPD) is the process of making teachers competent at applying the knowledge and skills they have attained in the classroom practice. TPD keeps academics up-to-date with the changing world and knowledge. The objective of this study was to explore policies and practices of teacher professional development in public campuses of Nepal. This study was qualitative approach with a phenomenological design. The participants of the study were three teachers of different public campuses of Rupendehi district selected purposively. The study revealed TPD policies as opportunities for teachers of public campuses deserve high consequence in the sense that they help teachers develop various kinds of professional skills, knowledge, new techniques of teaching. However, Public campuses are facing many challenges which include proper management TPD for faculties of their campuses and there is a gap between policies and practices in implementation of TPD in public campuses of Nepal.

English as Medium of Instruction (EMI) has been a burning issue of the pedagogical field among the concerned stakeholders including teachers. The objective of this study was to find out the perception of the community schools' teachers in shifting the medium of instruction to English in the multilingual classroom contexts. It also aimed to explore the opportunities and challenges of shifting the medium of instruction Nepali to English in community schools. It is a qualitative design with a phenomenological study. The participants of the study were two teachers of a community school of Sainamaina Municipality of Rupandehi who are teaching other than English subjects in English medium. A semi-structured interview technique was used to gather information from the participants. The main finding of the study was that the use of EMI in community schools is beneficial. It is also found that teachers of community schools were positive in implementing EMI in conducting their daily teaching and learning activities even though there are certain challenges like linguistic difficulties, inadequate language abilities of teachers, cultural diversity, less effective pedagogy, limited resources, etc.

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This paper analyses the position of languages in local education policy. The objectives of this paper were to explore the language in education policies in the local government of Nepal and to find the policymakers’ perception toward language in education policy in the local governments of Nepal. I prepared this paper in two ways; by reviewing the secondary documents in which I have gone through the relevant documents of language in the education policy of Nepal historically. It was a case study research design. For primary resources, I selected two local governments of the Rupandehi district as cases and reviewed their policies. For this study, I selected two policymakers of selected local governments of Rupandehi purposively who have been working in the area of local policy-making activity. I performed a depth interview with unstructured interviews based on the education and language policies they had prepared before. The findings of this study revealed that there was a gap between the policy and practice in relation to language in the education policy of local governments. Policies were formulated according to the spirit of the constitution of Nepal respecting all languages but there were lapses in practices focusing on English and Nepali Language. It was also found that policymakers were proactive to promote the local languages but negligence by the user and the policymakers were aware of addressing the linguistic diversity of their municipalities in education policy.