Towards Student Centric Learning

 

Abstract

In this post, I have attempted to summarize the knowledge I gained from Faculty Orientation Programme at Nirma University during December 2015, current practices which I have been following and new innovative ideas which I came to know during this workshop.

Preamble

“Education is the process of transforming human being into being human [13]”. During my journey as a teacher, I have carried out various experiments in my classroom sessions. The outcome of attending various Faculty Development Programmes over the years has improved my pedagogical skills to a great extent. Each such programme transforms me into a better teacher as well as learner, and I always become eager to incorporate the methodologies in my lectures. Not all the experiments get clicked at the very first time, but that is how Learning and Innovation progress in my opinion.

Characteristics and Responsibilities of a Teacher

A teacher should lead by example by motivating his students. Fig 1 depicts typical levels of teachers.

Fig 1. Levels of Teachers (adapted from [6])

A Level 0 teacher is like a professional, whose task is just to deliver lectures in time, mainly using Passive (traditional) learning approach and focus on syllabus completion. Gradually moving up in the concept hierarchy, the approach of teachers towards inculcating Learning and Research aptitude into students become prominent. An effective teacher is the one who makes the classroom environment interesting with the help of ICT tools. Level 2 teacher always relates the theoretical aspects with real applications and tries to motivate students to think in that direction.

Scholarly teachers are those who focus on contributing their knowledge in Research community and share it with the world. Finally, top level teachers are those who not only technically, but also pedagogically seek to bring innovations and changes into Higher Education.

A teacher should not merely be an instructor, but he has to possess an all-rounder ability. Nowadays, teachers need to transform themselves from conventional classroom settings to open and participatory, active learning scenario. Moreover, they are also expected to work not only as guide, but also as facilitator, mentor, helper, leader, inspiration and role model for students. A teacher should be ideal for his students and he must lead to them towards honesty, ethics and values. Following are some of the typical characteristics of a good teacher.

• able to pass the missing teacher’s litmus test[1]
• able to guide students : “where to look, not what to see!”[1]
• dedicated, not yet another professional[2]
• able to motivate students to step out of their comfort zone [3,14]
• able to transform information into knowledge[4]
• able to act as a leader[5,14] and role model[6] for students
• able to inculcate ethics and values into students[6]
• not there just to teach students, but also to see if they really learn[11]

 

Fig 2. Responsibilities of a teacher

            A good teacher is expected to be rich in terms of values and should not post any negative effect on the students. His objective should be to perform thorough literature review and identify the best material, simplify it as per the type of students, see to it that the quality of the material is utmost, and then deliver or distribute it among students. Fig 2 describes the responsibilities of a good teacher.

How to sustain interest of students during the entire session?

According to Dr S Garimella (Director-IMNU), the students’ attentions span in current generation is merely 7 minutes. Hence it is extremely difficult to sustain students’ interest during a one hour session. This is hardly possible unless we use some techniques to engage students such as role plays, games and other warm up exercises. This has to be done by connecting students at the beginning of the presentation [7, 14]. Further, we can also ignite curiosity into students’ mind by presenting a central theme of the topic (often referred to as thesis) which will initiate thought process into brains of the students. I often conduct a Quiz in the initial few minutes of the session by dividing the class into two or three teams and let them respond to small questions and recall the concepts of past sessions.

Another common methodologies practised by teachers are mentioned below.

• Play games
• Give a pause during the session
• Take a Bio break[7] and/or Think break[9]
• Use story-telling approach[7]
• Use of humours [7,8,14] and cartoons

Innovation in Education can be brought through three different types of approaches.

1. Course centric: MOOCs nowadays have drawn attention of the entire world where one can avail the facility of obtaining education from reputed international institutes and universities. They are also a means for remote, distant education as well as online learning.
2. Teacher centric : The most important stake holder of Teaching Learning process, the teachers, should be up-to-date in their field of expertise, and have to continuously keep participating in well recognized training programmes, workshops etc. to meet the requirements of the day.
3. Learner centric : The classroom learning can be made interesting by introducing a plenty of games, ICT tools and other innovative practices which may help students interact with the teacher as well as their peers also.

