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EdTech takes centre stage amid lockdown
With social contact and traditional ways to engage challenged, schools and colleges have adapted to technologies like video conferencing, instant messaging tools and more, to keep students and parents engaged.
India is in the midst of an unprecedented lockdown, joining many other countries as we come together to social distance and fight a global pandemic. For those of us fortunate enough to be able to work from home, multitasking additional home chores and finding new ways to keep our kids occupied as schools lockdown is the new normal. It’s been particularly interesting to see how quickly the education and learning sector has been able to innovate and adapt to this new reality.
With social contact and traditional ways to engage challenged, schools and colleges have adapted to technologies like video conferencing, instant messaging tools and more, to keep students and parents engaged. From uploading video lectures, students chatting with teachers on WhatsApp, group classes held on Zoom, Google Hangouts, to educational forums and even renowned Indian educators turning to Facebook Live, tech has begun to bridge the education gap virtually.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shared a letter talking about how the University of Bologna in Italy moved most of its courses for its 80,000 students online within three days. A Stanford blog talked about using platforms such as Google classrooms, YouTube and Microsoft Teams to connect with students.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have been around for over a decade, with millions of enrolments on platforms such as Coursera, Udacity and EdX. Closer to home, Indian edtech companies --TCS iON, EkStep, Unacademy, Byju’s,
Vedantu have been pursuing the Indian market aggressively in recent years. Now, they are likely to gain more acceptance for remote learning, upskilling, being more updated.
The new learn-from-home environment has prompted them to quick action. UpGrad, Byju’s, Udemy and Toppr are offering several free or subsidized courses in various school curricula. We’re also seeing an interesting shift towards evaluation of hybrid classrooms/ learning environments -- with many considering school operations from admissions, to notes, classroom teaching to assignments, and even transport and academic records going digital.
Digitalization of India’s education will not only enable the new normal (learn-from-home) bringing wide-scale access to universal and regional education but also help address India’s sector-wide challenges -- school infrastructure, blackboards, teachers, classroom headcount, etc. For underprivileged children, affordable, accessible and holistic edtech solution enablement could become a great equalizer.
The opportunity will need us to quickly reassess the always-on, online learning environment and enable teachers, students and parents alike. Institutions will need to rethink infrastructure to include IT tools for pedagogy, equip teachers with necessary training and infuse curriculum with the digital dimension. Many schools may need to invest in high-speed wireless networks, cloud computing, collaboration software packs, social networking school intranet and PCs that combine technology-aided education with classroom work. At the student’s end, personalized connectivity will be a necessity.
Vis-a-vis content, we will need to rethink how online resources will need to turn curriculum-oriented, and collaboration tools will need to be released in child-friendly versions. Think Wikipedia for kids, or Google Drive/Docs that allow teachers/kids to edit online. The digital generation born into technology thinks and communicates in fundamentally different ways than any previous generation. We will need to infuse the curriculum with a digital dimension; gamification can be a great idea here with certificates, badges and even life-skills skilling tuned to work environments, current demand.
Lastly, schools will also need to recraft teaching-learning material to support self-learning or learn-from-home modules. Smart learning programs that equip teachers with the new dynamic will be necessary to allow them to manage and engage through the screen. We will need to balance the classroom dynamic of facilitating social skills, learning with groups, but can also bring in smart learning technology and AI to add personalized, adaptive coaching to individual students. Students can learn at their own pace, with courses adjusting to fit the learning abilities of the individual.
Time is short and the work is immense. But the next generation of education can truly pave the way to a more dynamic, accessible and always-on school environment; with technology fuelling it in many exciting ways.
(Author Roshni Das is Director, Marketing, Intel India. Views expressed here are personal.)
