Day Fortytwo

Distance Teaching

The pandemic has disrupted our lives rudely. As people scramble and get back on their feet, rules are getting rewritten. There is complete unanimity that the post-Covid world will be different and the life that we were familiar with will not return anytime soon.

When Heraclitus said change is the only constant in life, he referred philosophically to an almost imperceptible change. But the pandemic has brought about change in one fell swoop. No doubt this causes much pain, but it provides an excellent opportunity to leapfrog into the future.

Many businesses have quickly adapted themselves to the “Work From Home” culture. And managements are quick to spot the benefits to their bottom line. They are unlikely to revert to the old practice once the pandemic dust settles down. The cleaner air will be a welcome bonus to the society.

Teaching and learning also will change, like other human activities. The classroom is dead. What would be the shape of the future classroom is a moot question. If it ends up as a zoom-room, we are squandering away a golden opportunity to transform and reform education. We are getting e-papers in our mailbox these days. These are exact replicas of the physical newspaper, with news from page 1 overflowing into page 2. Why should the inconveniences and discomforts of the physical newspaper be replicated in the e-paper? Either a singular lack of imagination or a reluctance to give up the past.

The traditional classroom is fighting a losing battle against the shrinking attention span. As a visiting faculty, I have been guilty of addressing vacuous faces for 3 long hours. Yet another major drawback of the conventional classroom is the “one size fits all” assumption. We had to tolerate these shortcomings because of economics. But with the pandemic throwing the rulebooks out of the window, we have an opportunity to redesign how we teach.

With this in mind, I performed a little experiment on my class of 20 odd students to whom I teach an elective. The learning modules were delivered every alternate day through e-mail. The modules were PowerPoint presentations, but altered very significantly. Each module had only 20 or fewer slides and covered a single big idea and wouldn’t take more than 20 minutes to browse through. The style was informal and chatty. Voice inflections were mimicked through font variations and animations.

Each module has 2 or 3 open-ended questions, which the students had to answer in a span of 24 hours. The students worked in teams of 3 to reinforce the collaborative spirit of learning. After 3 weeks, the results are more than encouraging. The compliance with the 24-hour deadline is near-100%. Some of the answers are creative, and suggests out-of-the-box thinking. An anonymous poll among the students received a 4+ rating.

My experiment addresses 2 major issues – attention span and flexible learning. It has engaged the students to participate in ways that I have not seen in the conventional classroom; it is most gratifying for a teacher. While there are many such models for distance teaching, they should not end up replicating the malaises of the conventional classroom.