Inner Critical Stages of Online Teaching and Learning

Online learning -teaching

The world has gained nearly two years of experience with online education extensively and its outcomes from all corners. Despite the fact that it began in the late 1990s, online education has gained significant traction as a result of covid-19. It has become unavoidable in the coming years, even if the presence of covid is no longer present. This is an opportunity to review all of its inner critical stages for success,as well as how we might best utilise it. Let us attempt to decipher the success mantra in online learning.

In order to do so, we must examine the situation through the eyes of the three stakeholders listed below:

1. Learner,
2. instructor
3. Organisation

on various points like :

• Learner’s characteristics,
• instructor’s characteristics, instructor’s quality/effective delivery, Instructor’s support to learner at right time,
• course design, evaluation, overall quality assurance,
• assured learner’s outcomes finally.

Learner’s characteristics — Learner’s opportunities :

Even in a traditional classroom setting, students have their own unique ways of learning. Meeting their diverse learning needs on the same online platform is the more crucial part of online learning programmes. The cognitive characteristics of the learner, their affective, self-regulation, and self-motivational skills, as well as their positive way of transforming understanding into application, should be addressed as the highest priorities.

The educational system that develops a learner’s capacity for self-discipline and self-regulation will make no difference whether the learner is online or offline. In fact, such learners benefit more and work at their own pace. Finally, they give their best.

I’d like to illustrate this point with one case study:

As we all know, under the circumstances of Covid-19, India went on lock-down in March 2020. During this time, there were nearly 100–120 students studying CBSE 11th grade in a city with one organisation. These students were unable to attend any physical classes throughout the year and instead took four hours of online classes per day and took JEE Main-2021. In this batch, 28 students scored higher than 99 percentile on the exam. It is an outstanding achievement. We can deduce that, in addition to their intelligence, quality delivery of lectures and mentor-ship,self-regulation and self-motivation played a significant role. A similar high level of achievement was achieved by these students in another prestigious exam, the JEE ADV-2021. These students’ behavioural learning patterns clearly changed in a positive way as a result of their school education and got an opportunity to work at their own pace in online learning.

At the same time, there are numerous examples of students losing momentum in the learning process in online learning due to a lack of self-regulation and discipline. Such examples explain how cognitive readiness and self regulation are more important besides excellent content delivery.

Allow me to illustrate the probable benefits that students would receive from online education if the programme is properly designed:

1. Offers the chance to learn from the best organisation in the world
2. Easily accessible to courses according to learner’s preferences
3. Instructor’s schedules could be arranged more meticulously than in the traditional classroom.
4. Allows each learner to check his/her activity with the help of technological integration
5. Provides information about each learner’s examination activity.
6. Provides in-depth analysis of exam performance
7. Online classroom modality is flexible,unrestricted and could be practical
8. learner’s can work at their own pace

Ultimately improves self-learning and paves way to lifelong learning.

Instructor’s characteristics — support to learners :

As per my opinion, Any online learning program’s success or failure is largely determined by the instructor’s characteristics. The biggest challenge is changing the instructor’s traditional classroom mindset to meet the needs of online learning by taking advantage of online resources.

• Making instructors’ ready-to-use content aligned with his/her delivery in the online classroom,
• increasing learner engagement through meticulous delivery,
• anticipating learner’s probable impediment and directing each learner’s attention to correcting it,
• empathetic way of understanding student’s learning needs and extending a helping hand to each learner until he/she reaches a certain level

are additional critical points to address in the right way. Developing a comprehensive training session to cover all of these topics with all instructors is a must for organisations today. Create a delivery method for the instructor that is proportional to the learner’s desired learning outcomes.

The benefits that instructor could receive through online teaching :

1. offers an opportunity to make the class more practical through the use of different advanced resources
2. with the aid of technological integration, the ability to meet the unique needs of each student
3. accessible to students all over the world
4. High-quality teachers may become more popular and mentor more students
5. new educational opportunities
6. Develop novel online pedagogical approaches
7. Self-teaching delivery assessment of the class through technology
8. monitoring student activity and providing more effective guidance

The role of Organisation :

Creating a course — developing the course, setting a set of goals, and giving teachers the tools they need to plan their instruction with great care. Provide assistance with online pedagogy, pedagogical assessment tools, self-learning resources,learner assessment tools in all areas such as attentiveness, understanding, application, and analysis skills, and grey area identification and supporting tools. Creating an instructor’s training program is another major task. Effective software that takes into account the privacy of learners as a priority and features that are effective in keeping the decorum of the classroom intact.

Finally, I could summarise this as follows :

“Along with high-quality content delivery, the steps that influence the cognitive readiness of the learner, the instructor’s empathetic behaviour, the instructor’s belief in each learner’s ability, and finally, the organisation's functioning will always produce the desired results”.

This is an area where big ed-tech players could make a big impact because of their resources in terms of content that captivates the interest of learners, training for instructors that sets the stage for exceptional delivery, and global reach.

Let us hope for similar successes in order to aid our Indian educational system’s online expansion as well.