After changing the way we work and play, technology is now changing the way we learn
Deepti Gulati is halfway through IIM-Indore’s Executive Program in Applied Management. The course, conducted on weekends, helps her juggle her education and her career as a finance professional at the Bangalore office of Thomson Reuters.
Every day, Deepti settles down in her chair for the three-hour evening class.
Higher learning
However, this is not the usual evening class. For starters, only about a dozen of her classmates actually sit in the same room in Bangalore as her. The rest are spread across the country, in similar classrooms in different cities. The teacher too, is usually sitting hundreds of miles away in Indore or Delhi. However, like a normal classroom, she can ‘see’ the teacher and the teacher can ‘see’ her. She can even interrupt the teacher’s lecture by ‘raising her hand’, through a mouse click.
“I might have considered joining a full-time MBA course,” says the 26-year-old, “But for personal reasons, I cannot be away from my job. I can’t take a break. Of course, it’s tough to get into an IIM.”
Welcome to the classroom of the future. At NIIT’s Imperia ‘classroom’, ace professors can teach literally hundreds or even thousands of students at the same time, whether they are sitting in Delhi, Mumbai, Guwahati or Patna.
“Learning happens because of many factors: because of what the instructors say, because of the questions students ask and because of the interaction between the students themselves,” says Udai Singh, executive VP at NIIT and the man in charge of Imperia, its ‘virtual classrooms’ initiative.
Udai’s design of the 22 Imperia classrooms reflects this belief. Each student has a computer with a webcam. Unlike the classical e-learning, where interaction tends to be more one-sided due to the broadcast mode or recorded programming; here, the students and the teacher are joined together by a 1.2 Mbps video link.
“Everyone wants to learn from an expert. Good instructors motivate and encourage you to learn. At the same time, we realized that such inspirational teachers are always in short supply. They are not able to reach out to as many students as they would like to,” Udai explains.
NIIT, which started operating such classrooms a year-and-a-half ago, is of course not alone. It was the US-based communications provider Hughes Network Systems that pioneered the concept of virtual classrooms in India, in 2002. Starting with just 128 students for a virtual classroom course from IIM-Kozhikode, Hughes now has 3,500 students at its 120 franchisees across the country, doing a variety of courses from IIT Delhi and Bombay, IIM Calcutta and XLRI, among others.
Another strong player that also offers courses from the IIMs and IITs, is the Chennai-based Everonn Systems. Everonn, which has most of its live classroom network in its partner schools and colleges, has around 400 learning centers in the country.
Most of the courses offered by these learning networks are of short duration, mostly in management, workplace skills or training and value-add areas, such as chartered accountancy training and project management skills. Bangalore-based 24*7 Learning, a relatively new entrant, however offers a full-fledged B. Tech (Engineering) course in tie-up with various engineering colleges.
 |
There is a difficulty with marketing such tools. If it were a local product, you can put up hoardings. But for an online product, it is difficult to promote it without advertising on mass media Rohit Kumar |
And back to school
Technology is not just influencing delivery of education at the post graduate level. Indeed, except for Hughes, these courses were mostly launched in the last two years and together account for only a few thousand students. A more lucrative opportunity lies at the school level.
“Everything in our society is changing, except the schools,” says N Sivakumar, VP at Everonn. "There, we still have a blackboard with white chalk pieces. And these are the schools which are preparing the next generation. The students of today are more used to the visual media, not books, but we still teach with only books and blackboard,” he adds.
According to industry estimates, India has around one million schools, with around 225 million students and just 20,000 colleges. Out of the one million, around 60,000, or 6%, are privately owned. Out of the remaining 940,000 government or government-aided schools, only around 30,000 have been brought under various computer-aided education schemes sponsored by the government.
The split between the government schools and private schools has also led to the emergence of two types of markets. On the one hand are the relatively well-off private schools and on the other, the technologically challenged government-sponsored ones.
“The school market is seeing a lot of sedimentation,” says Abhinav Dhar who heads the schools business unit at Gurgoan-based Educomp Solutions, a company working in the technology-assisted education segment. “As a result, there is a lag between different classes of schools. Ten years ago, private schools were setting up computer labs. They have now moved on to plasma TVs and projectors in the classrooms. However, the government schools are just starting to put up computer labs. At the other extreme, under our O3 program, we are upgrading around 30 to 40 schools to a system where each student will carry a laptop to the classroom,” he points out.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
written by planet kids, March 24, 2010
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
