ICT driven Education: Its Effectiveness

ICT driven Education: Its Effectiveness

(Article appeared in ‘University Administration and System in India’ Ed. Karam Pal & R.S. Jaglan, I K International Publishers, New Delhi (2012))

A.  K.  Mody

Department of Physics

V. E.S. College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Sindhi Society

Chembur, Mumbai – 400 071

e-mail: atulmody@hotmail.com

Abstract: E-learning/virtual classroom experiments are already in progress. If suitably combined, television along with Internet using techniques of e-teaching and learning can become a great blessing for mass education in a country like India. Although media/virtual classrooms may be able to substitute role of teachers to some extent, it may not be effective without teacher playing active role. However media would certainly help reduce burden of a teacher and at the same time help in saving recurring expenditure on education. At the same time this calls for redefining the role of a teacher. 

We face many challenges in education today. Starting from attracting children to school (especially in rural areas) to providing competent manpower to our educational institutions. Alarming is the fact that our entire education today is examination driven and rote memory oriented. With limitation of funding to employ competent manpower we are in for a serious challenge. With acceleration of e-technology and mass media, we can use technology effectively to overcome both the problems, that of quantity and quality.

In this paper we would like to present how ICT can be made effective with teachers playing active role making the process much more effective.

What is ICT?

ICT stands for Information and Communication Technology. At present we are at an epoch where electronic and computer software technology is exploding in its power and is playing major role in shaping our life. It has tremendous influence on the young generation although very insignificant role in shaping their life for better. If this technology can be used effectively can play major role in upliftment of education especially in country like India.

Problems in education today: 

Some of the problems we face today in Indian education are:

1.      Making classrooms attractive enough for students to look forward to it every day.

2.      Not having qualified and competent teachers.

3.      High cost of education.

4.      Quality of education imparted and quality of output (students) passing out of the system which remains unsatisfactory.

Some of the simple reasons we can think of are:

(a)    As mentioned in point no. 2.

(b)   Rote memory oriented examination.

(c)    Obsession (of parent, students, society and institutions admitting students for higher studies) for marks scored. This is in spite of the fact that most examinations are rote memory oriented.

(d)   Classrooms stuffed with large number of students.  High cost of education is one of the reason for this. One of the other reasons is that a teacher spending 30 to 40 minutes in a classroom of 80 to 120 students ends up making entire process of teaching-learning simply mechanical.

5.      Not having uniform standard across the country, for education at different stages .

6.      Political control of education.

The list is by no means exhaustive.

What are the solutions?

In this article, there is an attempt to analyse feasibility of using ICT as solution to many of these problems. With rapid growth of communication systems including internet and power of computer, which at presently are used primarily for commercial gain and entertainment only, this technology is certainly under utilized. In what follows we elaborate effective use of this technology for the biggest gain of humankind, i.e., education. There are three important entities that we discuss here.

1.      E-learning

2.      Virtual classroom and virtual laboratory.

3.      Role of a teacher in new scheme.

E-Learning:

Presently this term is restricted only to following areas:

(a)    Create lecture notes, visual textbooks, study material, learning activities, applications, assessments, guides etc…

(b)   For assessment: Hotspot questions, Multiple choice questions, Sequencing/Matching Questions, Fill in the blank questions, Drop Down List Questions, Drag and Drop /Matching Questions, Targets and Target Marker Questions, True False Questions etc…

(c)    Interactive tutorials, interactive software simulations, animations, virtual lab etc…

These are some ways no better than e-text books or CDs available around. Its role is and will remain limited as support system and is an important component, as this offers extra-ordinary power to handle information but not education.

Virtual Classroom and Virtual Laboratory:

 Typically in a traditional classroom a teacher merely reproduces same sessions many times (year after year) or some times in many divisions. In general this work is a labour job and can be replaced by a video recording, which can be shown to a large group of students or can be made available to them at their convenient hours through CDs or through internet sites. Such an attempt has been tried by UGC and recently at IITB.  However these are very average and primitive techniques and the attempts made by UGC have not been much popular.

Replacing an ordinary lecture session by a virtual classroom can become a very powerful tool if we can bring fair amount of sophistication. The following are suggestive improvements which are possible.

1.      Use of softwares, multimedia and animations.

2.      Preparations of such sessions with involvement of experts.

3.      Improvement and standardization of virtual classroom and lab sessions over the period of time with experience and evaluation of their effectiveness.

A clear advantage would be the fact that even in the remotest village, student will learn from a session that is prepared and influenced by the top expert. This of course would not suffice although will be of much better quality than present quality standards of teaching and learning. Such methods are a boost to spread of distance learning but is distance learning is all what we are aiming at?

A big question here is that what would a teacher do with this new techniques of E-learning, virtual classroom and laboratories. Certainly as mentioned, these are far superior option to what we have today in our education system, if we want the education to remain confined to feeding collection of information (and call it knowledge) and testing rote memorization.

In Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Bloom(1980) talks about six major classes:

1. Knowledge
2. Comprehension
3. Application
4. Analysis
5. Synthesis
6. Evaluation

The traditional system tests only memorization and to some extent comprehension, which are only first two of the six educational objectives. Our system delivers at the most till first two level of taxonomy and assessment also remains limited to these levels only. Clearly use of ICT can certainly prove to be a superior option to this traditional teching-learning-assessment. If we are aiming at higher objectives of learning which are yet not incorporated in our traditional system, ICT may be a big challenge.

Role of a Teacher:

It is right time, as society is awakened to these issues and HRD ministry has geared to take necessary steps to solve problems of education beyond funding level. In fact above-mentioned methods will certainly cater to vision of National Curriculum at all levels of traditional education. It appears teachers role in this scheme is going to remain confined to entity responsible for preparation of study material, its revision and up gradation from time to time. Yet the issue of students’ learning and its quality is not addressed with technology driven education. We propose much superior role for teachers at this stage, compared to their traditional one. This role, we call constructivist following Piaget(1972) and Vygotsky(1978) who coined these terms. Characteristics of constructivist teaching-learning is listed by Snehi (2008) as follows. (These are not presented in hierarchical order).

·         Multiple perspectives and representations of concepts and content are presented and encouraged.

·         Goals and objective are derived by the students or in negotiation with the teacher or system.

·         Teachers serve in the role of guides, monitors, coaches, tutors and facilitators.

·         Activities, opportunities, tools and environments are provided to encourage metacognition, self-analysis, –regulation, -reflection and awareness.

·         The student plays a central role in mediating and controlling learning.

·         Learning situations, environments, skills, content and tasks are relevant, realistic, and authentic and represent the natural complexities of the ‘real world’.

·         Primary sources of data are used in order to ensure authenticity and real-world complexity.

·         Knowledge construction and not reproduction is emphasized. It takes place in individual contexts and through social negotiation, collaboration and experience.

·         The learner’s previous knowledge constructions, beliefs and attitudes are considered in the knowledge construction process.

·         Problem-solving, higher order thinking skills and deep understanding are emphasized.

·         Errors provide the opportunity for insight into student’s previous knowledge constructions.

·         Exploration is a favoured approach in order to encourage students to seek knowledge independently and to manage the pursuit of their goals.

·         Learners are provided with the opportunity for apprenticeship learning in which there is an increasing complexity of tasks, skills and knowledge acquisition.

·         Knowledge complexity is reflected in an emphasis on conceptual interrelatedness and interdisciplinary learning.

·         Collaborative and cooperative learning are favoured in order to expose the learner to alternative viewpoints.

·         Scaffolding is facilitated to help students perform just beyond the limits of their ability.

·         Assessment is authentic and interwoven with teaching.

In fact one of the major challenge that we face today is to make education-examination stress free. Constructivist teaching incorporates what is popularly known as Dynamic Assessment (Mody 2011)^a,b in which assessment is interwoven with teaching when instructor helps students construct his/her own knowledge.

We have carried out an experiment of teaching Physics to undergraduate students in a college setup using constructivism through problem solving. This method improved students’ enthusiasm and motivational level to pursue the subject further. The details of this is described by Pradhan and Mody¹(2009). The course was offered and found to be successful in building their capacity, the details of which are discussed by Pradhan and Mody²(2009).

It is a well-known fact that activity based learning is found to be most effective method. Thus now as constructivist, teachers’ role will be to lead such an activity based effort. This would mean different things in different disciplines.

While in science it can mean experiments as a means of enquiry and problems (same for Mathematics) as a means of concept and capacity building. They may have different meaning and different types of activities for social sciences and languages. Part of these activities can use E-learning with the support of teacher as a constructivist. These have to be defined and identified for various stages of learning.

At this point we need to look at how can a teacher use ICT effectively and achieve higher order objectives of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Blended learning combines face-to-face learning with on-line learning to provide the most efficient and effective instructional experience by combining delivery modalities (Sundaram 2010). In the following paragraph we suggest what this can mean for different discipline.

A science teacher can show simulation of an experiment in class room or perform experiment in class room using virtual laboratory software which otherwise would be a very time consuming and expensive affair. Simulation of different phenomenon can assist in visualization which otherwise restricted to teacher’s verbal description. As it said, ‘A picture is worth thousand words’, we may say ‘a simulation or video clip may be worth thousand pictures’. This clearly increases effectiveness of communication of knowledge (information) at surface level. A geography teacher may be able to take students to visit different places on earth without need to physically travel, a history teacher may be able to show similar clips.  Thus use of ICT can be the most efficient means of achieving Bloom’s first objective. People are trying to create sessions which may be labeled as constructivist using e-learning but they may not go far beyond such text books except that they may be efficient as it needs only click of the mouse. Hundreds of books may made available through technology (internet, CD-Roms etc…) which otherwise are inaccessible.  None can replace what a teacher can achieve, i.e., help students construct his/her own knowledge and achieve higher order learning objectives.

