There
is an old adage that goes, ‘Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the
kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.’ For a long time, Indian mentality about education has been
rigid and fixated on textual learning. Although, we haven’t yet passed that
era, there is some room for change. Modern institutes are experimenting with
the internet for teaching purposes. So the question is, can technology change
pedagogy? Will it help teaching take the big leap required? This story is not
about any revolutionizing change in education, but about the little efforts
that can improve learning patterns in India. Prof Neelesh K. Jain, Academic
Affairs Dean, IIT Indore speaks about such initiatives on a national scale.
Introducing technology
in education will help students be more social. Now-a-days, there are a lot of students
from lower socio-economic backgrounds getting admission into IITs. Hence, there
is a greater need for students to be aware about the problems existing in the
society and be an active part of the community.
In IIT Indore, the use
of audios, videos and PowerPoint presentations is not infrequent. For students
who study on-campus, lecture notes are available on YouTube and Google as well.
But these techniques can be found to be in use in almost all prestigious
institutes in India. The need of the hour is to extend or rather improvise such
techniques to benefit the larger audience, especially those students who are
not as fortunate to be a part of an IIT.
This is where the
concept of distance learning through video-conferences comes into picture. This
system can be used to offer our standard of education to students in those
cities where IITs are not established. One
can also set-up remote campuses there. Of course, there are challenges to an informal
teaching environment. You have to match up to the standard of an IIT and also
make the lecture notes and videos easily and cheaply accessible to less privileged
students.
There is also a
provision for physically handicapped students. We use a system wherein teachers
type their notes online on a smart board which automatically gets converted into
PDF format. These files are then made available to partially visibly impaired
students who find it difficult to read the blackboard at long distances. Lectures
can also be recorded in high definition for students with partial hearing impairment.
Besides this, the
government of India, in the budget schedule of 2008-09 has made provisions for
a system called National Knowledge Network (NKN). This idea was developed
mainly by Prof Raghavan from IISC Bengaluru and Dr. R Chidambaram. The purpose
of this is to provide a unified high speed network backbone for
educational institutions in India. It eliminated the need to replicate
teaching resources. Library resources of e-notes and video lectures could be
shared by students throughout the country without having to go through any
trouble of physical acquisition.
The reason for setting
up such an integrated system was mainly to overcome the large rift between the demand
and supply of standard formal education. As per the rules, IITs can only accommodate
upto 10000 students. Now, the old IITs are already using remote lectures, but
the newly launched ones are not yet equipped with the technology for that. In
the past 7 years, NKN has set up 66 virtual classrooms throughout India and has
been extended to upto 289 districts thus containing the education gap.
My only concern is
that this system is only meant for higher learning purposes. I feel that IITs
and NITs can use this system to teach school and junior college students as
well, since preparation for JEE in many states starts at the school level. This
will eliminate the hegemony of coaching classes and initiate application based
learning.
All in all, the use of
technology in a positive way is always good. If students use it for research
and development, it can enable faster and better learning. The only reason why
some institutes prohibit modern gadgets on campus is to prevent its use in
ruthless and degrading acts.