By Dr. Lovi Raj Gupta, Pro Vice-Chancellor and Head Lovely Faculty of Technology and Sciences at Lovely Professional University.
Online education will not replace traditional classroom teaching, rather in times to come or
present times as well it has become a scaffold for traditional classroom teaching. Online
education as a framework has now come up as a blessing and support to the current setup of traditional classroom teaching, earlier there were few teachers who were into using the technological aspects and bringing the best of those aspects into the classroom. Now, with the advent of Covid-19, every teacher is well abreast of the potential online education holds. Considering today’s scenario, the marriage of online education and traditional classroom teaching is more even and the blend is more intriguing.
In times to come online education would become the backrest of traditional classroom teaching. Online education cannot topple Traditional Classroom teaching, as traditional
education would always score higher as it has direct one-to-one interaction between the tutors and the students and gives that emotional touch. E.g. when a virtual class/online class happens there are two challenges commonly faced by the stakeholders with it firstly, the visibility of both the learners and teacher is just 30% as the screen capture limits the area. So, the translation of expression is not deeper. Secondly, the moment when we talk in person to each other one can see the other person’s body language, feel the voice modulation, and can gauge the participation levels during the interaction. The online session is completely negated, that is where traditional classroom teaching will always be ranked above, but now it has to fly onto the wings of online education only then the most meaningful teaching-learning, and outcomes could be derived.
When we say that now every one of us as teachers is very well versed with online content the time is ripe to do ‘flip classrooms’, meaning thereby that the student is watching a particular video or reading a resource online and then, in the classroom, the discussions on those videos/resources being read are happening. The second aspect is that now any teacher can co-deliver, by co-delivery it is meant that it could be quasi-co-deliver or truthful-co-delivery. Quasi-co-deliver signifies that the teacher and the students follow an online course together and essence of an expert is brought from the other part of the world as well enriching the learning experience.
Truthful co-delivery means when a tutor is standing in a class and one of the industry experts is co-delivering that particular course along with the teacher, where the class teacher speaks about the theoretical aspects and the industry resource primarily explains how a particular postulate, theorem, or a theoretical aspect is being used in the industry for meaningful and sustainable solutions. So, to conclude, we can safely say that online education will never replace traditional classroom teaching but will always support and acts as a scaffold for traditional classroom teaching. Now, it’s time to take full advantage of the highly advanced tech platforms as we are now aware of how to use them, where the resources are, and how to access those resources. In fact, at LPU the faculty has developed a
sense of blending and creating a hybrid model to deliver the best content.