Make this pandemic a boon in disguise through 21st-century education
We are surviving through an educational revolution. The momentum of transformation from offline to online mode is progressing rapidly. Schools, colleges, entire nations are turning education and redefining the experience of both teachers and students. We are constantly proving to be a globalized world. There are several things which we are able to do by applying technology which we could not have done in classrooms before, thereby improving the whole learning experience. Given the flexibility of hitting pause, rewinding, increasing the speed to 2x, e-Learning creates an ambience where one can learn at one’s own pace. Online materials are available 24/7 and can be accessed anytime from anywhere to accommodate your busy schedule. Now, you need not invest your time moving to and fro from school/college and make most of your lives.
When you move away from the constraints of a physical classroom and receive explicitly designed online content you can break away from the traditional one-hour monolithic lecture and follow a much more personalized curriculum. Practice quizzes, practical peer-graded assignments and discussion forums are like the cherries on the cake which help students engage in interesting and fun-based learning. e-Learning just says, that as a society, we cannot afford to provide every student with an individual human tutor, but maybe we can afford to provide each student with a smartphone or computer. Mastery is easy to achieve using a computer because a computer doesn’t get exhausted by showing you the same video 7 times.
e-Learning is creating a pathway to establish education as a fundamental human right where anyone around the world with the ability and the motivation could get the skills that they need to make a better life for themselves, their families and their communities. By having this level of amazing content available one would we able to learn something new every time he/she wanted to expand and change his/her minds and lives.
On an ending note, Anant Agarwal rightly said that how cool it would be to say your grandchildren that your grandparents sat in that room, in neat little rows like cornstalks and watched this professor at the end, talk about content where you didn’t even have a rewind button!