This now takes burden of traditional classroom sessions away from teacher and hence we need to define his/her role carefully. A teacher now in addition to leading facilitating activity may contribute in a way, some of which are as follows.

1.      By creating more innovative (for effective learning) activities.

2.      By improving and establishing better assessment methods. Some of these assessments may be carried out while students are in the process of learning- constructing their knowledge.

3.      By improving virtual classroom and laboratory sessions. This may also include their contributing to E-learning materials.

4.      By constructing his/her own subject knowledge and teaching techniques that should percolate down as in 1,2 and 3 above.

5.      There by increasing his/her effectiveness in one or more of the above mentioned ways or any other ways not mentioned above.

This constructivist methodology would have following advantages.

1.      The traditional sessions prepared with the involvement of experts (as teachers and subject knowledge) in virtual class room and E-learning will certainly lift the standard as mentioned earlier.

2.      As now teachers will be free of burden of mechanical teaching work, they can use extra available time to upgrade their knowledge and qualification which is an essential element in a knowledge driven society.

3.      As less man-hours are needed, we can reduce student to teacher ratio significantly.

4.      This would not only improve quality of education but also of teachers in their new role.

With improvement in power of technology it is possible to tap its power in favour of enhancement in content and improvement of quality of education. However it is possible that focus may shift to content rather than teaching and learning leaving learner in isolation (Brown and Duguid 1996). This requires us to focus methodology of active learning and on learning outcome. The skills and knowledge assessed must reflect the process the students have experienced and preferably assessment should be integral part of students’ learning (Stiles and Orsmond 2003). Although education may be differently structured and delivered, as compared to present (traditional), there will always be a need for teachers, although they may be fulfilling different roles, that of a constructivist and may also have to become learner.

Most importantly it is teachers in their new role as constructivist would be instrumental in bringing quality change. They will have to be ready to create activities to facilitate students construct their own knowledge. Classroom processes will be the most important as they would be essential to support students and will also be used for assessment of their learning. Teacher here can use ICT effectively and/or otherwise create cognitive conflicts, guided interventions and at time on the spot generation of activities to guide students in planned activities and overcome their difficulties which may be student specific, to help students progress in constructing their own knowledge. Their role will have to be based on need of an individual students and hence very much learner centric although it may take place in a group environment. This would also require teacher him/her-self to be learner and constructor of new methodologies of teaching and assessment and his/her own subject to make entire education process effective.

Conclusion: In a country like India where mass education is to be taken care of this will prove to be the most effective strategy. With possibility of sending message across entire country simultaneously in different languages it will be possible to establish uniform quality standard of education. Financially mass production of hardware will make the technology available very cheaply and over the period of time this will be much more economical than existing system. Above all, the achieving quality we are craving for will be the foremost advantage. This will be possible in the light of teachers playing constructivist role. It is noted (Jaiswal and Gupta 2010) that class rooms are boring and students feel school is not challenging or interactive enough, where as for ICT driven learning, Sundaram (2010) has noted that  ‘Many Learners are expressing that they are craving for some live face to face interaction with peer and instructor and therefore blended learning is considered to be the promising one’.

Thus a proper blend of use of ICT and constructivist teacher creating activities for students to help them construct their own knowledge may achieve all the objectives of learning and make education most effective.

References:

1. Bloom Benjamin S. (1980). Ed., Engelhart Max D., Furst Edward J., Hill Walker H., Krathwohl David R.,  ‘Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Vol. I’, Longman Inc.

2. J S Brown and P Duguid , Universities in the digital age, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning 28 (4) pp 10-19 (1996)

3. Vijay Jaiswal and Priyanka Gupta, ‘E-Learning in Higher Education: Indian Perspective’ Universiy News 48 (03) 5-15 (2010).

4. A K Mody^a, ‘On New System of Grading for Students’ Learning of Physics’ Proceedings :Epistme-4, International Conference on Science, Technology and Mathematics Education, Jan 5-9 , 2011, McMillan India.

5. A K Mody^b, ‘Construction of Knowledge and Development of Multiple Intelligence - Teaching and assessing through PBL’ . To appear in Journal of Indian Education, March 2011

6. Jean Piaget, The Principles of Genetic Epistemology, Routledge & Kegan Paul (1972)

7. H.C. Pradhan & A. K. Mody “Constructivism applied to physics teaching for                                     capacity building of undergraduate students”, University News, 47 (21) 4-10, (2009)
8. H.C. Pradhan & A. K. Mody “Supplementary Programme for Capacity Building of  Physics Undergraduate Students”, Physics Education, 26 (2) 93-98, (2009)

9. Neeru Snehi : Improving Quality of Teaching-Learning in Higher Education: Constructivist Learning Approach, University News, 46 (04) 7-10, (2008)

10. Mark Stiles and Paul Orsmond, International Encyclopedia of Higher Education 9 (5) pp 43 – 58, (2003)

11. K. Mohana Sundaram, “Blended Learning : A New Horizon”, University News, 48  (03) 1-4, (2010)

12. L S Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1978)