By Ms. Shilpa Kiran
Head of Cambridge
Vishwa Vidyapeeth

“Transformation is often more about unlearning than learning. “    -Richard Rohr

A few months back, we were debating on the online nuances and screen time effect on young minds. We had never thought that teachers also could possibly be doing work from home just like their counterparts in the software fields.

It has been a transformational shift towards digitization at a rapid scale across the education sector. We have a lot to learn, evolve and create as educators. This also has opened up windows for educators to measure how students learn most effectively, adjusting the learning to new evidence-based aspects.

Educators see this era as an opportunity to continuously refine and improve their teaching-learning and make the learning experience much more productive than ever before. The many exciting changes fueled by technology lately are the digitization of books, Open education resources on the internet, Social learning like the MOOC (Massively Open Online Courses) have opened a new trend towards the learning process for students during these times. Thanks to this digitization, the lesson content helps to solve the struggle to create a variety of effective learning materials, which satisfy a broad range of needs for different competencies, difficulty levels of learners, etc.

Our professional world and society have evolved with this growth of technology. For educators to keep their students engaged, it has become one skill that will become mandatory for a teacher now and also be one of the skills in the checklist for the recruitment of teachers. Teachers must remain abreast with the latest changes and the factors that affect learning in their classrooms. Their understanding of these trends can help them create more effective learning environments.

Going forward, students will not be judged by their degrees or the amount of knowledge they have accumulated throughout their schooling days. But they will be judged on the application of that knowledge and also their ability to learn. We need students to be lifelong learners since by 2030 the jobs that they will be doing are not in any of the syllabuses presently. We need them to be prepared to learn along the way. So, capitalizing on these digital habits of today’s COVID 19 scenarios opens up new opportunities to get a lot of things right in terms of the future.

No doubt, technology has made education more flexible and accessible. We have seen the growing popularity of online degrees; physical boundaries have been removed and many executives have embraced technology to assist further education of their employees.

For a country like ours, it’s more than just online classes and technology, for us, it’s the reach out to all students too. The need to make education accessible to all without barriers is a challenge definitely. Television broadcasting, radio, mobile schooling, smartphones and some jug gad ways of innovative teaching methods have happened during these few months and definitely has boomed the teaching process. Though the struggles are still very huge to tackle completely.

Whether we like it or not, technology is here to stay and in order for our students to survive in post-secondary education and the business world, they must know technology and adapt to lifelong learning skills.