Today we had the first virtual meeting of the Open Forum in Alliance University in Bangalore because of the Corona virus lockdown across the country of India and the world. Even though the faculty could have stayed away, they showed great enthusiasm, understanding and concern for a very pressing issue facing the student community of the world. They also understood that it was a great opportunity to make, break or sustain traditional educational delivery models over modern high technology alternatives. .
About 7 faculty members attended the session from Bangalore from 3.30 PM for an hour on 31 March 2020..
The topic was on Sharing the rich lessons from the Online Courses undertaken in Alliance University.
Two of the faculty members shared their personal experiences. Dr. Shobana Padmanabhan from the College of Engineering and Design spoke of her experience of using ZOOM for teaching her students in Information Technology at the Engineering College.
Internet speeds and connectivity for people from outside Bangalore was a major cause of concern for the students. The students were okay with 2 hours of online classes but not more. Constant feedback from students helped Dr. Shobana to tailor her delivery mode to suit their needs.
Dr. George spoke of how his MOOC style online teaching has been benefiting students - 2-3 hours of instruction followed by daily quizzes. Dr. George first tried out Youtube Studio, then went to private Youtube videos which were recorded and distributed to students for learning, followed by quizzes.
This approach was cumbersome and on feedback Dr. George changed to ZOOM web conferencing software available in public domain for interacting with sem 2 students on Supply chain management, which has been interesting and convenient. Though it is not possible to have recordings like in YouTube sessions. Dr. George feels the daily quizzes were the reinforcing factor which helped in better retention by students.
Prof. Sajan and Prof. Sukanya, our tech protagonists in the discussion, were discussing on means and ways by which the online meetings could be made more effective. Their suggestions and proposals for and against both Coursera and MS Teams were interesting and provided great insight into the administration and delivery of these online courses.
The meeting was attended by 7 members and the interactions were very fruitful. We intend to have more virtual sessions on interesting topics in the Open Forum during this Corona virus lockdown period in the country.
The ZOOM software may or may not be replaced by MS Teams software which has been procured by Uty some time back for online learning. There is a demo tomorrow after which it will be decided to go for it or not.
The most dominating aspect of the discussion was the conviction among the experienced and learned faculty, of the inevitability and utility of high-quality online learning solutions in the future education canvas of the world..
George
No comments:
Post a Comment