This year the C.B.S.E (Central Board of Secondary Education) witnessed yet another controversy in the form of the Mathematics paper. Angry parents from around the country protested against the extremely difficult and twisted pattern of questions that left most students confused and demoralized.
In a formal statement, the C.B.S.E admitted that the paper was not set as per the general guidelines and contained questions which were challenging even for bright students to attempt. Although human examining brings about a certain personalization to the scoring system, it loses the ability to provide fair examining opportunities to the disciple.
So how can this situation be salvaged?
Equality. Freedom. Fair practices. Uniform teaching. These terms are the key to answering this question. If a system is devised to keep a track of the student’s progress throughout the year using various testing techniques as well as providing access to knowledge in seamless fashion, a brighter and stronger generation of students can appear from the cluster. This is something the teachers cannot actively manage on their own or create uniformly due to the limitations of the workforce. A teacher can only do as much as their capacity allows. What can surpass the limitations of time and energy is technology.
A digital platform for students to manage, interact, learn, play and discuss the year’s program can facilitate a very healthy learning environment. The current government is hugely stressing on the ‘Digital India’ initiative, a major aspect of which is introducing digital media in to studies. The results of which could be limitless.
Imagine a world where every student gets to study irrespective of caste, color, creed, religion, financial ability or even physical ability to study. The internet has redefined the way to connect people over the ages. If our entire education system can be made available on network servers and is endorsed to every student from even the most remote parts of the country, no one will ever miss school.
Let’s get to the facts and see how effective can digitization be against the current education system. Below is a table which charts the differences between digitization and the manual techniques of teaching.
Digitization
| Current Education System
|
Cost effective and easy reach for students. Since 3G, internet is available in parts of the country where even phone lines have not yet reached. For less than a thousand bucks a month, the world is your oyster.
| Not too expensive but available only to the privileged. Despite multiple government and social initiatives, educating students across the country and utilizing that education is a major challenge.
|
Self-assessment by students to evaluate their own performances.
| The students never get to know the reasoning behind their scores and keep wondering well over their 40s as to what went wrong.
|
Get to know the core strengths and weaknesses of students. The digital factor brings with it the comfort of statistics. Every single test score can be tracked and statistically presented, easily accessible at all times.
| Impossible to understand the true value of a student as all tests are in the same format and held only twice a year.
|
Flexibility in preparing curriculum. Most teachers agree that if they had the opportunity to design the curriculum, no single student would fail.
| Rigid, repetitive and mostly unexciting, the standard material feels formulaic.
|
Fast. Results are calculated by an automated, fair online system like OMR (Optical Mark Reader) which provide results instantly. The time saved can help students prepare their career accordingly.
| Students waiting for results have been known to commit suicide on the day of results or a day before, as the month long anticipation and fear of poor results drove them to near insanity
|
Scope of Multimedia. Multimedia allows all senses to participate in learning and what is seen, heard, and loved is retained the best.
| Books are engaging for sure, however a more comprehensive approach is needed to impart knowledge among students. There are students who are naturally intelligent but books might not be enough for them.
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There is a downside to the story though. The benefits of digitization, though many, is also privy to a fault. Majorly, the issue which comes to the forefront is access. According to a recent survey, McKinsey discovered that India is 20th on a list of countries facing issues in accessing the net. Read more about it here.
Other factors include poor infrastructure, computer code tampering for illegal benefits, cheat codes for papers, leakage and even power loss has a major implication on digitization and can spell disaster for students. Also, one point that escapes the mind when thinking of digitization is the problem of equipment. Over 40% of people in the country don’t have access to 3 square meals a day, let alone a computer/ tablet, yet these people dream of a better future for their kids and they deserve it. The government initiatives to satiate this situation is something all of us can hope for.
Digitization or not, one needs to understand a student first to impart education. A student can retain knowledge in many ways. Some students are formulaic who try to memorize the entire curriculum and get through the important papers by giving the required answers. These students might not be able to retain all the information in the long run and face issues in competing in the real world. And then there are students who ‘know’ the subject well. They use their imagination and sheer intelligence to understand the subject and formulate answers based on their collective knowledge. These students might not be able to answer the questions in expected formats, however, if given the opportunity; can retain the statistics to perform better in tangible situations. This divide creates a major rift in the understanding of a student’s psyche, because of which the intelligent students appear as dull and unintelligent in the exams whereas the rote masters get through with flying colors.