The Live Mint Story on Online Tutoring
We recently got mentioned in a Live Mint story on BSNL entering online tutoring. Good feeling to know that all the hard work the team is putting in registering somewhere.
An extremely short post, I admit.
Archive for the 'Online tutoring' category
Pedagogical effectiveness of live online classes
(An older post, here only because of contextual relevance)
The basic pedagogical process can be defined as a systematic transfer of knowledge and – or skills from an instructor to a learner. Depending upon the basic objectives of the process, the transfer may be limited to cognition of facts or may be extended to application and extension of facts, their inter-linkages and derivative concepts.
Since the important players in this interaction are the instructor and the learner, the important determinants of the effectiveness of the process should include the instructor centric parameters, the learner centric parameters and the transaction centric parameters.
Instructor Centric Parameters
Instructor centric parameters revolve around the instructor’s ability to effectively transfer the skills / knowledge and ignite the curiosity and motivation of the learner to explore the area through active thinking and alternative knowledge sources.
- Level of the target knowledge / skill with the instructor
- Level of transaction skill of the instructor
- Ability to engage
- Ability to motivate
- Ability to transfer the knowledge / skill
- Ability to activate the curiosity of the learner
- Ability to answer related questions
- Ability to positively handle unrelated queriesMotivation level of the instructor
The level of target knowledge is to a great extent determined by academic achievements of the instructor. To ensure adequate target knowledge, it is important to not only go by the academic qualifications possessed by the instructor but also testing his actual level of knowledge through independent testing.
Transaction skills of the instructor depend upon the awareness of the learning process possessed by the instructor and his aptitude for teaching. A University degree in education provides adequate understanding of the learning process to the instructor. However, it is important to actually test the teaching aptitude of the instructor.
Motivation level of the instructor determines his level of proactive effort in ensuring effective learning. This depends upon the career goals of the instructor, his basic personality and behavioral traits. It is important to ensure that a sound synchrony exists between career objectives and opportunity and progression, the teaching profession provides.
Learner Centric Parameters
Learner centric factors determine the learner’s ability to grasp the target knowledge set in isolation as well as in the context of related concepts. This includes:
- Level of the pre-requisite knowledge and skills
- Level of inherent aptitude for the specific knowledge set
- Level of inquisitiveness
- Ability to process, analyze and link new information with what already possessed
Together, these factors determine the learning speed.
Several behavioral characteristics of the learner also impact the learning outcome. The ability to concentrate and stay focused, the ability to work in a sustained manner towards a target outcome are major behavioral parameters constituting the “learning personality” of the learner which greatly impacts the learning achieved.
An important distinction between instructor centric and learner centric parameters is that while instructors can be subjected to a selection process to ensure the right ingredients, there can be no such selection process for learners. Anybody with an intent to learn qualifies as a learner and hence, the set of learner comes with an extremely wide spectrum of learner characteristics.
Thus on one hand, we have students with fast learning speeds and extremely conducive learning personalities (“Bright students”) and on the other, we have students with below average learning speeds and obstructive learning personalities.
It is important to note here that there should absolutely be no value judgement attached to the varying levels of learning characteristics of the students. It is absolutely nobody’s case that bright students have more right to learn than the relatively slower ones.
Thus, it becomes imperative for the learning transaction to cater to and compensate for the differences in the individual learning characteristics of students.
Transaction Centric Parameters.
This is the third important set related to the effectiveness of the teacher-taught interaction.
Transaction effectiveness is primarily determined by the ability of the learning process to:
a) cater to and compensate for the wide variation in students’ learning characteristics,
b) facilitate continuous evaluation and feedback from teacher to students,
c) generate positive and negative reactions in response to the positive and negative learning achievements, and,
d) facilitate free communication from student to the teacher regarding query resolution and intimation of any learning help required.
Learning outcome of any learning oriented transaction depends upon the right synergy between the three major kinds of factors impacting the learning process
Traditional Classroom & Online 1-1: Competitors or Collaborators
Traditional classroom setting where a single instructor communicates with a group of students of the roughly the same age, knowledge and skill level has been by far the most popular mechanism of organized instruction. This is in no small measure due to resource effectiveness inherent in the approach.
However, since the learning characteristics of students in a seemingly coherent group vary significantly and classroom instruction inherently being a group learning activity it settles down to cater to the most populous sub-section within a group of students. This means a classroom instruction fundamentally caters to the median of students with learning characteristics lying at the center of the curve. In other words, it catres to the learning speed of an average student thereby leaving the students with learning characteristics at either extremes, stranded.
