Coronavirus impact: How digital learning is gaining acceptability among students, teachers

Representative Image

Atul Kulshrestha

A few months back I attended a workshop on digital education. There, someone asked me if we, at Extramarks, while delivering technological education solutions to schools, have faced challenges in terms of adoption from teachers. My answer was very straight – in the past five years, we have seen a huge shift in behaviour and the adoption of technology-led classroom practices by teachers is no longer a challenge.

In fact, teachers are rather keen to adopt technology solutions which add value to a child’s learning. People looked at me with utter disbelief. However, the quick adoption of digital classrooms by Indian schools to facilitate continued learning in the COVID-19 period has proven my point. Teachers in India have very easily learnt to migrate to online mode of teaching. Extramarks started delivering learning solutions to schools way back in 2009, at a time when schools had just begun opening their eyes to technology. Extramarks has always been a pioneer in the way it delivered the right mix of cutting-edge technology and researched pedagogy-based learning solutions to schools, much ahead of its time. We always visualised that technology has the power of ultimately merging School and Home learning by really taking schools to home.

Continued learning at home

In our surveys with school students, we discovered that their learning consistency is directly related to the teacher’s methodology in their classrooms. Self-study by students through non-aligned learning means might do more harm than good since they might be following a different pedagogy and methodology compared to the student’s schools, thus confusing the child while teaching concepts. Since the teacher in school uses Extramarks content to teach the student, all Extramarks modules are aligned with the teacher’s pedagogy and methodology. Normally, a school tries to take enough care of their students’ home and self-learning needs by giving assignments and homework. This ensures student engagement and continued learning at home.

At Extramarks, we have created a technology environment that connects schools to home by allowing teachers to conduct virtual classes using Extramarks’ content, give assignments and take tests – all of which can be done anytime, anywhere.

Virtual classrooms cannot be like virtual business meetings. To impart education in an efficient manner, teachers need to use effective classroom tools and be able to take tests online to assess student knowledge and retention. Our technology platform allows teachers to perform all such activities that they can do in a classroom with much ease, right from their homes. The rich media-based learning content developed by us to impart education has already become very popular with students through our Learning App.

In the last few days, ever since the schools shut down, we witnessed such a rush from students to download our app, that we were pushed to quickly enhance our delivery capabilities manifolds.

I recently read an article which said that education technology companies could not deliver what the schools actually wanted. I disagree. We, at Extramarks, deeply and intimately understand what the schools and students need. We have always cared about quality in education because of which, we have been able to design and implement products that have been found very useful by schools.

This platform that we developed to connect schools with students and parents at home could not have foreseen a COVID-19-like situation. However, in this critical time, it has become an instant hit with the schools and has gained extreme popularity among teachers. Indian teachers have thus broken the myth about their inability to use technology. We already have 3,000 schools lined up to adopt this platform, and more are joining the queue every day. As an organisation, we are happy that we could visualise this need much ahead of its time by creating a technology platform that connects schools to home.

COVID-19 is going to not only change the shape of things at the school level, but also bring about a lot of changes in the way a child learns at home. Post-COVID, schools are not going to return to their normal physical teaching mode instantly since it may take time for people to normalise. Moreover, parents and schools are going to realise that the learning outcomes for their children are better when they are studying through the schools at home because the children feel that they have all the attention of the teacher.

In a typical classroom environment, a teacher focuses on selective students but here, as the child sees the teacher on a screen, the attention to teacher is better. Also, students are no longer shy of asking any question, as there is no embarrassment involved in asking even the most basic doubts.

Student performance data

Another wonderful outcome of the online mode of teaching is that teachers are now able to define individual learning paths for their students. They are able to understand learning requirements of each child, along with their gap areas. With the aid of technology like never before, Extramarks is helping in the creation of such personalised learning paths by capturing student performance data through its Learning App. The Learning App is itself built upon the pedagogy of Learn-Practice-Test, where we employ the same concept delivery methodology which is employed by the teacher while teaching from Extramarks classroom content.

This innovative way of imparting education through digital means is also creating commercial opportunities for schools, wherein they will now also be able to take up the role of a home tutor for the students as well. Learning has just become better in these COVID times.

Atul Kulshrestha is the founder of Extramarks.com.