Blended teaching and learning will become commonplace with online teaching, says Founder of IFIM Institute

In a conversation with Shiksha.com, Founder of IFIM Business School, Bangalore Sanjay Padode talk in detail about their Keep Learning system. This platform is helping the institute to provide online classes and exams during the complete lockdown situation in the country due to the outbreak COVID-19. The institute is also taking various to help the society fight against the pandemic.

Here is the edited excerpt of the conversation:

Q: How has today’s scenario of lockdown and global pandemic impacted your education system

A: No one can claim that they had predicted such a lockdown and that they are an exception to the COVID-19 impact. However, some institutions can claim that they were prepared to handle such an exigency due to the investment in technology that such institutions had made in the past and also the training that was imparted to their faculty and staff. IFIM Institutions was one of the beneficiaries of such a decision. IFIM Institution campus was already wired by a comprehensive integrated system called Keep Learning to manage student information system, learning, faculty portfolios, live-lecture capturing, live virtual-lecture delivery and internal messaging. This system was developed by integrating various off the shelf products over the last five years. As soon as we realised that the COVID-19 scare was becoming real, we started to make some contingency plans to enable our Keep Learning system to allow all the faculty and staff to work from home without distorting the academic calendar. We got about five days to get our act together before the lockdown was announced. Fortunately, the Keep Learning system was versatile and flexible enough to accommodate the requirements for teaching and working from home. We ensured that all faculty and staff were equipped with computers at their home and also ensured that they had good broadband connections. We also did a crash course on online teaching for all our faculty during the first four days of the lockdown. This was done through the online teaching-learning infrastructure of the Keep Learning system. Faculty, who were equipped with sophisticated laptops, were trained to use the stylus so that they continue using the chalk and talk method on the online platform. We adjusted the academic calendar to factor the loss of these four days and scheduled classes to go on normally. We were extremely fortunate that our faculty and students adapted well to this change. We not only transitioned smoothly but we learned that online teaching can be effectively used in many use cases and this could substantially improve and change the way we will teach in the future.

Q: What are some of the interesting initiatives your institute has taken to make it easy for your students and also contribute to the eradication of this pandemic?

A: We have already talked about the initiatives we have taken for students development but what we think is also important to take care of society. We have taken a few initiatives such as:

• We have donated Rs 2, 000 each to 200 daily wage women earners who work as a security guard or housekeeping staff and ar associated with Electronic City Township Industrial Authority (ELCITA)
• IFIM has adopted five villages in the Kolar district under the government’s Unnat Bharat Abhiyan scheme that aims to link higher education institutions with Rural India so that they can contribute to their economic and social betterment. We distribute daily essential products to each household in that village
• Our students, faculty, staff and management are deeply invested in impacting society, right from raising funds for the under privileged and the needy through Kanyathon, to deploying and ensuring the funds reach the needy like in COVID-19 lockdown to working with the under privileged community during Our Social Immersion Program (SIP) in order to work out solutions to social problems.  

Q: How is the institute planning to conduct exams, evaluate and declare results online?

A: Just like most of the colleges and universities around the country have taken this bold initiative of conducting the exams online, we also decided to do the same. We used our Keep Learning system as a platform to allow machine and online proctoring and also addressed all the concerns of the controller of examinations. The end term exams were conducted smoothly, followed by the registration of students for the fourth term and carrying out with the online classes as usual. This successful experiment encouraged our law school to conduct its mid-semester exam and our IFIM college to conduct their mid-semester exams online. All in all IFIM Institutions have conducted more than 700 online classes in the last 30 days and will be conducting about 4,000 written exams before the end of the pandemic on May 3.

Q: What impact will it have on students’ interpersonal, team management skills?

A: The fact is IFIM Institutions were able to take the lockdown in its stride will surely help our students in managing such lockdowns when they step into the real world. The students have experienced Business Continuity Plan (BCP) in action. It is only a few times in one’s life that BCP event occurs and those who experience it become fearless as they experience how such situations can be overcome. This will surely benefit our students if they come across such a situation again, it will help them to advise and prepare for such situations which will be a great asset for the entities that work for in the future. Attitudinally they will become fearless and confident. They would surely learn how work can be done from home and how teams can function remotely.

Q: What are the best practices that the college is adopting to ensure seamless online learning?

A: We have learned a lot during these days. The learning came through many small hurdles that we had to deal with during these times. Such hurdles have opened the holes in our system and we have already started to plug them. This experience of conducting classes, mentoring sessions, exams, viva voce, guest lectures and webinar events online has boosted our confidence immensely and we are not contemplating leveraging this experience to develop and launch many online learning initiatives, including a full-degree programme.

Q: How will today’s situation revolutionize online learning in India and abroad?

A: I am presuming like us many other institutes would have learned their own lessons while deploying online learning. In this process, the myth that online learning is not effective has been shattered. The fear of teaching into a camera and listening to questions on chats has been overcome. The fear of the mouse is gone and the use of the stylus is now a habit. These changes should transform education and the benefits of online learning should be leveraged to better outcomes. Blended teaching and learning will become commonplace in the near future and this will benefit the students immensely. Access to faculty from all over the world will seem easy and thus students will benefit from the same. The ability to teach beyond the boundaries of our country has been unleashed with this experience and I am sure that this will change the face of education in the future.