Shifting focus from schooling to learning
India boasts of its education system and it has created necessary infrastructure, such as constructing buildings, hiring teachers, and so on, to support the system. With a reasonably sound system in place, educators feel that it is now time to bring a shift in focus from the system to learning. How can this shift be achieved? Educationalists feel that the first reform that needs to be brought is to align the curriculum and textbooks with students’ ability in primary school years. The proficiency that students actually possess must be commensurate with the level of proficiency that their textbooks provide. If these two things don’t match, then there is a risk of relegating the whole exercise of teaching to a mere task of covering the syllabus. Students will learn very little in such a scenario. And once a student falls behind, he/she will never be able to make up the gap.
A shift is also required in the teaching method. Teaching should be commensurate with students’ learning levels. Further, there should be an in-built mechanism that will help those students who fall behind. Besides, there should be a mechanism that will enable students to learn through experience rather than learning by rote. Students must be able to set their individual pace of learning so that they can easily grasp a concept well before moving on to the next.
Incidentally, the Ministry of Human Resource Development of the Government of India has issued guidelines asking state governments to reformulate their curricula to make them appropriate for the ages that they are meant for. This, we feel, is a step to the right direction.
While the government will do its bit, schools must also bring about innovations to educate student rather than merely teaching them.
Tools of eLearning are helping achieve this shift in focus. Schools are discovering the benefits of eLearning. e-learning helps teachers teach better and students learn better. Schools that have adopted e-learning have seen a drastic improvement in the grasping and learning ability of their students. Even at the individual level, students who use eLearning systems have shown improvement in their performance. These improvements have also translated into better grades, giving schools and students who have adopted eLearning an edge.
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