Phygital Education - The Reinvention Of Learning In A Post Pandemic World

With the pandemic kicking in, Students and teachers had their lives upended. Classrooms shut down and remote learning became part of the norm. Now with more schools planning to reopen after receiving nods from their respective state governments, we can’t help but examine what lessons we have all learnt from a school year like no other and what the classrooms of the future might look like as Winston Churchill once said, “Never let a good crisis go into a waste.”

But it's not just the pandemic that has made us rethink the way education was and should be disseminated, the draft of the New Education Policy by the government (formed a year well before the covid took over) made us look into the new way of imparting education that is through “blended learning”- a concept that found new grounds during the pandemic. Blended learning as we may say or Phygital Education in simple words is the amalgamation of physical learning and digital learning. 

Phygital education has become the need of the hour, and it can be said so not just because of the pandemic but also because recent times have seen students’ interest in learning new things dwindling more than ever and the insanely high amount of dropout rates being witnessed by educational institutions worldwide. The world is evolving today at a breakneck pace and so are the demands to survive in it. The rigid curriculum being taught in schools is leaving students of all ages ill-equipped to grow in this world, leaving us with a question mark, “What to do then?”. The solution to this dilemma lies in Phygital learning. A kind of learning that not only helps students upskill their soft skills but also explore different career paths to be prepared for tomorrow. Phygital learning has the capability to ditch the monotony of regular schooling by reforming education. It has the opportunity to foster a lucrative environment that inspires each student to take strides of innovation by upskilling and birthing the much-needed inquisitiveness in them towards everyday learning. It cannot be denied that with the introduction of digital tools the skills and knowledge uptake of students has remained high in proportion to what they could have just via the traditional mode of learning.

With the advent of Phygital education, learning has taken a new turn. Gamification of learning a much optimistic way of making students master difficult to grasp concepts has been possible because of phygital education. This approach is especially helpful for young learners who have a shorter attention span and have a natural love for gaming. It provides a new edge to the tedious everyday wearisome learning by motivating students as it uses video game design and game elements in traditional learning environments. The outcome- maximized enjoyment and engagement in capturing the interest of learners and inspiration added in them to continue learning.

Phygital education’s scope is very wide and it can be said so in the respect of the creation of O-labs or online labs by the Ministry of Electronics and Information technology. With the advent of o-labs practical lessons that needed equipment and the physical presence of students in scientific labs can now be provided to them online through simulations. Through o-labs experiments can be taught using the Internet, more efficiently and less expensively. The labs can also be made available to students with no access to physical labs or where equipment is not available for being scarce or costly. It addresses the problem of the digital divide and geographical distances head-on as it allows less fortunate students to compete with students in better-equipped schools. The experiments can be accessed anytime and anywhere, overcoming the constraints on time. All this can be owed to the dynamic nature of phygital education. 

O-labs is a remarkable feat in the field of Phygital learning which also is a reflection of the advancement that has taken place in the field of education in our country within a matter of months. The government of our country actively endorsing and initiating steps in the field of Phygital learning makes us believe more in the fact that it is here to stay in India and is the future of learning.

With the emergence of new start-ups in the past two years, today in 2021 we have over 4530 ed-tech start-ups alone which make India a suitable ground for Phygital learning to re-invent and reimagine the education sector altogether.

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Chandrahas Panigrahi

Guest Author The author is CEO and Co-Founder, Edukemy

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