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New Digital Online Teaching Landscape–Challenges and Issues
16 May 2020
New Digital Online Teaching Landscape – Challenges & Issues
The COVID-19 pandemic is having a shocking impact on worldwide education. According to UNESCO, some 1.3 billion students around the world are not able to attend school or university causing more than 1.6 billion children and youth to be out of schools in 161 countries (around 80% of the world’s enrolled students).
The education sector is undergoing a tremendous shift. Institutions and students are under pressure to re-invent their teaching-learning by going completely online.
What does this mean for the institutions and students in the long run?
The sustainable long term benefit of this shift depends on various elements of online learning.
1. Online learning is NOT a library of video lectures and e-books
Converting class-notes into PDFs and creating digitized content is NOT the only aspect of online learning rather these must be contextualized and made to sizable in making learning interesting and engaging.
Doing this takes a rare skill set which few of us have mastered and rest are still struggling. Universities need to train their faculty and create an academic task force that keeps check on the quality of content produced and shared by the faculty.
2. Subject matter covered intended to be covered during the online classroom session requires a great deal of understanding & application of learning science and digital pedagogy.
Every teaching faculty needs to be enabled with this knowledge, or else they need to be trained seriously.
3. The teaching-learning experience in the online environment has to be is crafted and curated according to the diverse learner group and that is really difficult.
Institutions and Faculty should spend time in profiling the diverse student learner group, and accordingly should develop the content, and weave it into the program design.
4. Online learning is a pedagogical aggregation of various models that combines
1. Learning psychology,
2. Behavioral analytics,
3. Content delivery, and
4. Assessments for measuring learner’s progress.
5. Online Teaching has 2 components the technology and the learning science representing aspects of the online ‘delivery’ with online ‘learning’. The online ‘delivery’ is teacher-centric, and ‘online learning’ is learner-centric.
Each teaching faculty needs to be trained and re-oriented for online teaching-learning mode. They could be content experts or great classroom teachers, but they need learn to give equal importance to ‘learning sciences in digital and online media’ mainly because Learning is about inducing changes in learner’s actions and behavior through an incremental process that induces a change in thinking through deep understanding and conceptual strengthening.
6. Blended learning (a combination of classroom and online modes) should be the norm. Institutions and teachers should blend the two judiciously according to the context and the content.
TAKE AWAY
In sum, the newly realized need for establishing mature online education models can be successfully met if faculty before transposing classroom to online medium understand and apply judiciously the concepts of digital and online learning and secondly Universities must willing collaborate with digital learning specialists to train their teachers and re-design higher education for the newest online education world.
CA VINOD KR SHARMA
PROFESSOR
FACULTY OF COMMERCE & MANAGEMENT
RAMA UNIVERSITY
KANPUR