Teachers and pupils must turn to modern technology to ease their woes
August 8, 2012, 12:00 pm, the island
By R. Chandrasoma Students sitting GCE A/L this year (File photo)
Two factors militate against good teaching and responsive learning in our schools and universities. The first is that children and young adults that we deal with today in classrooms and elsewhere are far more restive and ill-tempered than in the decades past. In an earlier age obstreperous children were hammered into submission by rhinoceros-like teachers. Such direct methods are no longer possible and a class with docile and eager pupils is a thing of the past. This makes the job of the teacher very difficult indeed as he has to quell initial indifference or even hostility before launching into the core task of teaching. It is here that the personality of the teacher counts – if he is unfazed by initial boisterousness and impresses his class by the quality of his teaching, then good work can be done. Alas, quality teachers are now a rare species and quiet classrooms with the ambience needed for good teaching are equally difficult to find. A way out of this impasse is to use modern technology to thwart these seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
Suppose we have an excellent teacher – a man (or woman) who excels in the art of presenting a difficult subject eloquently and blessed with that charisma that holds an audience even when the subject-matter is difficult or frankly boring. Such a teacher is a ‘rara avis’ and cannot be easily duplicated. There is, however, a form of duplication that is easily done thanks to the wonderful advances in communications technology. The exceptional teacher we referred to earlier can have his lesson video-filmed with sounds and pictures recorded for others to see and here with remarkable fidelity. With the gadgetry available today this can be done at a very low cost – indeed, this can be done with a smart-phone of the kind sold by the thousand. Suppose a battery of lessons in Physics by a skilled teacher confronting an alert class is recorded live – this ‘material’ is now a transferable ‘file’ that can be passed to thousand of pupils separated in time and space. Today, the USB drive – a very small and compact device – is the preferred ‘medium’ for the transfer of large masses of moveable data (up to 8GB currently)
Let us see how this encoded ‘virtual lesson’ reaches pupils. Due to the sad lack of technical sophistication on the part of those in commanding positions, ‘computer studies’ in schools and universities are largely a business of providing ‘terminals’ for hands-on studies in the use of these wonderful devices. This approach is truly a waste of resources – a school with a thousand pupils can have – at most – about 50 terminals in a ‘Computer room’. This allows for a little practice in how to tap keys and push a mouse – but little else given the time allotted for each pupil. What is missed here by planners is that computer use ls like the driving of an automobile – there is no need to learn about the mechanism that underlies the motion of the car to be skilled in its use. Moreover, the best way of improving one’s competence is by actual use – not by taking short lessons on the mechanisms involved.
How does all this translate into practical approaches that truly enhance learning and teaching? The key to the resolution of our difficulties is the lap-top computer or equivalent mobile devices such as note-books and tablets. The ruling idea is this – instead of the costly and clumsy manoeuvre of having ‘terminals’ and ‘rooms’ for sporadic computer use, all pupils in the higher classes in schools and all university students must be encouraged to have personal lap-top computers - the ‘hardware’ that constitute the vital link for ‘receiving knowledge’ and dynamically interacting with the freely available data-bases.
Let us return to the model lesson given by the virtuoso teacher. This lesson is made open-access property by its conversion into a data-file that is freely transferable. With a personal laptop at his command, all that the pupil need do is to plug in the loaded USB drive to see and hear a great teacher in action explaining the finer points of the topic under study. An entire course in Physics (for example) can be made available across the country by a simple extension of this technique. The lesson (or a battery of lessons) is now freed of the constraints of time, place and resource-availability as the teaching is conducted in a ‘virtual class-room’ instantiated in circumstances of one’s own choosing. A leading feature of this system is that pupils across the country will learn the subject in a standard form that bypasses the local constraints to good instruction that are unavoidable given the poor state of most of our schools . All this does not mean that schools can close down. Learning is strongly collegial and discussions with teachers and fellow-pupils is a powerful incentive to the mastery of any subject. This latter phase can be truly reinvigorating if the subject has already been expertly presented in a non-challenging home environment. Teachers will find a class of prepared pupils – whose interest and curiosity have been roused by the prior educational encounter with the wizardly of the computer.
Today, all serious students find Wikipedia and YouTube indispensable companions in the pursuit of knowledge. Indeed, the portable computer is now the chief vehicle for pursuit of knowledge at all levels of sophistication. The persistence of an outmoded method of learning and teaching – the ancient method of a pupil sitting at the feet of a pompous and opiniated ‘master’ who demands submission as a condition for ex-cathedra instruction – is an anachronism that must go with such things as steam locomotives and horse-drawn carriages. The new method – based on companionship with computers - if fully and successfully implemented - will usher in a new age of humane education. There are, undoubtedly, a few problems – the chief of which are the high cost of a lap-top machine and the danger of young minds seeing this instrument as the gateway to forbidden visual delights. These difficulties must be overcome.
A coda to the discussion above may be useful – we witness today a strike by University Teachers demanding salary hikes etc. that truly have little or nothing to do with the improvement of university education. If the salaries of these worthies are doubled, it it would be a miracle if the quality of their teaching is also ‘doubled’. What is needed to raise standards is to install a computerized ‘delivery system’ of the kind discussed above. Such a system will allow striking dons to remain at home for about a year – greatly easing the burden of running the current ramshackle ‘apparatus’ of higher education.
