Online Education - An Overview

 

Meaning

Online education is a form of education that is delivered and administered using the internet.

The meaning of traditional education has changed in recent times. Being physically present in a classroom isn’t the only learning option that is available to you anymore. Nowadays, with the rise of the Internet and new technologies, the access to a quality education has increased. As long as you have access to a computer and internet you have access to a quality education anywhere and everywhere.

Also read : elearning the future of education

Benefits

It's flexible :

As a teacher or student you have the choice to either teach and learn at your own pace.

It offers a wide selection of programs :

You have a wide range of skills and subjects are available to teach and learn.

It’s accessible :

Its enables you to study or teach from anywhere in the world.

It allows customized learning :

You have access to very diverse material such as videos, photos, and eBooks

It’s more cost-effective :

It is more affordable and the results can be better than other than traditional education.

Also read : Top 5 Benefits and challenges in online education

Scope

Learners to increase :

Online education in India has been on an upward swing in the recent years. And in this current scenario the online learners are expected to increase at a much accelerated pace.

Unexpected subjects :

Data science, ML, AI, Analytics are few subjects that are the most popular subjects being learnt online by Indians.

Supplementary education :

Students may turn towards online after-school coaching and tution centers for availing extra help and are expected to flourish.

Career skills :

The practical knowledge and skills that are needed for a job is focused rather than just providing just education.

Quality & delivery :

With increasing competition, the quality of content & delivery of online courses will definitely improve.

Also read : Soft Skills required for effective tutors

Top Digital Learning Platforms and companies :

Companies that provides courses for school-going kids and help them in exam preparation:

Byju's Classes :

India's leading online content that offers contents in the form of interesting and interactive videos to the students. It also provides courses which help in exam preparation for IAS, IIT, JEE, etc.Using modern technology Byju’s uses stories in the form of videos, images and gifs to enhance learning and revision.

Vedanthu :

Its features include free live classes and sessions with live doubt-clearing. It also has free study material, NCERT solutions, previous year papers, important questions, learning management tools, and performance reports among others.

Extramarks:

It uses interactive, rich-media based learning modules. Virtual reality-based 2D and 3D animation techniques make learning interesting and concepts clear for school students. Preparation material for tests like JEE Mains, SAT, PSAT, TOEFL and NEET is also available for candidates.

Toppr :

It presents comprehensive content in a very organized manner. It offers online classes, mock tests, live doubts and adaptive practice. Toppr uses artificial intelligence-based machine learning algorithms on top of this strong infrastructure, to create personalised learning for students.

Khan Academy:

It was initially created for tutoring high school and college students. It offers exceptional training modules for all types of educational coaches, and for students at various levels. Khan Academy is known for well-researched units of multiple levels of science, the arts, mathematics, and history.

Learning Platforms that offer courses for graduates, professionals and other persons who wish to learn, enhance or update their skills.

Skillshare:

Skillshare offers a varied collection of courses to enhance your creative side, as well as enrich your business goals. Few examples of course categories include leadership, marketing, productivity, graphic design, culinary arts, languages, and wellness. Every Skillshare class has a project that offers practical experience and the opportunity to receive feedback.

Upgrad :

Upgrad provides industry-relevant programs designed in collaboration with the faculty of reputable institutions across the country and with the world-class faculty and industry. Merging the latest technology, pedagogy, and services, upGrad is creating an immersive learning experience – anytime and anywhere.

Udemy :

It is taught by experts to help your workforce excel, its learning recommendations enhance skills and are customized to drive employee engagement. Its course selections include more than 3,500 on-trend subjects that will enrich learning and boost your skills in a host of areas including business, tech, design, and more. Udemy also offers a great mix of expert resources on the latest e-learning trends, including e-books, webinars, videos, infographics, and case studies that will benefit you.

Coursera :

The Coursera provides universal access,partnering with top universities and organizations to offer online courses. You can earn credentials from distinguished universities like Yale and Stanford as well as leading companies such as Google and IBM. The site offers hundreds of diverse courses, certificates, specializations, and degree programs. Many of the courses are free.

LinkedIn Learning :

If you are looking to improve your professional development skills, this is an excellent place to start. The range of courses covers business and technology as well as creative pursuits and is offered in seven languages. The platform is open to individuals and organizations, and most courses include quizzes, exercise files, templates, and other supporting documents to help you apply the material.

