BackSchools bet big on virtual classrooms
Experts say virtual classrooms have some way to go before they positively impact the quality of overall education
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Mumbai: Irdishi Afroze, 15, sits on the front bench of her classroom in the City of Los Angeles municipal school in Mahim, a suburb of Mumbai. Instead of a blackboard, her classroom has a plasma screen on which a teacher is giving a maths lecture in Hindi.
Not only is the teacher at least 15km away in a studio in Dadar, another suburb, but hundreds of students from 80 other Brihanmumbai Mahanagar Palika (BMC) schools across the city are simultaneously listening to the lecture.
“I love these classes. It is a great way of doing revisions, and we see other students paying attention, asking questions. It motivates us to do better," said Afroze. Her neighbour, Krishna, nodded in agreement.
It has been two years since the launch of its virtual classroom programme. Meena B. Nalawade, head teacher at the school, said, “More and more parents are enrolling their children with them and the Class X board results have never been better."
“The mix of audio-visual keeps the children involved till the lecture ends, and there is a question answer segment where they can interact with the lecturer," said Kailash Arya, programme coordinator at the school. BMC teachers get trained by the Valuable Group, a company which provides the technology.
The system, though, does have limitations. Those sitting on the back bench complained of difficulty in seeing the font size. “This is an infrastructure problem but if the kids ask for an increase in the size of the picture, we can do it," said Arya.
Virtual classrooms are not new. They are being used even in premier B-schools and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).
“IITs use the national knowledge network to deliver lectures across the country and reach out to other universities," said Ajai Chowdhry, founder, HCL, and director at IIT Patna. He added that virtual learning “solves a great problem of shortage of good quality teachers and the problem of catering to a large audience".
Companies such as Tata Interactive Systems, HCL Learning—a division of HCL Infosystems—and Cisco India Pvt. Ltd provide content as well as a platform for e-learning to educational institutions. According to a 5 June survey by G-Cube Webwide Software Pvt. Ltd, an e-learning consultant, the Indian e-learning industry employs 18,000-20,000 people with annual revenue of $550-600 million.
However, some experts say virtual classrooms have some way to go before they positively impact the quality of overall education.
Companies may be riding big on the hardware and availability of cheap tablets, high-speed mobile Internet and amounts of cheap data but the quality of the content remains a challenge, according to Ashish Rajpal, founder of iDiscoveri, an education company that partners with schools to improve learning methods and trains teachers.
“In India, the revolution is yet to happen. The trigger may have been the poor quality of teachers but e-learning or adaptive learning hasn’t taken off as it’s not user-friendly. The main reason being that they haven’t found a solution to remodel the syllabus and only the medium has changed," said Rajpal.
Online education could help in promoting the Right to Education, but there is a problem here, too, according to Parth J. Shah, president, Centre for Civil Society, a Delhi-based independent, non-profit, research and educational organization. “The RTE has mandated that education should happen only in school premises, which puts the country’s NOS (national open school) in danger and a lot of online programmes that are taken from home."
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