Education, as we know, is evolving from being confined to just classrooms and books to online lectures and e-libraries. We are used to the traditional ways of education which required an infrastructure comprising of buildings, classrooms, and students to acquire education from teachers present in the classroom and get direct assistance from them in the time of inconvenience or doubts regarding the subject. The teachers and institutions around the globe are gradually shifting to online learning. This shift from traditional teaching has opened multiple doors for the teachers to now teach students at a global scale. The ability to reach students around the globe has encouraged teachers to teach online.
Online classes are where teachers and students communicate through video conferencing. Online classes facilitate the students to rewind and replay the pre-recorded lectures multiple times, let alone live chat with the teacher. Students can learn at their own pace as the recording of the lecture is provided to them. This helps them in revising the topics whenever and wherever necessary. The online classes platform makes it easier for the school and teachers to maintain a digital repository of the class recordings, student assignments, their attendance, and performance. It helps better analyze the ability of students, their understanding of subjects and further make plans on how to improve their results.
One of the advantages a teacher gets from online teaching is that they can be anywhere at any time, yet they’ll be able to record the lectures and upload them for the students. This comes with individual comfort as well for both the teachers and the students. Teachers can have a quiet space for recording and the traditional class nuisance can be avoided, which provides them with more concentration followed by better teaching skills. This also helps with the mental health of the teacher as they wouldn’t have to worry about reaching the schools or colleges in time or struggling with every student to clear the concepts.
With quality education being just fingertips away, students are also inclining towards online learning. The students now are always eager to learn and develop new skills online learning provides them a great platform to do so. Various trainers are seeing this as an opportunity to educate such students and are searching for platforms that will help enable them to teach online. Students can now enroll themselves into multiple courses irrespective of their field helping them develop diverse skills.
As the concept of online teaching is maturing we see various teachers using green screens and after-effects to make learning more interesting. Visual aids are known to increase learning speeds and students are able to understand and recall the concepts easily. 3D figures and graphs help students better grab the concept taught during the lectures.
India is one of the largest and most diverse education systems. To address concerns like the quality and relevance of higher education, the establishment of an independent National accreditation agency was advocated. In 1994, an autonomous body NAAC was established by UGC in Bangalore that evaluates and accredits Higher Education in India. The full form of NAAC is the National Assessment and Accreditation Council. NAAC proposes that every institute should have an Internal Quality Assurance Cell (IQAC). This cell would help in monitoring the quality of academics and administration of the institution.
Functions of IQAC:-
- Develop and apply quality benchmarks and parameters for the administrative and academic activities of the institution.
- Develop a quality center in the institution.
- Organize inter and intra institutional workshops and seminars leading to diversity in ideas.
- Integration of management information systems that would help easily manage the database of the institution.
- Documentation of activities performed by the institution.
- Enable feedback module for the students for checking/improving the quality of education being provided.
- Prepare an annual quality assurance report.
As more and more institutions are moving towards online education they need some rating to prove that they are providing quality education. With the accreditation of NAAC, it makes them easy to show that their education quality is up to par with the best out there. Online classes are the future of education as it is able to appeal to a major part of the population whilst being cheap and more efficient.
