Technology in Education


Technology, specifically technologies related to the Internet, have disrupted fields like journalism (think of how Twitter and YouTube have given a whole new meaning to the term “breaking news”) and publishing (everyone can blog or post a review or a comment; you don’t need access to a printing press). So is education the next port of call for the technology juggernaut?

It sure would appear so given how many American universities have started offering free online courses. And we are talking about the top ones here, like
Harvard and MIT.

But is there any downside to online education? Apart from the obvious, and very important, point that most of these online courses do not award degrees (No degree, no job).  I read this article that pointed several good reasons why online education cannot replace conventional in-the-classroom education. Education is not (should not be?) about ramming facts into your head:
“Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas. As information breaks loose from bookstores and libraries and floods onto computers and mobile devices, that training becomes more important, not less.”

The article pointed out that classroom teaching can (at least in theory) customize teaching to the individual as opposed to the one-size-fit-all approach of online education:
“...education, at its core, requires one mind engaging with another, in real time: listening, understanding, correcting, modeling, suggesting, prodding, denying, affirming, and critiquing thoughts and their expression.”

In other words, “A set of podcasts is the 21st-century equivalent of a textbook, not the 21st-century equivalent of a teacher”. Going totally online will also cause a loss of “the campus experience”.

How about reduction of tuition fees? Yes, online education would achieve that goal, but at what cost, asks the article?
“we will not make that core task significantly less expensive without cheapening it.”

So it looks like online education can be a helper, an add-on, but not a replacement to good old classroom education. Which is also perhaps why helper channels like the Khan Academy videos that work with schools to create synergies are so popular and even getting into the mainstream of classroom education. Check out Salman Khan’s TED talk for more on how the Khan Academy is already doing just that.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more