Create a learning community

 

Existing social media platforms can be leveraged to benefit the ed-tech industry and accelerate the learning process

Like most young Indians, I got into an engineering college but was not really interested in it. The syllabus was outdated, and I felt my professors lacked enough real-world professional experience in their respective fields. This dissatisfaction led to the discovery of the valuable world of online learning communities, through social media groups. While social media is a way to connect with people, it also has many focus-based communities.

Learning is also a social experience. Focus-based online communities on social media platforms such as Facebook, Discord, and Reddit simulate this up to a point. Not only do these groups give one a real-world taste of how the system works, but also give an opportunity to interact with active industry professionals that one wouldn’t have access to otherwise. This helps pick up the ‘language’ of the industry and also some initial leads.

Take the example of Harvard’s CS50x, an online course available for free, on an ed-tech platform. To ease community engagement between online course-takers, CS50x uses a Facebook group in which students can ask questions, clear doubts, celebrate their small wins when they complete assignments, and also participate in group events. Students sometimes organise themselves into small study-groups as well, to do collective course-work.

Another aspect of social media acting as a catalyst to learning can be attributed to educational content creators (individuals with a level of mastery in their field). Choosing to follow the right creators and consuming their content daily can enrich your thinking and put your learning in the right direction, as you are taking the information from someone who has already done what you are about to do. On the flip-side, this choice of whose content you can consume can also put you at risk of falling into echo-chambers leading to the formation of a confirmation bias

The community aspect of social media has been in use for learning purposes for the past decade. The ed-tech sector in India is currently tapping into this space, trying to leverage all of its possibilities, and ultimately moving the entire learning experience to the digital space.

Abhinav Arora

Source: The Hindu, 11/04/21

Students are copying from the internet. And it’s because of how we teach

 Since the onset of COVID-19 last year, it’s not only the virus that has perfected the art of copying. Students across the globe are acing it. With an expansive, permanently available repository at their fingertips, copying is a breeze. In online exams, students have the choice of copying from each other, from the internet and from other resource material. Consequently, setting a question paper in these times has become more challenging than answering one.

For most subjects, evaluation is a fundamentally problematic task anyway. When confronted with an answer, the evaluator has to convert the worth of the answer into a number. Even with a rubric at hand this is never straightforward. And it would be best to not talk about the reliability of these scores. Different evaluators at different times and the same evaluator at a different time would rarely give the exact same marks to an answer. It is such a fragile scoring system on which entire careers are built. The pandemic has compounded the difficulty of evaluation.

Do I give more marks to an answer that is original but incomplete or even off-the-mark or to an answer that’s more comprehensive but is copied?

The other day, it struck me that I keep telling students “write in your own words” and I wondered why I keep using this phrase all the time. In whose words will they write if not their own should have been the obvious comeback. But unfortunately, it is not. Students prefer to write in other people’s words. With so much text at their fingertips, writing has become synonymous with browsing, selecting and pasting.

Rather than reprimand these young people for their unethical behaviour, we need to seize this moment and radically overhaul our education in the light of the internet. The internet is never going to go away. On the contrary, it will continue to grow not only in size but also in its intelligence. By continuing to teach students a huge range of subject matter and covering a lot of ground, we leave them with little or no time to grasp, internalise, reflect, probe and play with the ideas and concepts they learn. And, then, because their involvement in what they have learnt is so low, they don’t feel confident to articulate or explain it in their own words. In any case, years of rote learning and reproduction have led to a lack of confidence while using language to articulate any complex idea.

We have to recognise that in this battle the internet is always going to win when it comes to quantity. We stand a chance if, and only if, we focus on quality. And that will mean a drastic reimagination of what and how much we teach. If we don’t give our students the time and the tools to read, think, articulate, write and, instead, focus on how much content they know, then we will be failing our students as well as our society.

Written by Dipti Kulkarni

This column first appeared in the print edition on April 8, 2021 under the title ‘Beyond copy, paste’. The writer is assistant professor, NMIMS University, Mumbai

Source: Indian Express, 8/04/2021

Any questions?

