Is the Internet the new Messiah to save our Educational System?

Is the Internet the new Messiah to save our Educational System?

by our guest blogger Kritika Deval

kritika

About the author: Kelly Brooke is 26 years old and has a master’s degree in Mass Communication. She is currently employed by Univariety. She studied at St. Francis College for Women, Hyderabad, India. She enjoys writing about just about anything, and finds coming transformation of education and admissions process fascinating.  https://www.univariety.com

 

Today, like every day, more than 40,000 children were born in India. In a few years, these 40,000 babies will grow up into children and will be ready to enroll in schools. But how many of these kids actually get the chance to get educated? We all know well that India’s education system is fighting a losing battle. With no hopes of better infrastructure and trained teachers in stark contrast with the rising number of students, there can be no expectation of bringing about an improvement. The matter becomes further hopeless when we consider how under-funded the educational sector has become.

When all hope seemed lost, there came a revolution which literally shook our planet. The advent of the internet and its rapid rise effectively removed international boundaries across the globe, turning it into a single global village. The advent of internet brought new possibilities and opportunities which can help in solving the problems faced by the education sectors of all developing nations. Inadequate infrastructure, lack of trained teachers and the inability to spread education among all sections of the society: all these problems can be solved with the utilization of internet as a source of e-learning.

Although e-learning, as a concept, has been around for quite a while, it has seen strong surges recently, especially in India where the prices of devices like computers and mobiles have fallen considerably. This has increased the number of internet users across the country and also resulted in higher internet/digital literacy. According to a report (India E-Learning Market Outlook to FY2018), the Indian e-market is poised to grow at 17.4 CAGR (compound annual growth rate) between the financial years 2013 and 2018. The number of internet users in India is also on a rapid rise as they are already leaving US behind and are only second to China. It was also found that Indians are the most aggressive users of online courses. Among the 29 lakh registered users of Coursera (a leading e-learning portal), nearly 2.5 lakh users are Indian, which makes it a staggering 8 percent of the overall users.

Many institutes in India have already started to tap into the potential of e-learning. Professor S Sadagopan, director IIT Bangalore says, “Technology is transforming all 4 L”s of learning- lectures through LMS (Learning Management Sytems), MOOC (Massively Open Online Coursewares), libraries through e-books and e-journals, laboratories through MIT iLab like initiatives and life through social media blogs, tweets, Whatsapp and Facebook.”

E-learning can enable students to learn through live classes from expert instructors even if they are geographically apart. It also offers the opportunity to self-learn in an easy and less costly way as the only resource required is a device connected to the World Wide Web.

India has a population of 1.21 billion. Nearly half of the population consists of people who can be the potential target audience of e-learning. The conventional schooling methods are becoming more difficult and costly with every passing day as the population continues to rise. E-learning remains the best option that offers students with a customized and personalized opportunity to learn.

The World Wide Web is like an ocean filled with pearls. The deeper you dive, the more you get.

 

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