The traditional education system in schools, colleges and universities is basically centered on physical classroom teaching. In traditional education system a teacher plans or prepares for a particular topic and presents it with the help of chalk or marker pen, dusters and blackboard or whiteboard inside the classroom. Specific classrooms and timetables are used for traditional class. On the contrary, online education is growing rapidly over past few years. With technological advancement, availability of smart devices, readily available software and easy access of internet across the globe, a great transformation on day to day life of people has taken place. Today’s learnings are also often called digital-age learning. Easy availability of smart devices such as Smartphones, laptops, tablets, desktops etc. which are capable enough to be connected over internet therefore create a complete digital platform for education.
Digital education is a big revolution in educational domain which eliminates the challenges such as teacher-student ratio, student capacity of institution, hostel capacity of institute, seating capacity of classroom, transportation facility, availability of infrastructure and utilities etc. existing in traditional physical classroom teaching.
Digital educational environment is also a big step towards reduction of different fees such as transportation fees, living cost and health insurance cost etc. which are paid by the parents on traditional educational systems. Although before Covid-19 pandemic some of the organisations were offering online courses but it was limited. Online education was the only option during pandemic; therefore a large variety of softwares and applications came into existence for enhancing the digital education.
Digital educational environment is a platform which can be also termed as virtual learning, online education, web based education, e-learning, internet based education and smart learning.
Power point presentation, text files, audio, video files, images, and pdf files are some of the common methods which are generally used to present and share the educational content over a web-based network on digital learning platform.
Students those are having digital devices like smartphones, laptops, desktops, etc. can be easily connected to learning platforms through internet connectivity, access the course materials, communicate with their trainers, submit their assignments and also be able to attend their examinations. Digital educational environments are mostly suitable for distance learning.
Now a day’s different digital platforms such as TV channels, you tube cannels, zoom, Google meet, MS team, Cisco WebEx, Skype and different video-conferencing apps are widely accepted for lunching online education.
Anytime and anywhere learning and browsing of course materials are only possible due to the introduction of digital educational environment.
During Covid-19 pandemic different online educational platforms are adopted by universities, colleges and schools to conduct their classes regardless of number of students present which is a big challenge in traditional educational system. Besides, digital formats help conduct examinations in a transparent way, allot and collect assignments, monitoring daily attendance of students and sharing the course materials. Although online education has numerous benefits over traditional educational system and is widely accepted by different organizations but still it is not satisfactory and having some major challenges. Completely avoiding traditional or classroom teaching and adopting digital learning means sacrificing one way.
Implementing online platform for education is quite challenging. Till date some of the geographical areas across the globe are either not having internet connectivity or having poor connectivity of internet and frequent outages and voltage fluctuations which are a major challenge to lunch digital educational environment.
Lack of skills required to operate smart devices and poor financial conditions of people to purchase smart device at rural areas are another big challenges to establish digital learning environment. Taking face-to-face feedback, track students whether attentive or not during the class, cheat checking during examination, internet or electric power outage during ongoing class and development of communication skills among the students are some of the common listed challenges arise on digital education.
As human beings are social beings by nature therefore most of the times face-to-face interaction is required. Lack of teacher student interaction is also noticed in online mode of teaching learning process. Implementing online learning means socially isolating the students from others which sometimes lead to mental stress, depression, anxiety etc. like diseases.
In traditional educational system students are more concentrated on their study inside the classroom. But it is a major issue in digital learning as no one is there to monitor and watch the students whether they are attentive to the class or not. On digital education, course duration and class timings are scheduled on or before it starts; therefore it improves the organizing skills and punctuality of students.
It provides the opportunity to the class organizer to upload the course materials, videos, images and presentation slides on online platform which are really beneficial for the students to access the material and learn later on. There might be an opportunity for the students to get access to the recorded and uploaded course materials who have missed their regular classes due to any reason.
(Dr Senapati is Professor of Chemistry, Trident Academy of Technology, Bhubaneswar; and Mallick is Assistant Professor, Department of CSE and Dean, Computer Application and Science, Trident Academy of Technology, Bhubaneswar)