How Digital Classrooms Are Transforming India’s Education System

Teaching and learning are not the same things. While a teacher might be able to give instruction or lesson to over 100 students in a classroom, they can never be sure exactly how much of the topic was actually understood or learned by the students. In the ICSE/CBSE context, where schools have a large number of students per class, ensuring and checking the learning of each student is rather difficult. Digital classrooms are an efficient way of ensuring learning takes place in an efficient and productive manner. 

Testing is the only way to understand student learning. Based on their test outcomes, teachers can assess where the students stand overall. However, in the setting of large classrooms of 40 students, this becomes difficult. At best a teacher can assess learning by asking a handful of student’s questions. Assessments for the whole class could traditionally only take place 2 to 3 times a year. With digital classrooms, large scale testing becomes a lot easier. Not only can each student be given a short quiz at the end of each lesson, or the end of each day, teachers are getting students’ scores immediately from the testing platforms. Teachers save a major portion of their time that would otherwise have gone in doing physical paper grading, and can now dedicate that time to analyzing each students performance either daily or weekly, and ensuring students are brought up to speed before they fall too far behind. 

Students can also benefit from digital classrooms as they can receive almost instantaneous feedback and personalized feedback. Learning management systems have the options for automated feedback, where a student is corrected almost immediately at the end of the test while the information is still relevant, rather than a few days later. The personalized feedback can also happen from teacher to students as soon as they are able to review their scores and guide them where needed. Teachers are no longer dependent on face to face meetings or finding time within the busy school day of both student and teacher to help a student out. Feedback in ongoing, and immediate. 

Digital classrooms will therefore also utilize the teachers time more efficiently. The time that would have gone in physically correcting test scores, will now be done in a matter of minutes. This will not only free up their time for lesson planning but also works as a feedback tool on students learning as well as feedback. The test scores will also give the teachers an understanding of their basic teaching and if students have understood or not, or if some part of the execution needs improvement from their end. It keeps teachers engaged in ensuring they are rolling out lessons to the students in an engaging manner. 

Digital classrooms help put the focus on learning rather than teaching. Checks and balances can be put in place more frequently to ensure both students and teachers are on the right path, and their time is being used more efficiently. As we move forward, no longer can we depend on the traditional classroom of the past. Schools will need to use a blended approach to digital and physical classrooms. Digital classrooms will allow for greater efficiency while allowing traditional classroom time to be used more constructively and yet keep its community and personal touch. 

Rohan Parikh

Guest Author The author is Managing Director - The Green Acres Academy