Learning is not just listening. Fuel your curiosity and engage with your mentor to enrich the classroom experience.

Speed is the operative word in any activity today, and this applies more than ever to reading, writing and studies in general. What often gets sacrificed in this speed-driven process of education is the ability to absorb what you study, analyse it and come up with creative questions. How can this be avoided? Is ability to question things an essential skill? Great scholars seem to think so. Einstein said about scientific thinking, “The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skills. To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advances in science.”

Scientific education must induce scientific behaviour, and this is all about asking questions and inquiring into truth. However, for various reasons, science students often hesitate to ask questions. They are keener to find the answers than to ask questions. If students did not rely on rote learning, studies tell us, they would turn out to be more suitable to what employers want in the workplace.

Learning is not passive

Dr. S.V.M. Satyanarayana, assistant professor at the Department of Physics in Pondicherry University, has been conducting physics classes every Sunday, in Chennai, for the last 18 years. The motive of these classes is to invoke thought. The classes aim at creating thinking individuals who will go on to pursue research. There is no fee and no compulsion to attend classes. Nearly a hundred students who have attended these classes have gone on to do their Ph.D. in physics.

Having observed students from various places and backgrounds come to his classes and pick up the scientific attitude, Dr. Satyanarayana says, “One of the practical problems in science education at the postgraduate level is that the students do not ask questions. Typically, learning is passive — involving accumulation of information…”

As an example he talks about the students’ views on the heliocentric theory. We all know that the Earth and all the planets move around the Sun because we have studied that it is so, but do we ever question why the geocentric theory is wrong? What is a scientific attitude in this contest? He says, “Being scientific is in contradiction to unquestioned acceptance of what is currently true. In the words of Aristotle, ‘the mark of an educated mind is to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it’…”

Active learning

To move from passive learning to active learning, it is important to be totally engaged when you are in class. Going over the topic before a lecture will help in formulating questions. Dr. Satyanarayana says, “At the beginning of the course, as well as the lecture, students can be encouraged to think about the topic and the course itself and write down their questions in a notebook.”

This is a very effective method because it allows you, as a student, to approach the subject from a fresh perspective. Also, your questions flow from an uninhibited stock that exists in your mind. At the end of the course, you can tick off the questions that have been answered and ruminate on the philosophical angles and perspectives you have gained in the process.

From a teacher’s point of view, the nature of the questions a student asks can give a perspective on the progress they have made in learning the subject. In fact, this paves the way to a gradual change from ‘learning science’ to ‘doing science’.

Breaking it down

Often, the first questions you come up with can be really complex and perhaps even somewhat vague. As you interact with the teacher at this level, you learn to refine your questioning skills and ask sharper questions. You also learn to break down the questions into simpler ones. It is an illuminating experience to move from vague questions, which, moreover, cannot be answered, to sharp questions, which are deeper and better formed.

The last query is — how do I find the time to do this? This is easy to answer but requires commitment to pursue. Allot time before lectures and before courses to go over the contents of your chapters. Anything from ten minutes to half an hour a day should be enough. Not only would this push you into active learning, it would also enhance your own interest in the subject.

Experience the fact that questions lead the way to conversations, and conversations to discovery and innovation. This then is the route to learning, doing and excelling.

Keywords: Scientific education, learning methods

You stop growing when you stop learning: CTS Vice Chairman

In today’s competitive atmosphere students should come out with new thoughts and ideas; this can be generated only through constant learning. The student community should think big and have the confidence to accomplish their goals, speakers at “Techno Dhin” said on Friday.

Speaking at the programme organised by the Oxford Engineering College here, Lakshmi Narayanan, Vice Chairman, Cognizant Technology Solutions, laid emphasis on constant learning. “If you stop learning you stop growing and become obsolete”, he said addressing the engineering students of the institution. New thoughts and ideas would generate only through constant learning, he said adding that people who excelled had learnt every day. He exhorted the students to give their best and excel in their career path.

