Custom-designed education will be a trend, say experts at ITM Business School

In times when, industries and sectors are finding ways to restart the economy again, the Education sector has found a way to stay afloat with new initiatives that ensure learning continues. Apart from just learning, institutes have an equal focus on the development of the interpersonal skills of students. In a conversation with Shiksha.com, Director of ITM Business School Dr Lakshmi Mohan talk in detail about the challenges they faced and how they managed to overcome all challenges.

Here is the edited excerpt of the conversation:

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

A: The lockdown and the unfortunate global pandemic have affected the world and undoubtedly the education system too is facing challenges. The hustle and bustle at the campus and hostel, the energy of the intelligentsia, face to face classroom learning, canteen buzz, all of it have come to a sudden halt. The adaptation to the current scenario for us at ITM, has been at a quick pace so that our students do not get impacted by the lockdown. We already had online backup systems. All we had to do was to bring them to the forefront during the lockdown.

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

A: Courses are taught through Zoom or Google Classrooms as alternate to physical classroom teaching. Under every specialisation, we have identified certifications that the students need to acquire, through various platforms such as Ed-ex, Udemy, AICTE’s Swayam and Coursera. Every faculty is assigned a few numbers of students for mentoring and the faculty connects with them on a weekly basis to chart their progress in their studies and capstone projects. The semester exams had to be suspended as Covid-19 struck at the same time, so we have moved to online examination mode. Students were geared up to join their internship companies by April 1, but we had to push it after lockdown. But we, fortunately, had companies that were fine with providing work-from-home opportunities to our students. So there have been multiple steps that we had to take to combat the present crisis.

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

A: We have a robust Learning Management Systems (LMS) that makes it convenient for us to hold online examinations. Our system also enables each student to log into the student portal and view his progress.

Q: How are students responding to new initiatives?

A: Students are smart with technology and are adapting to the new initiatives that have been reasonably good. Moreover, our students are with a learning mindset that enables them to adjust to the new systems.

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

A: The joy of meeting and learning together would surely be the best scenario. But understanding the criticality of the current situation, students and faculty have compromised by maintaining social distancing. Live projects, role plays and various extra-curricular activities are important for interpersonal and team skills but we make the best of virtual mode too to instil theses qualities, though it is a challenge for all of us.

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

A: We are making the utmost use of our LMS. Students are doing online certifications.

Instructional videos and relevant articles are shared with students. We use Google Meet and Zoom for online classrooms. We create synchronous interactive sessions online thus making real-time conversations possible. Our online libraries are put to use for reading assignments. We create discussion boards to encourage critical thinking.

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

A: Crisis is the mother of innovation and creativity. For many faculties across institutions, online mode of teaching would have been a new experience but believe me by now each of them is familiar and exploring further to make teaching-learning interesting and fun. Custom designed education will be a trend that will be adopted by Faculty and students. Today’s crisis is setting online revolution of – 'education for all’ and ‘education has no boundaries’. Online learning is a great boost to ‘continuous learning’ or improvement of ones’ skills. Best of teachers and best of universities that offer various courses online have added to revolutionising learning in today’s time.