Virtual Classrooms — Are they future ready?
Can online classrooms surpass physical classrooms? “College” — A term which might take your mind to a picture of students hanging out in dorm rooms or enormous lecture halls. This depiction as we all know is increasingly becoming obsolete as a number of online platforms provide more and more ways to learn with an inexplicable flexibility.
Challenges with Online Education
But let’s step back and think of ways to unleash the potential of online education in entirety. Working as a Mentor/Code Reviewer/Project Validator at various online education platforms, I believe there are still some serious hurdles which need to be tackled before we can start thinking of making some radical changes in our education system at the central level.
#1 Inability to answer subjective questions!
Online education, in general, has not quite been able to push the learners to innovate. There is a superfluity of learning resources online but then again, how many cases have we come across about students being pushed to think of new ways of solving problems?
From my experience as a Mentor, I still feel that the students are unable to break the problem down for themselves. Yes, there are discussions on different slack channels and workspaces but a teacher can’t attend to thousands of students which is ironically also the greatest strength of online education.
#2 Bringing learners together
With students isolated from each other geographically, conversations involving questions like “who all have faced a similar problem?” or “Is there a better way to solve this problem?” don’t seem to happen too often.
Some of the E-learning startups have come up with solutions like focussed study groups which help students get to the right questions to think and build over. But, this still needs consistent and dedicated efforts to eliminate all the gaps in a student’s learning experience and what a teacher intends to convey.
#3 Unaligned thinking process
There is an interesting study by Kenneth and Nathan where they have established the deviation between how experts have rated a set of algebra problems and how the students have perceived them.
These experts undoubtedly know a great deal about their respective field of study. Now, to share this enormous amount of knowledge with the students requires them to break it down into small, meaningful packets. They have to go deep down that sea of knowledge and get every bit of essential information out.
This is where the gap keeps on widening. Packaging your knowledge base and ideas is no less of an art. You need to put out something your students don’t even have a clue of. And you need to lay the path which can take them from zero to hero. Not so easy, I guess!
Hoping for a silver bullet solution won’t cut it
There is no clear-cut solution or strategy to these problems and these are not the only ones we have. There are a few platforms which are moving beyond the hype and getting some actionable items on the to-do list.
Emerging platforms like Udacity and OpenClassrooms with whom I’ve closely worked are diving right into the problems. They have analysed many such challenges and delivered what is direly needed in the industry.
With challenge #3 being the most profound challenge when it comes to creating content, the coaches at these platforms are studying the data meticulously to design the course curriculum. They have come up with dedicated courses to sow seeds of new ideas around numerous possibilities with the technology/methodology you are trained in. Students work on real world projects which are worth putting up on your resume.
The next question that comes to our mind is, “How would I know if I have built the right thing?”. Well, sit back and just learn, these platforms assign you a mentor to make sure that you advance quickly and successfully through the curriculum. Regular peer assessment is what caters to challenge #1 with a dedicated mentor to a learner who pushes you to optimise your methodology.
The process of reinventing the education system is the need of the hour and Udacity and OpenClassrooms with their unique and transformational digital classrooms are going to be the differentiators in the field with a profound story to tell.
