Use of Technology for Human Development
Dr. Santosh Koti
Asst. Professor
Dept of English
Walchand College of Arts and
Science,
Seth Walchand Hirachand Marg,
Ashok Chowk,
olapur – 413006
[email protected]
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In many areas like healthcare, communication, domestic appliances, transportation
and food
– We have a lot of new understanding / development in the last few decades
– And what we did 20 yrs ago is no longer valid
Do you think human psychology and learning has remained static?
But when it comes to teaching we still do what our teachers did!
The old classroom model simply doesn’t fit the changing needs. It’s a fundamentally
passive way of learning, while the world requires more and more active processing of
information. The old model is based on pushing students together in age group batches with
one-pace-fits-all curricula and hoping they pick up something along the way. It isn’t clear that
this was the best model one hundred years ago; it certainly isn’t anymore. Meanwhile, new
technologies offer hope for more effective ways of teaching and learning, but also engender
confusion and even fear; too often the shiny new technology is used as little more than
window dressing. The govt. has passed the RTE. But the question is does the govt. capable
to accommodate all the children in the schools? Are there enough schools to accommodate
these many children? The answer is unfortunately negative. Unfortunately we have to say
that the RTE is a kind of failure system. At one side there is RTE and at other side
privatization of school education. Parents have to pay thousands of Rupees as fees and
donations for admissions in schools. Some of the schools, under the title “QUALITY
EDUACTION” charge maximum fees. That can’t be quoted here. The question comes ‘where
are we heading?’ Many children drop the education only because they don’t have enough
money to pay the fees. The time has come to bring the change in the educational system
itself. One method to do this is online learning.
Online learning is a global trend that uses the Internet to create learning communities
among students and instructors/tutors who may be very distant physically from each other.
Over the past few years, online learning has grown dramatically in the world. India being a
fast developing country is also using this means to train the available human resource. India
has world’s largest young population. Every third person in India is a youth. Despite having a
smaller population than China, India has the world's largest youth population with 356 million
10-24 year-olds. This is an advantage to use the technology. In order to maximize the
dividend, India must ensure its young working-age populations be equipped to seize
opportunities for jobs and other income-earning possibilities. To equip them with the modern
technology and use the ICT means to train them is one of the best ways to develop the
ingrained potential of the youth.
Now it has become easy to reach to those who are deprived of education. One of the best
means to reach is a cell phone. Yashwantrao Chavan Maharashtra Open University, Nashik
has decided to teach a programme entitled Preparatory Course through cell phones.
Students need not to contact or come to the study centres. The university itself will reach up
to them, besides no extra fees will be charged. This system will definitely bring them in to the
flow of education. Higher education institutions must bring a change in their policy of
discipline. Most of the institutes don’t allow the use of cell phones in the campus. Now it is a
time to consider the fact that almost all the students possess cell phone and this asset could
be utilized for developing their skills.
It is a time to reach to the students. In the age old Gurukul systems students used to go to
the Guru Ashrama and get education. Now the students don’t have this much time. The world
is changing fast. It is time when, we, the teachers need to reach to the students. Every
student from every corner of the world must be in contact with the teacher. And the method
to do this is use of cell phones.
Today out of 1,267,402,000 of the total population of India 970,955,980 people use
mobile phones, that is 77.58%. The cell phone is personal technology. Most students have
invested a great deal of time learning about the features of the cell phone, how to navigate
and the limitations of the phone. The other reason to really rethink the cell phone debate is
because learning on the cell phone can extend beyond the walls of the school or the confines
of a class period.
Table I: Cell Phone Use in Asia
South Asia
Percentage of
respondents who
have used a phone
in the past 3
months
Pakistan
India
98
94
Southeast Asia
Sri Lanka Philippines Thailand
92
93
95
Source: Ayesha Zainudeen, Nirmali Sivapragasam, Harsha de Silva, Tahani Iqbal, and
Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara, “Teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Findings from a FiveCountry Study” (Sri Lanka: LIRNEasia, November 2007).
As mobile phones, tablets, and other connected devices become more prevalent and
affordable, wireless technology can dramatically improve learning and bring digital content to
students. Students love mobile technology and use it regularly in their personal lives. It
therefore is no surprise that young people want to employ mobile devices to make education
more engaging and personalize it for their particular needs.
As a country, we need to educate the next generation of scientists, inventors,
engineers, and entrepreneurs. Educating a workforce that is effective in a global context and
adaptive as new jobs and roles evolve will help to support our economic growth. Mobile
learning makes it possible to extend education beyond the physical confines of the classroom
and beyond the fixed time periods of the school day. It allows students to access content
from home, communicate with teachers, and work with other people online. The value of
mobile devices is that they allow students to connect, communicate, collaborate and create
using rich digital resources.
