THREATS & OPPORTUNITIES WITH — Online Education
Education is of core importance for every individual as it provides knowledge and awareness, fulfilling the need for knowing the unknown and enhance the value of what is known. As humans are social beings and, it’s the day-to-day interaction, either with family, friends, mentors, teachers or colleagues, contributing to human behavioural transformation throughout our lives, socially interactive mode of existence has been the basic education model since inception.
While considering an example of the formal education system, either school, college or universities, the primary medium of education has been classroom-based. It plays a vital role in defining the quality of learning one may experience while analyzing the medium through which we are educating or delivering knowledge. Many Educational institutions have always been good at proving their capacity and credibility about providing quality education to their students regarding classroom-based education, with a socially interactive environment until recent times.
When talking about the present-day scenario when a world-wide pandemic spread across the borders with a little or no warning has left many sectors, including education, to opt for nothing but a technologically dependent mode for fulfilling its ever-growing needs.
It is pertinent to note that online education is not a new concept and has remained in practice earlier than the current pandemic outrage and has been a common source of acquiring handy information and knowledge sharing internationally.
Advancements made in technology during the past 100 years have re-shaped the concept of living. These advancements have impacted our daily lives, which has left a thin margin to avoid technological dependency for everyone, resulting in a need to define methods enabling efficient means of learning and educating the masses contrary to the classroom-based learning concept. As a result of this need, online learning platforms have been in practice for decades now and, the social distancing concept as a result of the current pandemic has further reinforced the need for an online teaching system.
In addition to the above, the resulting need for prevailing circumstances globally, online teaching platforms seem to be a concept of classrooms in future with techno-social interaction as a primary mode of learning in common. Learning or teaching online as a whole may provide a comfort zone for exploring multiple learning techniques online with ease of access to the bulk of information-sharing methods. However, it might compromise the quality and authenticity of the content, therefore especial care for content sharing with controlled monitoring is required in this regard.
Moreover, with a re-shaped concept of educating, we may expect that the distance learning system would be the priority in common so particular steps for simplifying such methods for many with cheaper and less risky cloud solutions is expected. Furthermore, with the increased usage of online learning methods, we may expect a further refined and enhanced virtual learning experience along with increased community-oriented learning through social media platforms.
One of the ideas regarding online learning is that these may offer reduced expert help in learning methods with increased peer to peer learning techniques to be considered in common, resulting in less orientation towards the expert opinion, therefore attentive measures in the identification of expertise of each subject matter expert is a concern to be taken care of. However, these online learning platforms might offer every individual to explore and experience multiple learning techniques and methods to suit one’s individual pace and capability.
But the point of concern is what impacts education will have specifically in terms of quality and authenticity of content and knowledge sharing when it comes to the online learning mode of educating the masses. Therefore, keeping in touch with social connections in person along with online interactions is neither a bad idea nor it can be avoided.
With the agile flow of advancing technology and bombardment of new inventions now and then, there are both benefits and drawbacks which might need particular attention to help absorb and control the effects and impacts of technology that it will have on our education system. The technological advancements have resulted in an ever-increasing dependency on artificial intelligence, deriving in a whole new concept of socially interactive society technologically but isolated physically
