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Not The Right Click

Online courses have immense value, but as a supplement to the classroom

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Not The Right Click
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Online education, if handled well, can bring to the student the most motivating teacher. But there is much more to learning than just online courses. There is a role of the class—a role of discussion and feedback—that is crucial to learning.

It’s good there’s a debate on this—we have to really work out how online education can supplement traditional forms of education. All stakeholders have to come into the picture to make this happen. It is not just recording a course and putting it on the internet. We are putting up courses online but, significantly, the average student is not looking at it.

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There is also no evidence that a student will sit in front of a computer and grasp the course and become an engineer. It is not clear that they will be able to do what a course requires them to do without the physical presence of a teacher. Even in Stanford, only hig­hly-motivated students actually sit through the entire course offered online.

Learning is a complicated process. What if the mind switches off? A student’s mind might just not work in isolation. In a typical classroom, there are lots of students, a lot of issues are raised and discussed and a lot of questions are asked during and after a class. There is also feedback on a teacher’s lectures. In education, a lot of hand-holding is required. How do you bring that into an online model?

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Then there are things like peer groups, a teacher’s presence and laboratories, which online education needs to figure out. We can always set up an IGNOU-like university, but whether we should do that in the online sphere is not clear. I do not think there would be many takers for that. I don’t think online education will substitute normal physical classroom-based education in India. It will only aid the traditional form of education and can play a huge role in supplementing mainstream education.

There are many challenges to online education. We have an IIT-led initiative called the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL), where we have prepared a large repository of engineering courses, but we find that its usage is opportunistic—a backup for when someone does not understand a particular subject and not as a course of mainstream education. Only the really motivated people are using the full course online.

Even in the developed world, people are still experimenting with various modules of online education. While there are many modules and intensive courses available in the US, course providers are still trying to figure out how it will finally work out in terms of issues like examinations. We also want to do online courses in engineering in India, but the challenge is how to get them credited by multiple colleges and universities. There are far too many issues that need to be sorted out.

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