Use of Cell phones for teaching: a defining feature of the youth culture. Educators
have labeled them a classroom disturbance and they have been banned in most schools
across the country. But, is it possible to think that there could be, in between the deafening
ring tones and the obsessive text messaging, some redeeming educational qualities to these
devices?
One teacher says yes.
Liz Kolb converted from being one of those teachers who “didn't see value of cell
phones on campus” to devising ways to use cell phones as learning tools. Kolb, a former
middle school and high social studies teacher and technology coordinator, said she was
doing a blogging activity with a group of teachers when a message popped up on her screen
telling her she could create an audio-blog with her cell phone. “It was the easiest podcast I
ever made. I said, 'Wouldn't this be a great way to do podcasts as homework!' It was a real
ah-ha moment,” she says.
But when she went out searching for resources on how to teach with cell phones, she
found none so, she says, “I just started playing around.”
What she came up with was a host of ways educators and parents could use cell
phones to enhance learning outside of the classroom, and perhaps just keep students
engaged. Kolb, who is now completing her doctorate in learning technologies at the
University of Michigan, says while she still thinks cell phones shouldn't be used inside the
classroom, she believes there are ways to use a cell phone as “an anytime, anywhere, datacollection tool.”
Take, for example, this science lesson: your eighth grader is learning about
ecosystems, and is tasked with taking photos of insects on his phone to be studied later in
class. “There is a genuine excitement about the lesson because they can use their own cell
phone,” she says. And, says Kolb, when student's can connect their own culture with what's
happening in school they're education becomes immediately more meaningful to them.
And, says Kolb, this type of technology integration will better prepare students for the
21st century workforce, where jobs are performed on mobile devices, such as cell phones.
“We see it in places where we compete, such as China,” she says. “The fact is that they
already value the cell phone as a professional tool. Now we need to teach kids how to use a
phone ethically in the work environment of the future.”
Kolb, who highlights her ideas in the new book, Toys to Tools: Connecting Student
Cell Phones to Education, says students don't need the latest high-tech phones to conduct
these mini lessons. In fact, she says she did all her research for the book with one of the
cheapest phones on the market. About 95 percent of phones today have cameras, albeit
poor ones. But, says Kolb, even a poor camera is a teaching moment waiting to happen.
How can you leverage these teaching moments at home? Here are some of the
suggestions for using the phone as a learning device.
Cell Phone Learning Strategies
Recording Lectures: The “Flipped" Classroom
Many teachers are structuring their lessons in what is being coined “Flipped
Classroom”. These teachers are recording their “lectures” using video or audio and students
are listening to that outside of class as the homework and in class they are completing the
practice and the teacher serves as a guide, re-teaching as needed. On most cell phones with
a data plan students can watch a video of a previous lesson of an appropriate clip on You
Tube.
Use Cell Phones as Your Student Response System
Using www.polleverywhere.com and your students’ cell phones, you can track instant
answers from all your students. It’s free for classrooms of 30 people or less.
Gina Hartman an eMINTS Instructional Specialist at Francis Howell School District in
Missouri shared a fantastic new Web 2.0 site named http://wiffiti.com. The teacher creates a
wiffiti screen and students can text in their opinions.
One teacher used this to summarize Act 1, Scene 1 from Romeo and Juliet. They
texted in the short summary and it showed up on the screen. In another classroom the
students had think about the time period that Andrew Johnson was in office and text
something into the wiffiti screen that would have been something he would have tweeted
back then. I love this example, talk about engaging students.
Delivering Materials
As more curriculum materials are delivered digitally creative teachers are delivering
materials directly to students on their personal cell phones. One such platform is School
Town. This learning platform makes it possible for teachers and students to collaborate in
discussion areas and chat with each other making blended learning a real possibility.
Awesome Teacher Apps
Dropbox: One of my most beloved apps is dropbox. Dropbox allows all my computers and
my phone to interact together. So the photo I take on my cell phone can be put in my
Dropbox app and now it is available on all my devices, love it!
Evernote: Next in line of cool apps for the classroom is Evernote. This handy app lets you
type a text note, or clip a web page. If your phone has a camera you can snap a photo, and
now you can also grab a screenshot. Like dropbox it doesn’t matter what device you are on,
they all sync together.
