COVID19 has caused more destruction than anyone could have ever imagined. What is becoming clear now is that COVID19 has also challenged the traditional school–> college —> university education model. It remains to be seen how education will change in the next decade.
There is unfortunately too much stress on online TEACHING. Webinar after webinar talks of online teaching, online exams, online content creation tools. Teaching is not the goal of education, learning is. Teaching is not for the teacher, teaching is for the student. Nobody is explaining HOW to learn. Nobody is addressing WHAT to learn, WHEN to learn, WHERE to learn, and most importantly, WHY to learn?
From the school-going student’s point of view these HOW-WHAT-WHEN-WHERE-WHY are the issues. Parents often complain that the child has been given a laptop. They provide an expensive education package. Yet the kid is hooked to the TV. Reason is simple. Educational content can never be as entertaining as content on TV or as entertaining as non-educational content on Internet. Nobody is yet creating any educational content as entertaining as the silent movies of Charlie Chaplin or Oliver Hardy. Even the more recent animation movies are unmatched. It won’t happen for a long time though. It won’t happen soon because to produce online educational videos, we must involve several experts. These include a subject matter expert and a subject teacher, who can be different people. We also need a scriptwriter, a photographer, a musician, and actors. Basically, we require the entire team that would make a commercial movie, including the producer and financier. How do we teachers do that? We donot have those types of budgets, nor do we all these skills. So our content will not be a match for the content on TV. For some time to come. So someone will have to research why a 10-12 year old kid is hooked onto “Toy Story”. They have to understand why a child enjoys “Finding Nemo”, yet when he has to “find x”, he hates it.
It will be very difficult to convince children that they have to study on their own. Online education is successful only with another component – self-motivation. If you are not able to motivate a child, he/she will not do it. If you cannot convince him/her of the need to study online, he/she will do it superficially.
At this time, for online education to be even partially successful, parents need to be involved in their child’s learning process. Parents must actively engage in their child’s learning. Their involvement should be as much as the teacher’s is in the classroom. Just buying a package from the many available online won’t help school-children. Neither will purchasing content from millions of YouTubers. It will be like a commodity – like a packet of pop-corn, over in a jiffy – no value provided. A parent or an elder should be with the child when the online session begins. The parent needs to actively participate in the learning process. They must help the child focus their wandering mind on the subject. Often, the parent may have to pretend to learn something new alongside the child. The parent can then ask if the child is able to explain the topic. I feel that in the process, the parent will become a better parent. The parent will also learn the subject as it is taught now. The child will realise that his/her parent is the best teacher in the world. Even if content from YouTube has to be used, it must be presented in a linear textbook-style fashion. There should be a sequence of topics to study. This will make learning meaningful.
So for whom is online education useful? It can be immensely useful for students in junior college (class 11, 12). It is also beneficial for undergraduate and graduate classes. Students at this level have already developed the motivation and the understanding of WHY they study. I have already written about techniques for online learning here.
These are my thoughts and I realise that others may not agree with me. But that’s OK, please share your viewpoints so that we all learn. Thank you.
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