A National Level Seminar on ‘Reinventing Learning Spaces’ was organised by the Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC) at S.N.D.T. Women’s University, Santacruz where Mr. Vikas Panditrao was invited as the Chief Guest. The seminar was all about to explore various learning spaces such as virtual classrooms, incubation centres, open learning resources, research projects, etc. which an educator can innovatively use to create a multi-dimensional learning experience for today’s learners. It also aimed to focus on advance teaching skills to give participants a perspective of some innovative teaching methods used across the globe. The highlights of the seminar included understanding concepts of e-content writing, managing challenges in inclusive teaching, develop skills to teach today’s global classrooms and managing teaching-learning avenues through incubation. Hereinbelow is an inaugural address by the chief guest Mr. Vikas Panditrao
There has been an enormous disruption in the education system and way ahead to go. Technology disruption is in almost every industry be it banking, payments, medical, transportation, etc. Digitalization has also captured a major part of learning spaces with various edtech startups leading in the industry and changing the entire pattern of teaching experiences and methodologies. Smart classrooms, video lectures, live classes, etc are some newest trends disrupting the offline coaching industry.
To begin with, let’s elaborate upon some already known facts:
No two brains are the same. Each student is different with different individual strengths and capabilities. They have their own different dreams and different needs. So, in this world almost in various fields where we are talking about customizations while schools are still working on a standardized approach. The setting of the same question paper to test or grade all the students who have different levels of intellect and skill set. Isn’t this like a fish is being judged on the basis of its ability to climb trees? It’s not about completely eliminating the same set of question paper approach but rather not giving a hundred percent weightage to it and deciding the ability of the students based on the scores whether he is a smart student or an average, below average, etc.
In a nutshell, to be able to develop or enhance each student’s potential, the standardized approach needs to be done away with and a bit of flexibility needs to be provided to the students to help them in their overall personality development.
Also, the system of compulsory attending lectures needs to be revised. The majority of the students just attend lectures due to attendance compulsions, for internal marks, or getting important question bank for exams just for the sake of passing. There’s no value addition to the student in this approach. This seems more like forced education on the students just to have a degree for name sake which in the long run proves to fatal for their future. In fact, something has to be forced then it should be on teachers. Incentive schemes to be developed for teachers whose lectures are regularly attended by a certain percentage of students. This will be a push for teachers to actually provide some value addition to the students. Students should be voluntarily willing to attend the lectures to learn more and this will happen if the teachers also improvise their way of teaching using some innovative techniques and teaching methodologies.
In this technology run education system, what value are teachers adding to the students as a lecturer?
Technology has become the key in today’s era. With the digitization of the education industry, entire lectures are today recorded and uploaded whenever, wherever. Almost everything is available at one click through google searches. Question banks of past papers are also available in the market as well on the internet along with their answer keys. Youtube videos are available from experts across the world on each specific topic in detail for free and also recorded study material is available at reasonable charges. So with almost every solution available on the internet teachers are not seen to be adding any value to the students.
So, now what needs to be done? Register and Read the complete inaugural address