Daily Post 1325
DEVELOPMENT OF MOOCs / ONLINE EDUCATION
Forced into it, given the COVID-19 reality, Zoom is being talked more than NCERT textbooks, now that the Indian school and college education have to necessarily go online. That even after 5O days of lockdown, the way we have to usher in online education remains unknown. It has been left to the lower mortals and managements and high end educators have generally kept away from this exercise. A whole new practice has to be created out of nothing. The existence of few video conferencing solutions adds to the comfort level, when there is none.
Education 2.0 is right here. Online is default. Education will never be the same again. MOOCs to Digital Age Education to Online Classes, whatever we call it, this is new face of academic institutions, they cannot do without. MOOC started to help facilitate new skills acquisition for the Disruptive Age, anything that is to be learned outside the conventional system, at one’s convenience, mostly free, world class curated content and subject matter experts available for the purpose. The corporates could lay their hands on these resources with additional skills adding value to their enterprises.
Starting from the iconic Khan Academy to Coursera, Udemy, Edureka and our very own BYJU’S, they have defined different variants of MOOCs and have been immensely successful in models of their choice. Somewhere down the line a passion for teaching has made it happen, Salman Khan and Byju being the prima donnas. Harvard is also offering 67 free online courses. This is challenge against which the Indian educational system is pitted against. For them education is a product, they know how to create and sell it. Personal choice, corporate requirements and coaching has been the prime movers so far.
The challenge is to bring mainstream school and college education online without an effort, investment or understanding and unwilling teachers and professors to boast of. Have they even been able to fathom out the challenge? It is like creating a new functional layer of education, of which the stakeholders in the conventional educational system have no idea of. Digital content has to created out of the physical one and all that is available over the net etc. A multimedia content. Digital Pedagogy would have to be a research project in itself. The hardware, software specifications and then the platform. All the above have to seamlessly become one integrated system in which students and teachers get better experience and comfort than the physical mode itself.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IS THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE FOR EDUCATION TODAY.