In-class teaching: What are we going back to?

March 2020 will be remembered forever for decades, maybe centuries, as a time that brought the whole world to a standstill. The education sector, with its reliance on personal touch and the involvement of kids, became one of the most disrupted sectors. According to a United Nations report, we had already seen around 1.5 billion students, from all age groups, affected by the pandemic in around 200 countries worldwide with around 320 million of them in India alone. The situation forced us to adapt and we did.

During these difficult times, we did see numerous examples of instructors’ ingenuity on show, which was reported by various news outlets and posted across social media platforms and gave instructors some much-deserved limelight. Unfortunately, what the pandemic situation also laid bare was a complete lack of preparedness for a situation like this at an institutional level. Of course, no one could have foreseen the severity or the length for which the pandemic would affect us, but our education system’s 100% reliance on in-person teaching did make it extremely difficult for us to adjust to a situation where online teaching became the norm.

Instructors now may have been able to get to a stage where they have (or at least tried to) achieved a replica of the in-class experience they are used to using various live video lecturing tools which earlier masqueraded as web-conferencing tools for corporate. These e-lectures had their own set of challenges where student attention and engagement wasn’t possible to track. There was no way of knowing if the student is paying any attention to what the instructor was speaking let alone judging how much of the online lecture has the student understood.

With the prolonged closure of schools and universities, there was a need to conduct online examinations. This too posed a range of challenges. With one high stake examination being the end-all for most academic institutes, it became next to impossible to conduct fair examinations online. There were even instances where universities had to re-conduct all their online examinations as proper proctoring was not used during the examinations.

Some positives

Despite the misses, there were some positives from the experience as well. Several students have talked about the advantage of simply going over a video recording of a prior lecture at their own pace and convenience. Even having access to online lecture notes that the instructor had created give them far better quality of academic content than what they would have created themselves. Some instructors who took small daily quizzes have observed that student engagement throughout the online lecture went up as students wanted to clarify any doubts they had so they would do well on their online quiz.

What instructors may not realize yet is that the pandemic has forced them into creating digital assets for themselves that are not only extremely helpful for the students, but also for themselves as the online content here is highly recyclable and can be used even after we get back to the new normal.

Will it be we completely disregard all positives from we got from this experience and get back to the traditional methods (Chalk and blackboard) that we have been practicing for many decades? Or do we take the positives that we got from this situation and try and blend that with the traditional teaching approach? What has been clear from this unfortunate experience is that learning outcomes can take place outside the classrooms as well. So why not integrate the learnings gained from the experience over the last few months into the existing pedagogy to get the best of both worlds.

This will help us move towards a blended pedagogy which for the past few years has started becoming the norm around the world. With the advancement in education technology, it has become much easier for instructors to reach out to students outside the class environment which practically gives the instructor a lot more flexibility with his course structure planning as he can choose which concepts he wants to cover in-person and which concepts can be covered ‘online’. There are plenty of online resources available for instructors to use that add so much more to the process than just teaching the same concepts on a blackboard. There have been great technological advancements with automated assessments as well, which allow instructors to take online quizzes a lot more frequently and get them graded automatically in no time. Surely these are advantages that we can’t look back on.

Broader Picture

From a broader outlook, this situation also raises a much wider concern around how far away from the current technology are educational institutions, the primary sources of education throughout the country. All platforms that act as secondary sources of education like online learning apps and MOOC providers have done extremely well during the lockdown as they already had the academic infrastructure in India but it place to deal with this sort of situation.

I hope this does cause a realization that integration of technology into our traditional educational system is something that is the need of the hour as you are able to meet the students in their digital world. Gone are the days when a student would browse through the library to find a book that explains a concept for a lecture that he has missed. All secondary educational resources that a student opts for now are all digital. By incorporating technology into the existing teaching process, we would be meeting the students where they are and this will not only keep the students thoroughly engaged throughout the course, but we may even see High-Quality courseware as the instructor will start finding different ways to make his course more interactive using various online educational resources available at his disposal.

I guess if in the long run, we are able to incorporate some of the aforementioned changes in whichever form, we would be able to add a lot more to our teaching ecosystem than we lost during the past year.