Taking their infrastructure to a whole new level, the School of Open learning (SOl) along with the Department of Geology is making major reforms in teaching techniques. While classrooms are getting equipped with interactive whiteboards, every lecture is being recorded and put online to enhance retention levels in students. Moreover, even study material for all courses is being uploaded online so that students don’t have to invest in textbooks.
Director, Campus of Open learning Prof CS Dubey said that their plans were to eventually turn the institution into a technology dependent one. “We have already shifted all study material to the digital format by giving students notes on pen drives. The study text has even been uploaded on the SOl website. However, earlier that material was only available to the students of SOl, but now it is open to all to increase accessibility. We want to make teaching audio-visual as it will help students study more,” he added.
The college has already taken their first step in ensuring this by introducing interactive whiteboards. According to Dubey, six such boards have been installed in the Department of Geology and 10 in the SOl campus. However, he added that no extra expenditure has been incurred by them in the process. “All the interactive boards were bought from the money that SOl was given after winning the Antardham Award for good practices. We have won the award twice. The first time we were given `5 lakh and the second time `10 lakh. We put together the entire money and invested it in enhancing the technology on campus. All the 16 interactive boards have come out of that,” said Dubey.
Even teachers can benefit from the online content improvement by SOl. The SOl website now hosts tutorials for teachers so that they can learn how to use software and then use them to teach. Apart from that, students can also find it easier to study now as all the study material online has a text-to-speech option which can read out the entire text to the student.
Though these plans have already become functional in SOl, Dubey said that it is likely that several more changes come in. “We are collaborating with a lot of other colleges as well and opening centres to increase interactivity. However, we also have plans to introduce Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) in the college. This will make the course completely high-tech and will set it apart from the others,” informed Dubey.