Continuing high-quality education through online learning during and post pandemic

(originally written on 17-May-2020)

Authors: Suresh Dhamapurkar, Shilpa Dhamapurkar

Keywords: Educational Technology, Online learning, eLearning, MOOC, Pandemic, COVID-19, Instructional Technology, Instructional Delivery

Due to many advancements in technology and innovations in the Educational Technology ecosystem; education for all, anytime, anywhere has the potential to be a new norm. Advancements in compute, storage and networking technologies now enable education to be imparted online, at scale and yet maintaining high-quality if done correctly.

There are many reputed global institutions such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, USA), who have been successfully conducting many high-quality online education programs since many years now, either through free Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) or Professional paid programs. Recently some of these institutions have even started professional Masters programs in online mode. Lot of R&D is going on globally, including in India in the emerging Educational Technology area.

Our Recommendations:

• Subject Matter Experts (SME) and Stakeholders:
  • Each college, institution should engage with Online learning (e-Learning) SMEs.
  • Ensure SMEs are hands on, they understand pain-areas of different stakeholders such as Students, Teachers, College administration, Parents, etc.
• Lessons learnt:
  • Learn from the experiences of reputed global institutions such as MIT, USA and many others who have been successfully running such programs since quite some time now.
• Tools:
  • Ensure online courses are designed and delivered in such a way that remote students are fully engaged and motivated.
  • Make use of good Learning Management Systems (LMS), Platforms and other tools in the ecosystem.
  • There are many technology options now available, facilitating students to interact with fellow students, teaching staff, extended online community staff as well as to participate in the discussions on certain topics of interest, asking questions, responding to other’s questions, etc.
• Assessments:
  • Imparting high-quality education requires significant efforts for designing assessment framework to test and assess students’ conceptual understanding and application of concepts.
  • Instructors can consider designing a good combination of quick exercises, practice problems, case studies, graded exams, peer-reviewed assessments, adaptive assessments, etc.
  • Choosing the right set of tools is important for conducting such tests. Assessments if designed correctly would help students gradually reach towards achieving his learning goals for the course.
  • As of now, technology and tools are not yet matured enough for conducting proctored exams remotely, at scale seamlessly. Until good quality and affordable solutions are available in the market, consider blended assessments models.
    • Critical exams and practicals which cannot be done effectively online, can be conducted physically following social distancing and healthcare norms, may be in a number of batches.
• Performance Analytics and Personalized Learning experience
  • Evaluate online learning tools for critical features such as measuring and proactively tracking administration, teacher and learner performance.
  • Recent advancements in Big Data, Advanced Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies enable personalized learning for students.
• Training
  • It is essential that administration, teaching staff and students are trained on using tools efficiently and effectively.
• Diversity and Inclusive:
  • Creating a diverse and inclusive learning environment is critical for building a strong, growing nation.
  • Facilitate needy students, who can not afford to have good networking connectivity and the right environment at home to take courses remotely.
• Competitive Advantage
  • Through superior innovation in terms of high quality personalized learning at scale, helping each student achieve learning goals tuned his/her potential; online learning has the tremendous scope to positively impact lives of many students from any corner of the world. It offers massive competitive advantage to the educational institutions and organizations.

(image source: Photo by Julia M Cameron from Pexels)