Solving Common Problems Using Cell Phones in Class
Students without Cell Phones / Smart Phones
Other issues arise because not every student has a cell phone. The easiest way to
work around this is to have students working in groups, collaborating and solving problems
together. Now we only need one cell phone to report out the group work. If we get creative,
any problem can be solved.
Wireless Access
Wireless access might be another problem. Smart phone users will usually try and find
a wireless network instead of going through the provider signal. With all these added devices
your network may be burdened. Also cell phone reception is an issue in many schools. If this
is the case, you may want to focus more of the group work or homework-related cell phone
strategies.
Keeping Cell Phone Use Appropriate
Thinking about using cell phone in the classroom we need to make sure we involve
our students in the conversation. Let them teach us about how to reduce the fear of theft or
inappropriate use. Every student should be reminded every day about appropriate
technology use, and what to do if the rules are broken. We need to help students understand
the ramifications of things like cyber bullying, sexting and posting things to social networking
sites.
OER
Another method to reach to the students is OER (Open Educational Resources). OER
are reusable; are adaptable to many learning should be interoperable in different formats
(including devices, operating systems and applications. OER are used in some sites, and can
be useful; they are usually in the form of star ratings or numbers. Instructors can also
conduct self-evaluations of resources to ensure that the quality meets their standards. Also,
the brand or reputation of the course developers or their institutions can be an important
indicator of quality.
Of course, the above quality indicators can and should also be used in evaluating
restrictively licensed content. The ability to update content in a timely fashion without
restriction gives OER a significant measurable quality advantage over closed content.
Commercial vendors do not allow users to modify their content and so it cannot be updated
by the users. Cost is another important variable in evaluating quality. If the content is too
costly and essentially unaffordable, it is not useful. OER are free of charge and the costs of
developing content as OER is shared among many institutions. An institution may develop
one OER and receive thousands in return.
Open Educational Resources
Name/Details of the Site
OER Commons
NPTEL
SAKSHAT
National Repository of Open Education
Resources
Teacher Portal ( Class room resources)
Open Resources for Schools ( Home
baba Centre for Science and Education)
National Institute of Open Learning
Lecture fox
MIT
Berkeley University
Yale University
Princeton University
John Hopkings University
Rice University
Carnegie Mellon University
Tufts Open Courseware
University of Notre Dame
Utah State University
Utah Open Courseware Alliance
Paris Tech Graduate School
Open University of Nederland
University of Southern Queensland
New Zealand OER Project
Web Link
www.oercommons.org
www.youtube.com/nptelhrd
http://nptel.iitk.ac.in/
www.sakshat.org
http://nroer.gov.in/home/
http://www.teachersofindia.org/en
http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in/researchdevelopment/projects/open-educationalresources-for-schools-oer4s
http://www.nios.ac.in/online-coursematerial.aspx
http://www.lecturefox.com
http://techtv.mit.edu
http://ocw.mit.edu
http://video.mit.edu/
http://ocw.uci.edu
http://oyc.yale.edu
www.princeton.edu/webmedia
http://ocw.jhsph.edu
http://cnx.org
http://www.cmu.edu/oli
http://ocw.tufts.edu
http://ocw.nd.edu
http://ocw.usw.edu
http://uocwa.org
http://graduateschool.paristech.org
http://ocw.tudelft.nl
http://ocw.usq.edu.au/
http://www.repository.ac.nz
United Nations University
Vietnam
Open Courseware Mexico
Open Courseware Consortium
Open learning object repository: (Merlot)
Open textbooks: (Connexions)
Aggregated video: Academic Earth
Mixed Media: Wikimedia
University of Minnesota:
(Open academics textbook catalog)
Open access research: (DOAJ)
Open textbooks for K12: (Siyavula)
Khan Academy
OER Africa
Carnegie Mellon University ( Open
Learning Initiative)
The Open Video Project
WiKiEducator Project
http://www.ocw.unu.edu
http://ocw.vn/index.ocw
http://ocw.fetp.edu.vn/home.cfm
http://ocw.itesm.mx
http://www.ocwconsortium.org/
http://www.merlot.org/merlot/materials.htm?mat
erialType=Learning%20Object%20Repository&
category=372822&sort.property=overallRating
http://cnx.org
http://www.academicearth.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_media
https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/
www.doaj.org
http://www.siyavula.com/
https://www.khanacademy.org/
http://www.oerafrica.org/
http://oli.cmu.edu/learn-with-oli/see-our-freeopen-courses/
http://www.open-video.org/
http://wikieducator.org/Main_Page
Moodle
If you were a computer programmer the term “Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic
Learning Environment” (Moodle) might make your heart skip a beat. If you were a teacher
you might recognize the word as a verb that describes the process of lazily meandering
through something, doing things as it occurs to you to do them, an enjoyable tinkering that
often leads to insight and creativity. As such it applies both to the way Moodle was
developed, and to the way a student or teacher might approach studying or teaching an
online course. Anyone who uses Moodle is a Moodler.
