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Learning in appetising bytes

Deepanjali Dwivedi

Radhika Anand, promoter of bachalog.com, was earlier worried about the impact of her husband's frequent job-transfers on her sons' education. ``I realised the importance of having access to information about schools, their curriculums, application deadli nes and extra-curricular activity sitting in places far away from Delhi. This gave me the idea to offer such a resource on batchalog.com.''

Last year, Sanjay Kar, an NRI, admitted his daughter to a prestigious school in New Delhi with the help of delhischools.com. Now, Sanjay keeps a check on his daughter's progress at school via the Internet, sitting thousands of miles away!

Blackboard lessons are being courted by multi-coloured, multi-lingual and multi-dimensional Web content available at the click of the mouse. Listings of schools nationwide, their curriculums, homework modules, customised tutorials, coaching classes, clas s projects, report cards, student counselling, `chill-out' zones, teachers' forums, extra-curricular activities and even PTA meetings have been hosted on Web sites.

Indian sites such as classteacher.com, classontheweb.com, webjump.com mykindasite.com, egurucool.com, planetvidya.com, getmoremarks.com and bachalog.com are already in place and more are expected to join the `e-educators' bandwagon.

Some of the e-learning sites also offer resources for competitive exams such as online MBA degrees, IT training programs, distance education and coaching classes for board examinations. Popular sites in this category are entranceguru.com, excelatexam.com , onlinetutor.com, headlight.com, NIIT's Netvarsity.com, Aptech's onlinevarsity.com and gurukulonline.com. Prestigious business schools such as Harvard and Stanford now offer business management courses online.

Reaching the remote corners

The virtual schools are not limited by location. For instance, classteacher.com has a registered base of more than 25 schools in New Delhi, Chandigarh, Punjab and Indore.

And sites such as egurucool.com are heaven-sent for parents in small, remote places seeking admission for their wards in city schools. They can now fill the online admission forms of the registered schools.

The key objective of the online classrooms is to make learning fun by packaging knowledge in appetising bytes. Classontheweb.com is a portal site for students of Class V to XII (ICSE, CBSE and SSC boards) covering Mathematics, Chemistry, Biology and Phys ics.

Rachna Pant, Principal of Summerfield Schools, New Delhi, explains, ``Students who are shy and cannot ask questions in class can log onto these sites for a more tailored understanding of the subject.''

Ayush Pant, a sixth-standard student of the Sanskriti School in New Delhi, gets enthusiastic seeing his school's activities posted on the Net. As his father K.K. Pant points out, ``These sites are fostering a strong sense of identification when students see their class information and activities posted online for others to see.''

Archana and Rajiv Mehra are a busy working couple in New Delhi with little time to monitor the school-work of their son, Rohit. As Archana says, ``We found that he was trailing behind the rest of his class in Physics. So I sent an e-mail to his Physics t eachers, asking how he could improve his performance.''

Rohit's teacher e-mailed back saying the child's main problem was lack of concentration in class.

Teacher can learn, too

E-mailing parents is one thing but adapting to the entire gamut of online school services can be a daunting task for some teachers. Singhal, a 12th Standard science teacher, gets up an hour earlier to attend special classes on Internet navigation and rel ated computer skills.

Says Kavita Punjala, computer teacher at the Sanskriti School, ``We teachers are realising the benefits of increasing our knowledge base through these training programs. We can enrich our real-life classes with the additional information we source from t he Internet.''

Companies such as Intel Corporation are assisting school managements in training teachers to create computer-based study material and evaluation tools.

The training also enables the teachers to become consultants to the e-learning sites. According to Sameer Buti, co-founder of classteacher.com, ``They (teachers) not only enrich their clicks-and-mortar classes but also help us in creating customised cont ent and selecting suitable Web-based material for our digital library.''

Digital library? This is a bank of active URLs and Web sites relating to educational content. Varun Khanna, a ninth-standard student, used the digital library to complete his school project on the biodiversity of India. ``I did not waste time going throu gh hundreds of encyclopedias and library books...,'' he says.

So, will this be the end of school libraries with their dog-earred books? Sameer Buti clarifies, ``The Internet is the biggest treasure-house of information. It's cheaper than buying expensive books, accessible round the clock and invaluable for students who want specific information from around the world. But that is not to suggest that digital will entirely replace the physical. Rather, it will be a value-added tool in the information-gathering process.''

Virtual helping-hands

Counselling is another popular aspect of the educational sites. Aditi Anand, a 12th-Standard student of Sardar Patel School, New Delhi, was baffled by the maze of career options before her. ``I just posted my query and these career experts helped me out by replying in detail. This saved me a lot of time as I did not have to go over to their offices personally.'' For many parents and students, there is the added advantage of privacy as they can avail of free counselling on a host of topics, not strictly academic.

As Reshma Talwar, a mother and school-counsellor herself, explains, ``All parents want answers to questions about their child's aptitudes... Many parents and children have started e-mailing us their anxieties.''

Cyber chill-outs

But it is not as if there is only a serious side to online education. Many sites have a `chill-out' zone where students can relax and discuss myriad other topics of school life -- popular interests such as Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Tomb Raiders, M P3's, movies, contests and so on. Some sites even plan to bring child prodigies and celebrities to interact with children in chat rooms.

The global experience

The e-learning trend in India was largely inspired by similar successful experiments in the West such as the Canadian Grassroot Projects which was initiated, designed and implemented by teachers and students. Curriculum-relevant, the online activities im part learning through virtual interaction.

However, supplementing real-life classrooms is not a new concept in India. Some years ago, the Government had initiated a UGC series on distance-education through television and radio. But the programmes did not really make a powerful impact owing to the lacklustre content, odd timings, limited interactivity (except for the weekly feedback section) and minimal awareness-building activities.

But will online education make all that difference to the diverse, demographic sections of schoolchildren in India? To begin with, Internet access is highly limited and there is a crying need for Web content in the regional languages.

But Sameer Buti is optimistic, ``In India, cable is available in more than 12 million households. I am sure that with the rise of broadband access, we can reach out to schools all across India.''

With a little governmental help, online education need not be restricted to the urban areas. A beginning has been made in Andhra Pradesh where Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu recently gave the go-ahead for Schoolnet India, a Net-based education project promoted by an infrastructure financing company, ILFS Ltd.

Content-discontent

Future goals apart, not everyone is satisfied with the kind of content currently available. Says K.K. Pant, ``In most sites the content is nothing more than replicating text-books onto the computer screens.''

And many parents complain of low bandwidths, sluggish connections and other technical problems posed by the sites.

But are online students really better off than those who prefer dog-earring their text-books? According to a study by the US-based Centre for Applied Special Technology on `The Role of Online Communications in Schools: A National Study', students with on line access perform better. The study compared the work of 500 students in seven urban school districts -- half with online access and half without.

A similar study is yet to be undertaken in India. But there is ample proof to show that the Internet can help students become independent, critical thinkers who can find information on their own, and organise and evaluate it.

Picture: Students receive a supplementary diet of virtual lessons.