Neither a subject is boring, nor a student is dumb; it is the ability of a teacher to transform the subject into interesting one!

Current Practices through the use of ICT tools

Following are some of the innovations which I have attempted in my career, and I have obtained reasonable success in these experiments.

1.Conducting regular surveys using SurveyMonkey

1. Pre-course Survey is used to test whether the students possess the sufficient background and prerequisite knowledge for the particular course, or no. For example, in BTech Computer Engineering, higher semesters courses such as Data Warehousing & Mining, and Simulation & Modeling need the concepts of Probability and Statistics, which is already covered in one or two courses during their earlier semester.

The results of this survey enable the teacher to analyse the technical level of     students, and decide the flow of lectures accordingly for subsequent sessions.

2.     Mid-course Survey is often missing in traditional scenario. The biggest advantage is     to detect the students’ response and expectations well in time (usually after 2-3 weeks of the semester commencement), meet those expectations and serve them better so that learning does not suffer. A sample form with 20 questions is attached as Appendix I.

3. Post-course Survey helps to improve the process in the upcoming versions of the course (in the next semester) since it is collected from students at the end of the semester. It serves as a Course Satisfaction Index. Appendix II describes a survey form with 7 such questions.

2. Engaging students through online discussion forum Piazza

Piazza is a wonderful tool which supports teachers mainly by providing the facility of online discussion forums. An instructor can configure a Piazza class with some settings, and enrol students and/or other instructors or TAs to the class. Students and instructor can then write posts based on categories, assignments or homework can be shared with students, announcements can be made, course information can be provided etc. using Piazza. There are many ways which one can use to exploit this tool, and encourage students to participate in classroom discussion via online mode. Even if some students who are shy, can also post their doubts anonymously, which may be their main reason behind not participating in the classroom discussion.

Fig 3. Piazza Usage statistics report

             Fig 3 is a snapshot of automatically generated usage statistics report of Piazza for my class 2IT422 Data Engineering during 2013. Some of the responses from students on the Sessional exam question paper for another course are visible in Fig 4. 

Fig 4. Comments of students on a specific post

 

Til date I haven’t found a single tool which can offer all the features as listed in Table 1. However, tools are there which have one salient feature.

Table 1. ICT Tools for Education with their salient feature

Some other good tools can be found at this link.

Future Practices

I have gained a plenty of new thoughts, ideas and innovations which I will surely use in my future classes to improve performance. Some of them are mentioned below.

• Introduce games of Self Realization to polish creativity and imagination of students [10]
• Find expertize of each student, and mould it to utilize for the course
• News Paper article discussion [12]. One of the students can be appointed as a reporter of the class, and he may weekly provide latest news in the recent trends in the course
• Use Google Classroom [15]
• Demonstration and simplification through animated videos[15]
• Ask students to design business cards and crossword puzzles for a new concept or renowned people in specific field[16]

Conclusion

Learning can be student centric only if the teacher can transform the traditional learning into active learning through unconventional approaches by making it interactive using some tool. If the teacher is passionate and innovative about whatever he is doing, he will definitely contribute to the development of Teaching Learning.

References

1. Changing the Mindset, Shri K Thyagrajan
2. How to be a good teacher? Dr Sudarshan Iyenger
3. Effective Mentoring, Dr N P Gajjar
4. Pyramid of Learning, Dr S C Vora
5. Organizational Leadership, Shri Devang Joshi
6. ICT Tools in Teaching Learning, Prof Sanjay Chaudhary
7. Presentation Skills, Prof Asha Kaul
8. Effective Communication Skills including Public Speaking, Dr Suresh Mashruwala
9. Active Teaching for Active Learning, Dr Dhaval Pujara
10. Self-Talk, Prof Vinay Pandya
11. Ethics, Values and Character Building of a teacher, Prof T J Purani
12. Innovative Pedagogy tools for Economics & Statistics, Prof Dhiren Jotwani & Prof Mahesh K C
13. Plagiarism, Dr Purvi Pokhariyal, Research Orientation 2014
14. Developing Winning Personality, Mr Vivek Randeria
15. Use of ICT Tools for Education, Dr Priyanka Sharma
16. Seminar Presentation, Prof Dipal Gandhi