It is usual for most children to show promise while growing up. Most parents love to display their child’s talent of memorizing poetry and songs to relatives and friends. However, the same parents lament the loss of interest in studies as the children grow up. “He can do it,” says the parent. “If only he would take interest.” It is not rare to find a teacher scolding her student by recounting the songs her student can remember, but when it comes to studies, the teacher is disappointed at the student’s ability to remember simple theorems. Sometimes, it even happens that certain students show promise in class, but the next day they are struggling with the same lessons.
Why do some students fall behind in studies?
There are many answers to question why. Most of them are related to the interest levels of students, and that the lectures are boring. However, is there a solution to this? What if lectures were made interesting? They could include animation and presentations! It has long been accepted that children retain most information when it is presented to them in a pleasing manner.
What about the problem of students forgetting lessons once they reach home?
How about teaching the students at home, rather than in class? What? Why not? Instead of watching television, they could watch interestingly presented lectures in video format. These pre-recorded video lectures can be viewed and reviewed as many times as needed for understanding of the student.
Then what use would the class be?
The classes could be used for solving queries and questions that some students would still have after watching the videos. The class time can be better used for assessment of the student and the teacher can keep an eye on the progress of the student to see if they are ready for the exam. The time lost by teachers and students writing important notes on the board can be saved and when the teacher is explaining a concept in class she would be actually explaining a finer point rather than explaining something new.
Welcome to the flipped class room. This is the place where students and teachers interact freely while trying to assess the weaknesses of students and remedy those shortcomings. This is where technology helps students learn better because, they can now plan their studies and assess themselves through questions built into the software.
These kinds of class rooms have already been experimented upon in some countries and have shown promising results. India, a giant in the software sector can easily take the lead using this approach to take advantage of its young and growing population. This approach although not new is still in its development stage and the field is open to design new pathways and perspectives. With the help of new and improved technology the question of learning new concepts maybe easily answered.
MT Educare has taken the lead in this field and launched the Robomate+app. The app is free to download and has video lectures by expert tutors along with presentations and animation. The software has tests at the end of each lecture to assess the progress of the student. The student can plan his studies and make notes with the help of the software.
This is a good start and MT Educare’s Robomate+ is the world’s largest curriculum based study app. It can be hoped that in the coming years the situation can only improve and students can study smarter.
