3 Modes of Education and How to Improve Them

THE THREE MODES OF EDUCATION

The National Education Policy has enabled three modes of education -- conventional on-campus education, distance education or correspondence, and online education.

The conventional mode is still the most popular one, in which the knowledge exchange takes place in an immersive campus learning environment through face-to-face classroom interactions.

Both students and teachers follow a structured schedule and curriculum that determines the learning pace. Students are also part of the larger campus community enabling peer learning and enhanced faculty/industry interactions.

Distance mode emerged in the last three decades and is popular among experienced professionals or individuals of the working age. Printed self-learning materials prepared by the enrolled universities are the primary source of learning.

Limited interactions with co-learners and instructors are available. Study centres play an intermediatory role among students and the institutions. For taking exams, learners need to go to the centres in the jurisdictions of the university.

Online education combines the best of both worlds -- providing the quality and credentials of a conventional campus programme while making it affordable and accessible through modern platforms and digital solutions.

1. Gamification: A learner can pursue a programme like she/he plays a game with points in completing each module and a leader board to showcase top performers etc.
2. 360-degree videos: These 360-degree videos give the essence of virtual reality for more immersive learning and imparting concepts comprehensively.
3. Micro-learning: Explains concepts in slices so learners can imbibe the knowledge seamlessly, as compared to reading long articles or books at one go.
4. Mobile-first approach: Smartphones are an integral part of human life, and the mobile-first approach is an effective strategy. Mobile learning applications help students learn anytime, track their learning progress, get notifications etc. Bite-sized content is the primary component of mobile-first approach.
5. Practical sessions: Online learning curriculum includes practical sessions to give students a deep understanding of each concept and hands-on experience in such subjects.
6. Adaptive learning: The systems are evolving at a rapid pace to ensure that individual learning paths are customized through different content formats, difficulty levels etc. to suit individual pace of learning. This ensures holistic development of the entire learning cohort.

These are some of the methods adopted to improve the effectiveness of online education to compete with conventional learning.

Students from remotest regions could enrol in online degree or certificate programmes offered by top universities, thus, improving the access and equity of education, especially in the higher education sector.