The Changing Role of Schools
Online learning has expanded the possibilities of education and foretells a changed role for schools. Schools will no longer be about learning everything. In my view, schools have three major roles; creating and augmenting content, delivering content to ensure learning, and developing critical skills. Online learning and open-source platforms make a wide array of content and courses available to students which schools can subscribe to. The need and popularity of these services have increased greatly as schools moved into virtual learning during the COVID 19 lockdown. Their quality in delivering and ensuring learning has also improved significantly. The main goal of schools will then be to provide an interactive and collaborative experience for students and prepare them with the skills they need in the future.
Creating and augmenting content
In India, depending on the school and the course, teachers either create the content themselves with the help of external resources or use a textbook or other resources and build on from there. When a school doesn’t follow a particular curriculum or educational board, teachers usually can create the course themselves. For most schools, the educational board provides the curriculum and the teaching material from the 6th grade. The role of the teacher is to use the resources in a way that maximizes learning and to create practices and exercises that go along with it.
In many schools, students don’t get enough exercises or other alternate methods of practice, so they use platforms such as Khan Academy and Byjus or go to tuition classes. Instead of students using these platforms as an independent activity, schools can partner with them for providing extra learning content and opportunities for their students. Partnering with such platforms ensures that a much larger group of students have access to practice of a trusted quality. Another option especially for schools in rural areas is to find or work with programs to shift their content to a TV channel as access to TVs is more than the access to a stable internet connection. As schools have moved to virtual learning, usage of these content platforms has increased by 300%. Khan Academy has recently stated that they are using most of their resources in creating exercises. They have recently partnered with the Punjab Education board to provide experiments, quizzes, and assignments to 1200 schools.
The use of open-source and other content platforms can be valuable even to schools that have highly qualified teachers. Teachers can only cover a limited number of subjects and schools may not be able to offer courses that go in-depth into a particular subject area. These schools can partner with MOOCs such as Coursera to provide a much wider range of courses taught by well-known teachers. Whether it is to provide good quality courses or provide a wider range of courses, online services can be extremely beneficial for schools in creating and augmenting educational content.
Delivering Content
While most teachers have access to textbooks and other resources, it is their job to clearly explain these concepts to the students and answer their questions. Some schools have well qualified and experienced teachers who greatly augment the learning experience of their students. The unfortunate reality is that the large majority of teachers in India aren’t qualified for the subjects they teach, leading to students having only a partial understanding of the subject. Many are unable to answer the doubts of their students or don’t have the time and bandwidth to do so.
This problem can be addressed through the use of online learning. In addition to platforms such as Khan Academy that create videos explaining concepts, there are services which provide a teacher to student experience. Vedantu is one such in India — their certified teachers conduct live tuition classes where students take live quizzes and post their questions through an interactive experience. Lido Learning offers many small group classes with a ratio of 1:6 to help enhance the learning experiences of students. Schools can subscribe to these services to conduct classes for their students. Schools can also subscribe to services such as Doubtnut to clear student’s misunderstandings and doubts. While most of these services were used before either for extra practice or tutoring, the shift to virtual learning is the best opportunity for schools and educational boards to bring it in as a part of the school experience.
Developing critical Skills
When the creation/augmenting of content and the delivery of it is done through other online platforms, schools can focus on helping develop analytical and collaborative skills in students. These skills could be imparted through thoughtful exercises of making claims and forming opinions from pieces of evidence or through group projects analyzing a situation. In some of my classes, we are given pieces of evidence from which we have to write a CER(Claim-Evidence Reasoning) paragraph. Group discussions and debates are very helpful as well in fostering deep thinking and analysis about an issue. I regularly have small group Socratic seminars discussing themes and character development in stories and find them to be very beneficial. Small group work is very helpful as well as students can push each other’s thinking while working together.
In addition to teaching these skills through academic work, schools have the responsibility to provide students the opportunity to take part in clubs or sports activities. This helps students discover and develop their interests. This experience also helps students improve their collaboration and problem-solving abilities while fostering emotional development.
https://yourstory.com/herstory/2020/06/byjus-users-online-learning-new-normal-divya-gokulnath
https://www.lidolearning.com/blog/why-we-built-lido/
demy-founder-and-commencement-speaker-sal-khan
https://entrackr.com/2020/05/vedantu-claims-80-monthly-revenue-growth-april/
demy-founder-and-commencement-speaker-sal-khan
https://entrackr.com/2020/05/vedantu-claims-80-monthly-revenue-growth-april/
