When Blended Learning wins the Teacher v/s Technology battle!
With education moving online due to the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, who did you think would take over the teaching scenario? Teachers or Technology? While classrooms with physical human teachers might turn a thing of the past completely, A research at nasscom FutureSkills suggests that people prefer VILT (Virtual Instructor Led Training) to purely online learning when it comes to really undergoing deep skilling. Learners definitely want to be able to engage with a human teacher along with technology, v/s only technology.
A clear winner? BLENDED LEARNING!
Technology itself isn’t transformative, it’s the pedagogy that is transformative. There can be infinite uses of technology but if teachers do not make it work, it fails. One doesn’t work well without the active engagement of the other.
In certain cases (where devices and bandwidth is available), learners prefer to engage with technology along with a human teacher, v/s only a human teacher.
A blog by Amit Aggarwal, Co-Architect FutureSkills & CEO IT-ITeS SSC nasscom, on ‘Embracing Blended Learning’ ponders upon technology’s dominance in academia during the COVID era. Although, the rapid growth of technology has always made glimmering promises, as he tells, one of them being automation beyond imagination. Nobody could imagine the possibility of driverless cars until a certain time, but today we know the idea being close to reality. What actually takes us back is the impact on jobs due to unimaginable pace of technological disruptions. How can we make our future generations cope with this technological progress?
Future is uncertain and volatile but we must keep the hopes high with the promising role that EdTech is playing in the education sector. The success of Indian EdTech startup Byju’s, which recorded a 100 % growth in three consecutive years and a massive 200% growth in FY19, displays the quintessential potential of the EdTech sector. However, it is worth noting what happens when technology interferes with our age old physically interactive teaching/learning models. Amit’s blog on ‘Embracing Blended Learning’ carefully examines how a blended learning model will become the primary way of moving ahead with skilling and education.
While blended and continuous learning seem to become a norm in the future of education, it is imperative that our students master digital fluency which will not only help them keep up with the technology led education of today but will also make them ready to face the technological disruptions of the future. A basic understanding of emerging technologies would play a massive role in preparing the youth with the jobs of tomorrow regardless of a tech background.
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