“Online Classes” is not a new concept. Due COVID-19 lockdown, it has become “New Normal”. Being an IT faculty in a management college, I got an opportunity to explore more about conducting the online lectures and interacting with the other faculty colleagues and students.
Initially, there was a dilemma regarding which platform to use for online classes: Cisco Webex, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Airtel Jeans. We tried all the options at the beginning and found some or the other additional or different options in these applications. One of the main concerns was that it should be user friendly. Finally, we came to the conclusion that let’s begin with Cisco Webex. And the journey started.
We conducted lot of dry runs of faculty and students as well so that they should be familiar with the application. The IT team including me, used to get lot of calls regarding the different queries which actually helped us to search more and go in the depth. After taking 2-3 lectures, most of the faculty and students as well were confident of using the application and the various options in it such as Mute/ Unmute the microphone, camera on/off, chat option, recording, etc.
Most of us thought that now everything is fine. However, now there was a real challenge for most of the faculty which was “Students Engagement during Online Lectures”. Because only becoming familiar with the tools of that application was not sufficient. In fact, how faculty can involve the students and how students can understand and enjoy the session like classroom teaching was a big challenge. So, as per Dr. Nitin Joshi’s valuable suggestions who is the director at our college, we conducted a session on “Students Engagement during Online Sessions” and also had lot of brainstorming for this in which we realized that some of the tools such as case study discussions, MCQs, Quiz, Students Presentations, Videos, asking questions to the students after every 15-20 minutes will help to engage the participants positively. And most the faculty started taking the lectures with the help of such different tools depending on their subject.
Gradually, everyone started realizing the benefits of this new era of learning such as convenience, flexibility, lecture recording facility because of which it was possible to recap. In addition to the regular schedule of the college, some active students had started doing the online certification courses on Cousera, Udemy, etc.
In spite of all the benefits of online sessions, one should have a back-up plan of everything for conducting/ attending the online sessions such as an alternative device in case the regular device like his/ her usual desktop/ laptop/ smartphone will crash, Wi-Fi and sufficient mobile data (2GB, 3 GB per day depending on the requirement), Sufficient Charging of the devices so that power-cuts will not affect anyone’s online teaching or learning.
Even though online classes will not replace face-to-face classes fully, it has a great impact on the learning and teaching, because ultimately teacher is a facilitator who helps the students to learn and leverage their time and shows the right direction.
Prof. Sandeep Moghe
Assistant Professor,
DR V N BRIMS, Thane
Also read : CONTROLLING DISTRACTIONS AND MANAGING ‘ATTENTION’
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