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''' ONLINE ''TEACHING'' OUTPOST '''
ONLINE TEACHING HAS OPENED TREMENDOUS OPPORTUNITIES in, and for the developing world,.... especially!
What was once confined to a room, can now, at no cost, be opened up to the world. A lecture or discussion session can have as many participants, and from anywhere, as one wants. Lectures can also be recorded at no additional cost.
Live lectures as well as recordings make it possible to open up teaching, restricted to close space in a classroom, to a much larger group. And the possibilities for a peer feedback, again at little or no additional cost, open up significantly.
So, online teaching can make teaching, an act once thought of as confined to a physical space, an open, accessible and more easily available activity too.
THE PANDEMIC HAS FORCED JUST about every teacher to learn more and more about online teaching, learning and pedagogy. I am one of them.
And though all of us are still learning, and the field is still evolving, quite rapidly, it is opening up new ways of thinking and learning and teaching for many of us.
Online teaching has many challenges. Unequal access to devices and to the Internet, summarised under the notion of the digital divide, has already been talked about a lot. I am not going to focus on that here, other than to say that if not addressed, the digital divide will increase already significant educational inequalities, so these problems need to be tackled on urgent basis.
Besides challenges, however, online teaching is also opening up new opportunities. In a recent course I took on online teaching, the instructors asked us, the students, to create a small lesson and deliver it to other participants.
Then they asked the participants to provide feedback to the presenter. The sessions were also videotaped so that the presenters could later review the lessons themselves.
The exercise was extremely enlightening. Seeing myself in the act of teaching allowed me to learn a lot about some of the small and large mistakes that I was making. From simple things, like word repetition, to more complex ones, from patterns of thought to managing technology while trying to focus on delivering content, and so on.
But the real gains came when peers gave me feedback. Their own experiences enriched the discussion and allowed me to reflect more deeply on the more on the more embedded structures of my thought patterns as well.
When we do research, the standard practice is to present research to peers. Peers feedback is an important way of not only improving research but of getting it accepted as well.
Journals run double blind reviews [in which the reviewer does not know the author and vice versa] to get feedback on research, and only when peers consider the research to be of good enough quality is it accepted for publication.
Quality, of course, might vary, but all reputable research journals will have a solid peer review process.
Teaching did not and still does not have the same level or peer review. Most schools /universities had some level of student feedback, and students results are actually tracked to gauge teacher performance, but these are post-fact and they do not provide a peer review.
The act of teaching, in a room with a faculty member and students, was more or less closed to outside scrutiny and possibilities of peer review.
So, I repeat, yet again, that Online teaching has opened up tremendous opportunities in the developing world, for sure.
What was once confined to a room can now, at no cost, be opened up to the world. A lecture or discussion session can have as many participants, and from anywhere, as one wants. Lectures can also be recorded at no additional cost.
Live lectures as well as recordings make it possible to open up teaching, restricted to enclosed space in a classroom, to a much larger group. And the possibilities for a peer feedback, again at little or no additional cost, open up significantly.
So, online teaching can make teaching, an act once thought of as confined to a physical space, an open, accessible and more easily available activity too.
The Honor and Serving the latest Global Operational Research on The new normal, The New World, continues. The World Students Society thanks author, Dr. Faisal Bari, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at LUMS.
With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011:
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