Ms.Hema Gopal, Vice President, Tata Consultancy Services, Chennai, said discipline was the key to success. Irrespective of the medium of instruction, students should think big and constantly upgrade themselves to excel in their career, she said. She called upon the students to be strong in their fundamentals, learn beyond their academics, and improve their analytical abilities. Chairman and managing trustee of the college M.Subramaniam, spoke.

The price of learning

India has increasingly taken charge of financing its education schemes, but are citizens getting good returns for the investment? The numbers show that the new administration will have its work cut out for it in improving outcomes.

Despite being a long way off from spending the recommended minimum of 6 per cent of its GDP on education (just over 3 per cent in 2014), allocations for the sector have grown substantially over the past decade. The Central government’s allocation has grown nearly eight times in the past decade from Rs. 11,000 crore in the 2004-05 Budget to over Rs. 82,400 crore in the 2014-15 one. Two-thirds of the allocation for the sector goes to school education.

For school education, India’s flagship schemes are the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, the primary education flagship scheme initiated in 2001; the Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyaan (RMSA) started in 2009 to tackle secondary education; and the Mid-Day Meal scheme started in 1995 and gradually expanded. Between them, they account for 85 per cent of India’s school education budget and are credited with helping the nation achieve universal primary school enrolment ahead of the 2015 Millennium Development Goals deadline.

How does India pay for these big-ticket schemes?

In its first Budget after coming to power in 2004, the UPA introduced an education cess of 2 per cent as a “tax-on-tax” applicable to corporation, income, customs, excise and service tax, in line with a promise made in its Common Minimum Programme. “The whole of the amount collected as cess will be earmarked for education, which will naturally include providing a nutritious cooked mid-day meal. If primary education and the nutritious cooked meal scheme can work hand in hand, I believe there will be a new dawn for the poor children of India,” the then Finance Minister, P. Chidambaram, said in his speech. After coming back to power in 2009, the UPA-II added an additional 1 per cent cess for secondary and higher education.

Over Rs 2.3 lakh crore has been collected through the education cess since its introduction, Budget documents for the past 10 years show. This education cess, paid by income-tax payers and consumers of many goods and services, now substantially funds India’s major education projects.

In 2014-15, the government will collect an estimated Rs. 33,818 crore through its primary education cess, accounting for over 80 per cent of the amount it will spend on the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan and the mid-day meal scheme, Budget documents show.

As tax-payers have become the direct financiers of these education schemes, India’s reliance on foreign funding has fallen. Ten years ago, foreign funding agencies accounted for over 10 per cent of India’s allocation on education; today that figure is down to 1 per cent, the documents show. The World Bank and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development contributed Rs. 625 crore towards the RMSA this year, and the European Union gave Rs. 225 crore to the SSA. In comparison, the primary education cess will raise nearly Rs. 33,000 crore this year and the secondary and higher education cess will raise over Rs. 6,000 crore, dwarfing foreign aid.

But are Indians getting the bang for their buck? Enrolment may be near-universal at the primary school level, but both teacher and student attendance are low — 73 per cent and 60 per cent, respectively, in 2012, according to a study by Educational Consultants of India. Once past primary school, enrolment falls precipitously to 67 per cent in secondary schools and just 20 per cent for higher education, according to government data.

Most crucially, there isn’t yet evidence that children are learning enough in school. According to the National Assessment Survey conducted by the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), fewer than two out of three students in Class III can read and understand a passage and fewer than two out of three can do simple division. Moreover, the numbers have not got better despite the big spending push, in 2007, the Annual Status of Education Report brought out by the NGO Pratham showed that 25 per cent of rural children in Class V could not do a simple subtraction. By 2013, the figure got worse — now 40 per cent of the children could not subtract one two-digit number from another.

Keywords: Education in GDP, Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyaan, Mid-Day Meal scheme, expenditure on education