DISTANCE EDUCATION – THE WAY FORWARD

The pandemic has thrown a new challenge to our educational system and right across the spectrum from primary school level to the professional colleges and universities, all countries are trying their hand in distant learning techniques. Education is a continuous process and it cannot afford long interruptions at any level. That is the reason why innovative distant teaching techniques are being evolved using internet, Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality. 

The choice of the online teaching platform has to be a wise one. The site of your online teaching needs to be:

• Accessible: it’s easy for students and parents to use at home.
• Equitable: it has printable activities for students without reliable internet or device access.
• Communicative: so that students can talk directly to teachers as well as their peers. This might be via a live chat or a discussion board.
• Monitorable: so that teachers can stay informed of student activity and progress. Automated reporting is ideal.
• Sustainable: the online teaching platform needs to be a realistic long-term solution that doesn’t cause teacher or student burn out with undue amounts of time and effort.

What does it involve?

Distant learning is a form of education in which the main elements include physical separation of teachers and students during instruction and the use of various technologies to facilitate student-teacher and student-student communication. It adopts a web platform as technological tool to deliver the courses and the contents from the teachers to the students. Thus distant education involves:

• creation of a virtual classroom in which all course materials, including registration of the various sessions, useful for future reference and for administrative findings will be available
• the lesson the teacher appearing by video on the monitor of the students and presents them on line (in real time) the course of the educational content (files, videos, photos, exercises, questionnaires, etc.).
• the teacher sees the students present at the lecture, who in turn can interact in real time to seek clarification
• the teacher can enable students to work on the ‘whiteboard’ Course
• there is absolute geographical neutrality and both students and teachers can be from anywhere in the world.
• during or at the end of the lesson, the teacher can assign students to specific operations to be performed (filling in questionnaires, specific tasks, in-depth materials, etc.)
• at the end of the lesson, the teacher stays connected with students through the chat to discuss the details of the course; you can share new files and comments, review records and notes

There are 6 Types of Distance Education

• Distance Education via Video Conferencing. Distance education institutions often employ video conferencing for educating the students. For this motive, video conferencing software with high quality like ezTalks Cloud Meeting are being used, and this ensures your with flawless communication and enhances the experience of both students and the faculty.
• Synchronous and Asynchronous Distance Education. This means learning at the same time the teacher is teaching or learning at student’s convenient time. Synchronous distance education is usually less flexible and unsettles student's life to a larger extent. It also facilitates larger sum of interaction between professors and students. Asynchronous distance education provides students with the freedom to work as per your own will. Students can have more interaction with other students.
• Open Schedule Online Courses. Students are given with internet based textbooks, email and bulletin boards to finish their course work. Initially, the students are provided with a set of deadlines to complete their work and then permitted to work in their own pace.
• Hybrid Distance Education. Hybrid distance education is actually the combination of asynchronous and synchronous learning in which the students are subjected to follow the specific deadline to complete their work. Students are permitted to complete assignments on their own time and submit those assignments via online forum.
• Computer Based Distance Education. Students are required to meet in classroom or computer lab at a specified time every week.
• Fixed Time Online Course. The students need to log-in to their learning site at a designated time. The format of this course remains synchronous because it requires mandatory live chats in some cases.

Distant teaching

There are 3 parts of distant teaching - Content creation, Connecting with students and Conducting classes. 

Content creation
Teachers are converting their class lectures into ppt presentations and videos. The online class then becomes an interactive session in which after the video or ppt presentation the students question the teachers about their doubts and thus clear their concepts. The schools and university departments are then storing these educational contents in their website or in YouTube so that the students can revise at their leisure. 

Connect with students
This in India is still challenging despite the penetration of mobile phones in every corner of our country and the economical rates of broadband services. Our internet speed is much slower than what is available in the developed world, but then again we pay much less. In parts of our country like Kashmir 4G services remain suspended and every service provider is not rendering services everywhere with equal efficiency. But despite all these difficulties online classes have become a norm. Enthusiastic students and dedicated teachers have agreed to go online in the evenings after office hours when internet speed is higher. Even tuition teachers and primary schools are going online with creative contents to impart education. There is however a discrepancy in the receiving end as poor students may not have the same access to these contents and classes as their richer counterparts. 

Conducting classes
Both the teachers and the students need to be complimented for making this happen. The teachers have gone beyond the call of their duty to create innovative teaching modules and students have patiently accepted the initial glitches and birth pangs of this newer model of education and now are getting friendly with it. Every realtime classroom has rogue elements and so it is not unexpected to have their online counterparts but teachers are gradually learning to deal with them. Once the pandemic blows away I am expecting this trend of online education to continue. The classes will become hybrid with students both in real classrooms and online locations. This will give much needed geographical neutrality to education and one will not have to spend a fortune studying in Oxford or Cambridge but be their online student at a fraction of the price. 

Advantages and disadvantages

There are many advantages of distant learning – it cuts cost, more experts on the topic can be involved, bureaucratic and logistical practices (visas time, travel, etc) can be bypassed and long distance travel can be avoided. However there are disadvantages too. Creating individual touch points between the teacher and the taught is vital for personality development. The campuses of elite Universities and Ivy League colleges have a personality of their own and their atmosphere, their environment and their people have been known to build leadership skills and personalities, something distant learning will perhaps not impart.

What the students will miss the most is the human connection that is cultivated in their classroom. The little interactions teachers have with them in the hallways, before and after class or during breaks in lessons, are irreplaceable. While it can be tempting to focus on content in distance learning assignments and instructional videos, what matters more is creating structures for personalized touch-points with students. Teachers thus have added responsibility to create these touch-points through any medium you like: emails, video messages, phone calls, messages through the learning management system, comments on shared documents, etc. Such interactive alliances will have to be created with students and they in turn will see their teacher’s investment of time, energy and effort and know that they care about them.

Several online educators like Baiju, Vedantu and Unacademy are already targeting this vibrant market. Our educational institutions need to collaborate with them for technology upgradation so that the best quality education can percolate down to the remotest students. Skilling too has to be incorporated in these teaching modules so that our education system starts producing employable youth. This will be our best Teacher's Day tribute to Prof. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan.