Ours is a digital age. From pizza, groceries, vegetables to even services like hiring a taxi, plumber, almost every conceivable commodity is being accessed via the internet, by countless people, successfully. The education sector is not immune to digitalization. Especially, since the pandemic began, and millions of students across the nation were locked out of the classroom, online teaching and learning have become increasingly common in educational institutions. In India, the pandemic propelled the already growing tech sector towards new heights. To meet the huge demand for online teaching, a myriad of online classes app were developed which provide state-of-the-art features for online teaching and learning. So, how exactly is online teaching a 21st-century approach to education? Will it continue to grow even after the pandemic, when social distancing norms are eased?
Though, when the schools reopen, quite a few students will revert to classroom teaching, the trends indicate that most of the revolutionary changes brought in online teaching will help the tech industry in retaining its rapid growth in the coming decades. Even by minimally optimistic estimates, the current $ 2.8 billion online teaching industry will grow more than 3 times to about $10.4 billion in 2025. Some important reasons for this spontaneous growth of online teaching, are that it addresses the shortcomings of traditional classroom education. The pandemic could not have hit us at a worse time. Not only was the education system lagging behind more tech-friendly nations, but it was not focused on the most important aspect of professional education- the employability of students. It focused more on rote learning than on important skills for professional development like critical thinking, logical aptitude and acclimatization with the digital work environment.
Not only have online classes app improved on the cons of traditional classroom education, but online teaching has several intrinsic benefits as well. Online teaching offers the flexibility of teaching and learning from anywhere. In fact, good online classes app nowadays provide the added feature of online teaching through mobile which allows the flexibility to truly teach from anywhere. Online teaching is accessible to basically anyone with a broadband connection, allows learning at your own pace, efficient revision with recorded lectures, automated attendance, cost-efficiency, and likewise. Thus, the simplicity and effectiveness of online teaching make it a real game-changer in the field of modern-day education.
Even the government is acutely aware of the lasting impacts that the surge in online teaching is going to impart. In this bid to facilitate the practice of online teaching in India, the Narendra Modi government, in its budget for the year 2020 has announced the National Digital Educational Architecture (NDEAR) for administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation, and delivery of educational courses, training programs, or learning and development programs. The New Education Policy 2020 (NEP) has put a special focus on ramping up the development of digital infrastructure for online teaching. It is set to provide a significant impetus to the role of online teaching and ed-tech in all aspects of education. New and improved online classes app which allow access to self-paced online education are a culmination of these efforts put in by the administration and Edtech industry together. Online teaching has turned into a new world order with countries all across the globe moving towards setting up Virtual Universities (VU), which means no concrete campuses and no physical presence of staff. Everything is properly arranged even the experiments are conducted through remote labs. Exciting concepts like gamification, that is, using game mechanics and virtual achievements in non-game contexts to engage users, are being added to online classes app, to increase student engagement and learning outcomes.
Therefore, the field of online teaching is in a true sense, visionary. The unprecedented and exciting innovations in the field have provided a unique online teaching and learning experience to countless educators and students nationwide. A good online classes app can give a learning experience that is multiple times more enriching than traditional classrooms could ever provide. These remarkable features of the online classes app have led to a high level of habituation in the users towards online teaching and this will lead to the irreversibility of the preferred mode of education when the pandemic ends. This is what makes online teaching a 21st-century approach to education in a true sense.