Conclusion

Though online education cannot 100% replace traditional education, these are few reasons for the students to choose this new form. And in recent days most of the students started to think that online education is the same or better than the traditional classroom experience. Still you must be able assess the situation and decide according to your needs and goals. And this alternative to traditional education is not for everyone, it's still a convenient option for students all over the world.

Google Meet with New Layout

Though G meet has gone through a lot of changes over the past year, these new changes are very significant and are helpful. Thanks to Google for listening to our need and responded with new updates.

This new experience will begin rolling out by end of May. This has lot of changes and has almost responded to the needs of every teacher and student. 

You can click on to the YouTube link to watch the video explaining about - the updates in the Google meet layout.

1. Controls moved to the bottom bar

All the controls for G Meet will be in a bar at the bottom of the screen, instead of in all corners of the screen. This will be easy to see the more students at a time

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• The toolbar will be always displayed, instead of hiding when not in use.

• On the bottom middle the controls include – Microphone, Camera, captions, hand raise, presentation controls, more options (three dots) and hang up.

• The more option button includes -

• The hang up button is on the far right, so that you don’t accidentally hang up which trying to unmute to speak.

 

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• On bottom left corner, you can find meeting code.

• On bottom right corner, you can find

• – Meeting details like joining info
• - The people in the panel
• - Chat box option
• - And activities which has – Breakout rooms, Polls, Q&A, Recording and Whiteboard.

 2. See the presentation screen

The big rectangle black that is seen when you are presenting, which takes up the major portion of the screen and do not even show what you are presenting, is now changed :

• The presentation tile will actually show you what you are presenting, which can be helpful to know what you are actually presenting.

• The presentation screen can be reduced to one tile when you unpin the presentation tile, so that you can view more number of students on the screen.

• You will be able to view at least up to 49 tiles at a time.

 

     

                                      

 3. Changes in viewing yourself

• You can click on your own video tile you can make it popping out as a floating picture or as part of the grid.

• As a floating picture you can drag it around the Meet screen and place it in any area of your choice.

• The floating picture can also be dragged by its corners to change its size.

• You can also minimize your video screen to hide your screen from yourself, so that you can see more number of students.

Other updates

• You can use tile view to see more participants at once. To increase the number of tiles on the screen, you need to change the numbers of tiles from the layout option.

• You can see the tile in blue, when someone speaks.

• The tile shows mute icon if the participant is muted.

Other New features

New features that are expected in the near future includes the following :

• You will able to pin multiple video feeds.

• You will be able to reduce data usage to help you save on data cost.

• You will be able to adjust the brightness, so that can be seen in better.

• You will be able to change the backgrounds as video instead of images.

Evaluation - Tools and Techniques

 

Table of content :

• ASSESSMENT
• EVALUATION
• LEVELS OF EVALUATION
• CHOOSING THE METHOD
• TOOLS OF EVALUATION
• CHARACTERISTICS OF GOOD EVALUATION
• EVALUATION METHODOLOGY

Education is incomplete without Assessment and Evaluation.

Assessment:

Assessment is a fact finding activity that describes conditions that exists at a particular time. It describes the progress students have made towards a given educational goal at a point of time, mainly used to collect quantitative data.

Evaluation:

Evaluation adds value judgment to assessment. It estimates the worth of the process or programme in order to reach meaningful decisions about that process or programme. Thus, it a a qualitative measure of the prevailing situation.

Levels of Evaluation

Kirkpatrick’s Levels of Evaluation

Choosing An Evaluation Method

Tools of Evaluation

Let’s see the various tools and technique for an effective evaluation.

1) Testing Procedure

A formal testing that is intended to measure the student’s knowledge, skill aptitude, physical fitness, which can be administered formally or informally in the following ways :

a) Written Test - A test that are administered on paper or on a computer.

• Multiple Choice
• True/ False
• Matching
• Fill in the blank
• Essay - Short / Long

b) Verbal Test – Which is also know a mental test, it consists of items measuring vocabulary, verbal reasoning and comprehension.

