For the millions of us who have been brought up within the traditional ‘classroom system’ of learning, education has been a highly-structured affair. We followed an established syllabus, which was taught at a set pace and in the typical style of a teacher at the blackboard explaining concepts. College was more of the same – the environment became less restrictive, but the teaching style remained the same.
In the past decade, huge technological changes – rise in internet usage, increasing adoption of mobile phones, improved data analytics, and exploding social media popularity – has opened up the entire education system. Students are no longer dependent on their teachers to learn – every question, every doubt, every concept can be taken care of, online!
While education in schools is firmly entrenched in the physical setup of a classroom, higher education has shifted online in a big way. For the Indian student faced with limited choices and increasing competition in accessing higher education, online learning has opened new doors. The system has several advantages – the most important is the removal of geographical constraints. With ed-tech companies like Talentedge providing high-quality courses, taught and certified by reputed institutes, students and professionals are now flocking to e-learning portals.
While some of the first online courses saw a huge percentage of drop outs (80-90%), organisations like Talentedge have moved away from the unstructured and unregulated form of e-learning. They are using cutting-edge technology to replicate a classroom environment to ensure unfettered student-teacher interaction and attentiveness to the course material.
Tapping Technology To Enhance Learning
How do you create a classroom like an environment in the virtual world? Well, Talentedge is already doing it with its pioneering technology platform called SLIQ. The platform combines artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning – with two-way communication channels between the instructor and the learner to deliver a near-perfect classroom atmosphere.
The way the SLIQ platform uses an AI engine to keep students on their toes is a marvel in innovative technology integration. Ajay Kumar, the Chief Technology Officer at Talentedge, describes how the platform works: “The AI engine keeps tracking an individual student’s performance, queries and other activities on the SLIQ and identifies problem areas which the learner needs to work upon. The system then suggests the right study material and objective remedial measures to the students. When done repeatedly, this has shown considerable improvement in the learner’s performance. What machine learning does is that it makes the AI engine evolve and show better results in terms of suggesting the most effective remedial measures to students. The engine also extracts user expressions from images of students clicked multiple times in between milestones within the session. It then aligns the extracted expressions with the ‘attention scores’ and presents an overall engagement score to the faculty.”
Enhanced Learning Experience – For Students And Educators
Last year, Sindhu Nair was considering adding a professional qualification to match her current job profile in Marketing and Branding. For a working professional, online education seemed most feasible and after some research, she opted for one of the courses offered by Talentedge -PGCP Marketing and Brand Management, MICA.
While the reputation of the institute along with the flexibility of the online methodology informed her choice, she was floored by the responsive technology that formed the backbone of the entire course. This is what she had to say about the platform,” The technology platform was very impressive and resourceful during the entire course. The interface is very easy to use and distinct options were available to us during the live class. Even though it’s a virtual learning experience, the classes were live where you get to interact with the faculty real-time. The interactions were very classroom-like. Live quizzes, relevant assignments and interacting with different industry experts ensured that we understood the concepts well.”
These sentiments are echoed across the aisle by educators as well. Ms. Falguni Vasavada-Oza, who teaches the strategic marketing course at MICA has found the Talentedge platform useful as well,” The platform presents real – time class attention score to us, the teachers. It lets us know if the lecture delivered is engaging the students well enough. The AI (ML) driven real time ‘class attention meter’ lets us take necessary steps during the lecture delivery itself to make the session more engaging. The platform connects us, the faculty with the students through chat during an on-going session. This facilitates near real time query resolution thus keeping the students engaged. Every session is clubbed with objective type assessments, really deep performance analysis, both collated for the class and for individual students, provides us with fairly objective cues on how to plan our future class better.”
There is a lot of buzz around whether digital learning is the future of education. The trend seems to indicate so – the Indian eLearning market is expected to touch $1.29 billion by 2018. While AI and ML led innovations for performance tracking is outstanding, what the Ed-tech companies have cracked is beyond just replicating classroom environment – they provide a 360-degree learning environment that supports both the teachers and the students. From practical solutions such as tech support and access to recorded sessions to personalized attention with predictive learning, chat bots and social media integration – online learning systems are smartly leveraging technology to enhance the overall learning experience.