Covid-19 is the ‘black swan’ event of the 21st century. More than a year into its occurrence, it continues to wreak havoc, disrupting lives and livelihoods and impacting several economic sectors. The pandemic disturbed education and learning equally, though not talked about extensively.

Digital technologies, which made considerable progress in the past decade, saw accelerated adoption during the pandemic in several sectors impacting consumers, businesses, and governments to ensure business continuity. Digital became a quick fix to the shocking developments that paralysed lives.

It became the de facto medium in education too. Digital education got a big boost. Institutions and teachers reached out to students with digital content synchronously and asynchronously and enabled their continued learning during the challenging circumstances that prevailed through most of 2020. The situation continues well into 2021. This medium facilitated reaching out to students in remotest locations, gave students the flexibility to pick programmes and pace their learning to suit their circumstances.

However, the evolving online modality faces several challenges in terms of connectivity, device availability, privacy, content, and pedagogy, limiting the reach and effectiveness of education. Softer aspects such as student socialisation, communication, collaboration, camaraderie, peer-learning, which are natural human instincts, have taken a back seat. Besides, the online medium cannot support labs, experimentation, tactile learning, and emotional exchange.

Unlike popular conception, online education is not about broadcasting to students using audio/video communication technologies. That is distance education, which is unidirectional with no student participation. Online education is not about hours of teacher monologuing followed by student assignments and tests.

In the new education universe, the student is at the centre. So, the new format has to take the transformation of the student mindset into account. Generation Z, or colloquially known as Zoomers in the west, are distinctly different from the previous generations of students. This set of students are digital natives, born and brought up in the Internet era. They owe their unique identity to rapid technology adoption in all walks of life. Social media and digital communication tools are part of their daily routine. An online student is attracted/distracted by social media constantly. Getting them to disassociate from digital disturbances and grabbing their undivided attention toward the class lecture is not easy.

To effectively engage Generation Z during online sessions, the content must be modular, the pedagogy be refreshed, and the evaluation systems more robust. We need to experiment with new methods such as "flip learning", where classwork becomes homework and homework becomes classwork. Educational institutions must replace face-to-face, long teacher monologues with modularised audio-video capsules of 10-12 minutes (Generation Z’s typical attention spans). Further, they need to reinforce the learning with follow-up quizzes, group activities, breakout room discussions, and problem-solving exercises before delivering the next module.

In this format, students get to read, watch or listen in a non-classroom environment, actively participate, and reinforce the learning during the classroom session. Students learn the theory by themselves ahead of the session and then practise together during the class. The content for reading and listening is in asynchronous mode and so students can pace themselves based on their uptake and schedule the sessions based on their convenience. This would truly make learning an ‘anytime and from anywhere’ activity. Unlike synchronous online learning, high bandwidth requirements and scheduling conflicts are less serious concerns in asynchronous learning.

However, pre-planned fewer student presence in classrooms addresses some of the limitations of pure online learning. There is no single way to address this challenge. Teachers will have to find innovative ways to engage students based on the subject, student behaviour, and available infrastructure. Teachers also need to constantly look at the feedback from asynchronous learning to suitably modify the synchronous content. One solution will not fit all. Through this process of customised ‘blended’ in-class learning and harnessing the strengths of synchronous and asynchronous learning, we can achieve better learning outcomes. More importantly, while being cost-effective, blended learning offers greater flexibility to students allowing them to pursue other interests outside traditional learning. Blended learning is more equitable, inclusive of students with physical and learning disabilities while keeping classroom connections and the social dimension of education alive.

While these modalities evolve, we can certainly say that the pandemic accelerated online education deployment. As vaccination progresses, hope is on the horizon for students to return to their campuses. When they get back, will it be back to old ways, or will we do ‘online’ only? The answer lies somewhere in between, and I am certain ‘blended’ is the way forward.

Source: The Times Of India