Should technology disrupt classroom learning?

How to Integrate Learning Assessment and Student Analytics in Every Day Education 

By Gumbi Software Private Limited, Bangalore

In traditional schooling, delivery of education often tends to be teacher centered - with children expected to remain passive and only listen. Since students at different learning levels sit in the same class, it becomes extremely difficult for teachers to provide targeted instruction to students. The fact is student engagement begins and ends at raised hands, questions asked, or simply maintaining eye contact. Over the years this has been resulting in only selected students being interactive in the class and most students remaining inactive throughout the academic year.

When the COVID19 pandemic seized the world, everyone including students were asked to remain at homes. While society began to adjust to this change, students, mostly from private schools un urban India where internet connectivity is available were required to take up online classes. On the other hand, students in most rural Government Schools had no or limited access to online education on borrowed devices. Online education companies with existing solutions tried to mimic the traditional classrooms to certain extent but largely struggled to create enthusiastic and uninterrupted positive response among teachers and students in the long term. Some students were deciding to just ignore online classes and assignments and thrust themselves into the seemingly endless abyss of what today’s entertainment has grown to be. Nevertheless, technology and digital tools no matter how ubiquitously or scarcely available, opened up possibilities to depend in the future.

The main questions before the current education systems are - now that schools and colleges have reopened, how to keep the online learning momentum going so that it can remain as a fall back system and also how best to improve the interactions in traditional classrooms by using digital tools. 

Let’s look at some possible solutions:

1. Firstly, consider connectivity issues are solved in all schools (urban and rural) either through satellite, internet, fibernet, or cellular internet modes. The requirement then comes down to equipping the schools for either remote virtual education or digital classroom education. Or hybrid of both the worlds.

2. Secondly, equipping teachers for digitized education without taking out their teaching method or making them overburdened with technicalities. Most teachers have a good understanding of how to interact with students and engage them inside the classroom. With this strength, enabling teachers with curriculum mapped teaching aid with integrated assessment in a simple desktop or mobile application will be of sure help. When centralized virtual teaching such as studio based teaching in a large number of schools is employed this helps state level education systems to overcome shortage of teachers and lack of digital skills in teachers. This also ensures standardized quality of teaching and learning in all schools as high quality multimedia content will be used from the studio and proper monitoring systems will be in place for regular education inputs.

3. Third aspect of the solution is there is a need for a classroom technology component which can help remote teachers and/or classroom teachers to integrate various formative assessment methods in their day to day teaching to conduct evaluation of student comprehension, learning needs, and academic progress during a lesson, unit, or course. So our recommendation for the schools is to adopt student analytics systems for enabling remedial education. By providing schools with student devices to capture student learning progress, classrooms can capture, measure, and remediate. Student assessment questions make children more involved learners and the analytics derived help teachers identify concepts that students are struggling to understand, skills they are having difficulty acquiring, or learning standards they have not yet achieved so that adjustments can be made to lessons, instructional techniques, and to provide academic support. Overall, this will be an engaging and interactive solution for students and a supporting system for teachers and schools.

In summary, technology need not disrupt the classroom teaching-learning processes. Instead, it can be introduced as an organic interactive element to support and supplement both in-classroom and beyond classroom learning experiences.