• Spelling
• Grammar
• Word group
• Analogies
• Sentence completion
• Verbal deductions
• Instructions
• Critical Resoning

d) Practical Test – Students performs a visual enactment of a particular activity and teacher observes and rates the students performance.

e) Performance test – It involves students in performing various activates through the teacher evaluates.

• Oral presentation
• Dance / movement
• Lab demonstration
• Sports competition
• Dramatic reading
• Enactment
• Debate
• Musical recital
• Projects

 

2) Self reporting or Self Evaluating techniques

In this the children evaluate themselves.

a) Questionnaire :  Questionnaire consist of a set of pre-determined questions, by which the factual information about the children is known and the children are able to understand themselves.

b) Autobiography : This method helps the child to write about themselves and they understand where they stand and which area needs improvement.

c) Interview : Interviews are good at producing data which deal with topics in depth and in detail.  The teacher is likely to gain valuable insiges based on the depth of the information gathered.  It can be a structured or non-structured interview.

d) Personal diary / Portfolio : It is collection of evidences of students’ work over a period of time. In which, the students demonstrate to other his/her learning and progress. It provides a cumulative record or a picture of how a skill or knowledge area develops emerges.

3) Observation Method

It is observing with a specific objective, but without giving any inputs.  The student is exactly observed in the given situation. There is no possibility of bias. Here no body influences the behavior of the child.

a) Anecdotal Records – Notes written by the teacher regarding the student’s unique behavior across time, to establish patterns and causes.

b) Checklist – A list of response categories that respondents check if appropriate.

c) Rating Scale – It is a set of categories designed to elicit information about a quantitative or a qualitative attribute.

Types – Numeric rating , Graphic rating, Comparative scales

d) Sociometry – We identify the child’s social relationship. It measures relatedness among people.

Types – Sociogram, Sociometric Matrix, Social Distance Scale, Guess who Technique

 

4) Projective techniques are a method of understanding the inner world of the individual.

a) Association Test – Sight words / flash cards / jumble words - are given to the students to associate it.

b) TAT – A theme is shown and asked to the students what actually comes to the childs mind. We all could have seen the clouds and we assume it to be some animal / bird image from that.

c) Ink Blot test – We all would have done this in our childhood.  Dropping few ink on the paper, floding it and when we open it, we can see some image or picture in it.

d) Story completion test – once strory is narrated. The sequesce of the story is shuffled and the child is asked to arrange in a proper order.

e) Sentence completion test – Giving a hint – and the child is asked to develop a story or complete the sentence.

f) Make a Picture story test – where the child is asked what does the story interpret.

The answers in such test will not be same, each students will have a different story and interpretation.

So far we have seen all the tools and techniques of evaluation.  Now, lets see what a good evaluation tool must have. It should have a good –

• Validity
• Reliabitly
• Usability

a) Validity

• Quality of a tool enables it to determine what it was designed to determine.
• Validity is always concerned with the results of a test and not to the test itself.
• Validity is a specific and not a general quality.

b) Reliability

• It is the quality of consistency that the tool maintains over a period of time
• An estimate of reliability always refers to a particular type of consistency.
• Reliability refers to the results obtained with as evaluation instrument and not to the instruction itself.

c) Usability

• The tool must be practicabiliy accplicable.
• The should be not be expensive and time consuming.
• Evaluation tool should be easy to interpretation and comparable.

Evaluation Methodology

You need to select the methods of evaluation according to educational objectives and domains to be evaluated.  Below are different evaluation methods for each educational domains.

Cognitive Domain

Written Test

• Objective type
• Subjective type

Oral Test

• Observational rating scale
• Questionnaire

Affective Domain

• Direct Observation
• Rating Scale
• Checklist

Psychomotor Domain

• Direct observation
• Practical test
• In real situation
• In simulation condition

So, we have identifies or evaluated the students using the various toos and techniques. Now what is the next step?  Based on the performance and rating, we are now able to identify where the child needs improvement or where is the gap and where we need to focus on.

Looking at the gaps, we need to identify whether the child is slow learner or under achiver or having a learning disabilities. And we need to find out the remedial teaching strategies to fill the gaps.  Which is the main aim for evaluation.

Hope, this post was useful for the you and I would try to write about the various remedial strategies for the students with learning disabilities.