The Australian developer of Moodle (Martin Dougiamas), is both an educator and
computer scientist. This combination brings unique qualifications to the art and science of
using technology to reach learners in the 21st century.
The main goal of moodle is to give teachers, students and the tools used to teach and
learn. The functionality is different from pre-existing software systems like Student
Information Systems and perfectly possible to use moodle as a Standalone system in which
no need of integration with anything else.
Open Source e-Learning Software
Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a software package designed to
help educators create quality online courses and manage learner outcomes. Such e-learning
systems are sometimes also called Learning Management Systems (LMS), Virtual Learning
Environments (VLE) and Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS). Students need
only a browser (e.g., IE, Firefox, Safari) to participate in a Moodle course.
Moodle is Open Source software, which means you are free to download it, use it,
modify it and even distribute it (under the terms of the GNU General Public License). Moodle
runs without modification on Unix, Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Netware and any other
system that supports PHP, including most web host providers. Data is stored in a single
database: MySQL and PostgreSQL are best supported, but it can also be used with Oracle,
Access, Interbase, ODBC and others.
Moodle that is the acronym for Modular Object- Oriented Dynamic Learning
Environment it's an online Learning Management System (LMS).
Moodle contains the following features
1. Upload existing content, other web resources can be linked to, or create and edit new
content in moodle.
2. Stimulate, extend and record discussions outside the classroom.
3. Test and report on students learning, encourage students to learn and self-test, deliver
exams.
4. Quickly gather feedback from students.
5. Facilitate the sharing, storing and dissemination of knowledge.
Other than the above features also some more features we have those are shown below
1. Assignment submission
2. Discussion forum
3. Files download
4. Grading
5. Moodle instant messages
6. Online calendar
7. Online news and announcement (College and course level)
8. Online quiz
edX-MooC
MOOC stands for massive open online course (MOOC) which is an online education
system providing various courses, which aims at large-scale interactive participation and
open access via web. MOOC aims to provide real time education online with the help of
various features like videos, study materials, quizzes and online exams and also tries to
make it more efficient than the real time education in class rooms by removing time
constraints and location constraints. MOOCs also provide interactive discussion sessions for
the user through interactive discussion forums that help to build a community for the students
and professors.
edX-MooC contains the following features
1. Interactive video lectures with subtitles and indexing on subtitle(Downloadable).
2. Study materials like books, notes, cheat sheets, etc (Downloadable).
3. Online test of different types like video embedded quiz, practice sessions, midterm exam,
final exam, etc.
4. Virtual Laboratory with interactive interface for user to view the expected simulation.
5. Calendar based schedule.
6. Multi lingual support.
7. Discussion forums.
8. Wiki edits for implementing collaborative learning.
9. Progress reports and other kinds of embedded analytics.
10. Different kinds of assessment systems for submitted assignments (open response
problems). It includes:
_ Peer Grading
_ Self Grading
_ Staff Grading
_ Machine Grading
11. Emails and Notification facilities for registered student
12. Provision of certification
13. Registering and deregistering from a course
14. edX meetups
15. Contacting authors through mailing
16. Support for a large traffic (Users at particular time)
LIST OF MOOC COURSES OFFERED BY UNIVERSITIES AND ENTITIES
Sl. No Mooc Name
1.
Edx
2.
Coursera
3.
Canvas
4.
Iversity Open Courses
5.
Novoed
6
Stanford Online Courses
7.
Future Learn Online Courses
8.
Open hpi Online Courses
9.
Carnegie Mellon University
10.
Open 2 Study Online Courses
URL
https://www.edx.org/
https://www.coursera.org
https://www.canvas.net/
https://ivrsity.org
https://novoed.com
http://online.stanford.edu/courses
https://www.futurelearn.com/
https://openhpi.de/
http://oli.cmu.edu/
https://www.open2study.com/
The interesting fact is that these courses are free of cost. Students need not pay any charges
to complete a course. The certificate is issued on demand by paying minimum fees. Majority
of the students and teaching community also is unaware of this. We should make them
aware of this and equip them with the modern technology.
Using this modern technology for education and training the available human resource will
definitely boost the economic growth of our nation. Besides, the human skills will be
developed at anytime and anywhere regardless of the stakeholders.
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