Thus, while the slow learner may feel confused and puzzled, the fast learner becomes frustrated because teaching is at the speed of an average learner. This has been the most significant drawback of otherwise cost effective and relatively effective classroom instruction.
Personalized online tutoring helps remove this weakness out of the classroom setting by providing supplemental learning at the individual learner’s speed. Thus the slow learner has an option to go slow, imbibing everything at his pace, the fast learner can quickly cover topics and move on thus satisfying and igniting his heightened interest level.
Done in tandem with classroom instruction, proper one-on-on online instruction creates the ideal learning setting for each individual student.
Remote teaching – alternative models and applications
What is the problem of being a very good teacher?
The biggest problem is that there are only so many students you can teach and not just that, they even need to physically reside close by and also, belong to a certain socio-economic group (so that they can afford you).
A good teacher is an extremely valuable resource, an engine which can propel innumerable mini engines and his effectiveness being curtailed due to geographical or economic or any other limitation is a terrible waste.
From students’ perspective, every student who is willing to put in the effort deserves the best available guidance irrespective of his locational or monetary disadvantages.
Now, the challenge is, how to connect a very good teacher to willing students across geographies and make this process cost effective too.
Online tutoring in its current avatar (as done by eTutelage ) works very well in the Indo-US or Indo-UK context. Exchange rate and cost differences make one on one tutoring extremely affordable for the student and the availability of the requisite hardware at the student’s end is never a problem. Geography has already been taken care of by the process itself.
The question of intrigue is whether this model can be extrapolated to a one to many situation – a model where the expertise of a great teacher is made available simultaneously to many more students than in a traditional class room setting and whether the richness of a class interaction can be preserved while keeping the costs minimum. It can have very interesting applications both from a business as well as welfare point of view.
Incidentally, the essence of this model has been very beautifully captured in this Idea Cellular TVC.
The challenge is, how to operationalize it in a business-sustainable manner.
A couple nice links on online tutoring and elearning market
Sharing a nice link on alootechie which talks about the market for online tutoring being in the region of $12bn. The article also contains a reference to this piece in Financial Express.
And, to save the best for the last, its a very well written article in India Knowledge@Wharton which presents an interesting perspective on current trends and future direction.
Online tutoring: fixed schedule or sporadic help
The question looks more like a matter of preference, at least on the face of it. Some students might prefer a fixed, regular schedule week after week while others may prefer the flexibility of having expert help available as and when they need it.
However, when looked closely, the two options throw up and interesting interplay of student requirements, child psychology and the way kids learn. Sporadic help is mostly sought very close to an important assignment deadline, test or an exam. Those are stressful times and the sole focus is to get over the current “crisis”. That’s exactly the purpose, sporadic help solves – to work as a panacea, a band-aid to relieve the current pain. It does precious little to resolve the condition behind the pain – whether it is unclear fundamentals, lack of practice, lack of understanding of interlinkages of concepts, lack of application and the resulting loss of confidence.
Regular sessions, on the other hand, are more like getting regular exercise, eating well and having an overall healthy lifestyle. It builds real strength, stamina and good health, academically speaking. It’s mainly because a regular schedule drives a certain discipline, demands commitment, allows the teacher to develop an understanding of the student’s learning pattern and leaves the scope for him to take pro-active action.
Most of us need or have needed at least some help when encountered with complex new ideas. A school kid is no different. Help may be required to comprehend the idea from the reading material, to appreciate how different concepts converge in theory and application or just to sort out the clutter so many different ideas create in a child’s mind. Not being able to solve problems is essentially the symptom – the real disease lies elsewhere. Having one on one expert supervision helps decipher the symptoms, diagnose the problem correctly and remedy it.
Of course, there are gifted students who need no help in understanding the concepts, though, at times, they may just get stuck at a difficult problem. Again, the symptom is the same while the “disease” is much different, much more innocuous. In such cases, sporadic help indeed has real value, though regular one on one sessions would still pack much more punch – simply because they will help the student move faster than he would do without any help.
Thus, though sporadic help has its value, one must appreciate that excessive use of band-aid at the cost of trying to find out the real problem will not sustain a healthy body. More so, if you are not a straight A’s student who has a natural affinity for the subject he studies and never needs any help apart from the textbooks.