Teaching Online – The pedagogical shift all teachers must embrace.

The modern educator, in its true sense defines a skill that has come off age. Imparting education has become more an act of teaching the way learners want to learn rather than following a mechanical and archaic process. The approach to teaching or pedagogy has evolved into a more child centric, result oriented and skill driven. Educators in schools and other educational institutions are united on the idea of revamping the traditional approach to teaching and discovering modern and efficient ways of connecting with the students.

Teaching in today’s schools requires educators to be more welcoming of the use of technology beyond the basics. As educational institutions today, have gradually started to offer job-oriented learning, there is absolutely no doubt technology would be an essential enabler in the process. With the increasing demand for students in the country, there is a natural push towards shifting teaching and learning online in a manner that is both effective and innovative. It is a well-known fact that learners today can associate better with video lessons rather than text books. In fact, technologies can enable standard text book material to come to life thereby establishing an engaging contact with the learner.

What does teaching online entail?

Educators that can leverage technology today, can ensure that student learning continues with minimal hindrances. Contrary to popular belief, teaching online is simple, efficient and easy to learn. It takes a small amount of willingness to adapt to the teaching environment and get acquainted with the tools and platforms. Most of online teaching is extremely similar to classroom teaching. Teachers can do everything over learning platforms such as design curriculum, conduct assessments, allocate assignments and design progress reports for their students. Infrastructural requirements are fairly limited as all that is needed is a computer with a stable internet connection.

Why should educational institutions push for online teaching?

When employed efficiently, online teaching offers a load of benefits that enable education in a way that has never been possible before. The most noteworthy of these benefits being:

• Online teaching renders geographies pointless. Since teaching online is managed by a system over the web, students can log in from their respective residences and do not need to travel to school to attend sessions. This opens the playing field to students beyond the immediate vicinity of the school’s location.

• Online teaching makes asynchronous teaching possible. Present day teachers find it difficult to ensure that every student has understood a course or lesson. The commitment to provide individual attention to each student therefore remains unfulfilled. However, online teaching enables students to schedule one to one session with their teachers and allows teachers to do exactly the same, thereby ensuring that student queries are timely addressed and their learning continues.

• Online teaching makes it easier to monitor student progress. Since learning platforms today offer the possibilities of associating learning outcomes with lesson plans, teachers are able to monitor in real time, which students are lagging behind and require personal attention. Analytical summaries are a great way for teachers to ensure that all their students excel academically.

• Online teaching helps make monotonous lessons more engaging. Traditional teachers often struggle with certain topics that do not inspire student attention and focus as the rest. Subjects such as history, sociology etc. can be made more interesting with the use of videos, slides and other support material that are otherwise absent from a traditional classroom.

The prospect of hundreds of thousands of professors and students venturing into academic cyberspace for the first time has prompted some commentators to take to social media to predict that this period could alter the landscape future for online education. "Every academician shall be delivering education online. Every student shall be receiving education online. And the resistance to online education will move away as a practical matter," James N. Bradley, chief information officer at Texas's Trinity University, wrote in a LinkedIn post.

Online teaching has off late become the face for the educational industry at large. As a consequence, to the pandemic, schools across the world have shifted curriculum online and are enabling teachers to conduct live lesson delivery using video conferencing and education management software. Teachers are able to conduct sessions, address doubts and deliver high quality education across the globe. This is an exciting opportunity for the uninitiated to be exposed to the many benefits of online learning and understand its importance for the future.

COVID-19: A New Dawn for the Indian Edtech Space

The term EdTech has off late come to encompass a wide variety of business models and value propositions. As the global schooling model slowly warms up to the idea of technology enabled learning, the Indian market space too is showing a promising trajectory with massive investments being funneled towards Edtech initiatives. Both public and private players are rapidly diversifying to design and innovate more efficient ways of teaching and learning indicating a radical shift in market understanding.

As the pandemic hit the country, about 5 million students in schools were impacted. Schools had no contingency plans to tackle such events and the education system was on the verge of collapse. In an effort to salvage student learning, schools switched to online video conferencing platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Skype etc. to push classroom teaching. These tools however, were never really designed for live lesson delivery and therefore lacked immensely in functionality and aesthetic. Moreover, students were able to take advantage of their schools unpreparedness and indulged in mischief and unscrupulous activities thereby completely defeating the true purpose of learning.

A closer look however, also brought forth a few schools that had invested in the idea of online learning and were able to swiftly move their curriculum online. Their teachers were well trained to use these learning environments and students were acquainted with E-Learning during normal schooling which cumulatively lead to minimal impact on student learning when the pandemic hit. Such incidents however, are a dime a dozen, and there is a vast majority of the Indian market space that is still searching for online learning models to support their recommencement plans.

In order to leverage staggering spike in demand, Indian Edtech firms have started offering a wide variety of features such as personalized learning, and expert led sessions as an alternative to traditional schooling. While these services were only supporting student learning prior to the pandemic, they have now been repositioned to be a replacement to regular schooling altogether. Leading Edtech players such as Byju’s, Vedantu, Unacademy etc. have expanded the scope of their services to offer live lesson delivery, digital lesson planning and personalization of learning paths for students to take advantage of. In fact, their efforts have yielded shocking results with some firms reporting a consistent month on month user base increase of 60%. Even top investors have significantly increased their investments in the Indian Edtech space which is estimated to be valued at over US$200 billion.

Learning management solutions are now being leveraged by schools for front end classroom delivery activities. Geared purely towards E-learning, Learning Management solutions are cloud based frameworks that emulate regular schooling activities, digitally. Schools can schedule classes, assign teachers, supervise lesson delivery while students can view their timetables, attend live classrooms and submit assignments all through the use of this learning management system. In fact, important aspects such as attendance, assessments and course material provisions are also possible through these learning management solutions. Global giants such as Google and Microsoft have also launched their schooling solutions to address front end aspects of schooling and cash in the momentum of the Edtech space.

In India, several universities have also adopted the use of highly sophisticated proctoring solutions to conduct their online examinations. These solutions provide web based candidate authentication and AI based supervision services which can perfectly be integrated with almost all leading Learning Management Solution providers. Government departments have also started using these proctoring solutions to conduct important competitive entrance exams such as those related to banking and finance.

Indian startups that primarily operate in the exam preparation market have also significantly increased their contribution to the overall Edtech pie. There has been an increase of over 14% in their addressable base in the last year. Studies also indicate that test preparation and online certification firms earned a whopping US$1.6 billion as revenue in FY19 and had the highest capital inflow in Edtech. This surge in adoption has also given rise to innovative propositions such AI based doubt clearing applications, designing of learning applications for the visually impaired etc.

It is safe to assume that the EdTech space in India is perhaps one of the most attractive sectors to be in at the moment. Even in the face of a worldwide outbreak, investors have been able to exit big and early stage startups have been able to ride the wave of technology driven learning. This trajectory is clearly setting precedent for the absolute requirement of online curriculum support systems and digital literacy in the education space in general. This is a great opportunity for thought leaders and critical thinkers to venture into uncharted territory to identify niche segments that can be developed into self sustaining verticals.