Digital Vision Statement for HEI – An Academician’s View
Published on : Sunday 16-08-2020
Teachers and digital learning specialists should collaborate with each other for an agile and efficient education world, says Dr (Mrs) Jayalekshmi M Nair.
The corona pandemic has forced schools, universities and colleges to function digitally, triggering a learning revolution. The impact has been dramatic and transformative in schools. For the higher education institutes (HEIs) who were already adopting a certain amount of digital technologies such as Google classroom, the journey was somewhat smooth. Since the pandemic struck in the middle of the term, teachers had to go fully go online only to complete the residual teaching. Available on line courses such as Coursera also came to the rescue.
Student engagement is a key element in keeping students connected with the course and thus with their learning. Certainly, teachers were working hard to maintain the same level of engagement with the students they could have in a classroom environment. This warrants training of the teachers to handle the situation efficiently. A lot of free online workshops and webinars are being conducted during this period for training of the teachers. Most of the webinars advocate the use of open source platforms such as Moodle, (Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning), CourseNetworking, Google Classroom, etc. They also train on the software to create e-content such as OBS (OpenBroadcaster Software), CAMTASIA and Open Shot for editing the videos. More familiar, user-friendly solutions using Microsoft products and smart phones are also covered, ensuring that any teacher who is willing to learn can adapt easily to these online tools.
More tech-savvy teachers are trained to improve their e-content by including user interaction by incorporating reflections such as interactive quizzes, polls and surveys. Software solutions such as Answer Garden, AWeb WhiteBoard (AWW), Google Jamboard, H5P.org can be incorporated judiciously by them. The large number of participation from the teachers in all the webinars is a good indication that teachers are willing to learn, ready to adapt to and adopt the digital transformation for Education 4.0, which envisages deeper fusion of technology into the teaching process. It is expected that future trend will be the Blended Learning method or Flipped Classroom Model, i.e., to blend tools that are available both for synchronous communication and asynchronous communication. Teachers can easily blend the two judiciously according to the context and the content. Thanks to the pandemic situation, teachers are getting prepared both mentally and physically to embrace the transition.
However, the traditional teaching or face to face teaching enable a teacher to customise the teaching method and speed as per the average of the ability or absorption capacity of the class, if not the individual student. Efforts should be made to use the technologies of artificial intelligence and deep learning modes to create customised learning methods, rather than going simply digital. Tackling the challenge of cultivating the sort of collaboration and discussion are often the hallmark of great teaching and learning environments. Of course, teachers and digital learning specialists should collaborate with each other, without any prejudice to redesign the customised higher education for an agile and efficient education world.
Dr (Mrs) Jayalekshmi M Nair is Principal, V.E.S. Institute of Technology. A PhD from IIT Bombay (1995) with major research topics Systems & Control Engineering and Robust Control of Singularly Perturbed System, she has also been Member, Adhoc Board of Studies in Electrical Engineering and also an Expert Member on panel of Staff Selection Committee for Lecturers/Assistant Professors/Professors of Engineering Colleges on behalf of Directorate of Technical Education.