ROLE OF DIGITAL WORLD IN THE FIELD OF EDUCATION: NEED OF THE HOUR

SAGAR SEHGAL

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

KCMT, BAREILLY

INTRODUCTION

There is a growing trend in education across all sectors to move from a focus on teaching to
that of learning. Evidence of this trend is reflected in many aspects of emerging educational reforms
including:

Move in many countries to outcomes-based curricula;

Emerging use of information and communication technology as an instructional aid; and the
development and increased use of student centered learning environment. Teacher education sector
has not been spared from these trends and strategic plans and policies have been developed or are
being developed to ensure that teacher education curricula, especially for the university level, reflect
the mainstream. Various factors that are currently shaping and forming the nature and style of teaching
at higher education level include public sector reforms, globalization of the economy, privatization and
liberalization.

Many institute of higher education such as universities or colleges of education that have been
predominantly funded by operating grants from government, are now seeing increasing moves by
government to remove much of the cost of higher education from public. Increasingly a significant
component of university/college budgets is now being derived from other sources such as student fees,
commercial courses and external consultancies. The of the day is to create partnership in the learning
process itself, that is between teachers and learners. Teachers’ education is criticized often as too
content oriented, providing knowledge which is narrow and limited. There has been no shortage of
advices and guidance on what effective teaching entails. Some critical features of effective teaching and
learning suggested by Ramsden (1992) are:

Clear learning goals:

Appropriate assessment tasks and strategies:

Appropriate workloads:

Emphasis on learner’s independence.

Digital education has great potential for creating effective teaching-learning partnership.

OBJECTIVES

To orient management personnel and principals on impact of digital education in teacher education.

To show the success story of implementation by teacher educator and student teacher.

To recognize colleges of education as leaders in use of digital education with active support of
management and principal.

FRAMEWORK

From many research studies and from experiences world over, two important aspects are
coming to fore with regard to digital education integration with teacher education:

1.tecahers should be reflective in what they do in the form of teaching and facilitating student learning.

2.the offline community of practice and the networked community of professional community need to
be integrated into a comprehensive framework of continuing professional development. Some of the
important skills associated with reflection included:

Self awareness: ability to analyze feelings, especially examining how a situation has affected the
individual and how a individual has affected the situation.

Description: ability to recognize and recollect accurately the key features of an experience or situation.

Critical analyses: ability to examine the knowledge components of a situation, identifying existing
knowledge, challenging assumption and imagining and exploring alternatives.

Synthesis : ability to integrate new knowledge with pervious knowledge.

Evaluation: ability to make judgment about the value of something.

 It must be underlined that in any sort of digital education intervention in teacher education or
any digital integrated teacher education, reflection needs to play a critical role in contextualizing teacher
education practices as also to critically reflect on teacher education as professional discipline and
professional practice. The framework given depicts an integrated and comprehensive online teacher
professional development in which culture, professional community, curriculum design, online presence
and individual, collaborative reflection contribute to transform in professional identity and professional
practice.

The context in the framework for the professional development of the teachers involves: the
online learning community, the community of practice. Therefore all aspects need to be taken into
consideration while designing for online professionals development of teachers. Thus development for
online facilitators needs to be embedded in the social and physical contexts, there might be virtual
surrogates of online and offline work environments.

In this framework of online constructivist continuing professional development ,reflection is

assumed to play the major role in underpinning the change in cognitive structure through independent
study, online collaboration and negotiation, collaborative project work, knowledge construction and
negotiation in the community of practice.

Change of professional identity is visualized as the goal of professional development for

teachers. professional development involves participation, transformation of knowledge in form of
experiencing identity and change in both individual and community identities. So there must be a
context being the transformative practice of the professional community.

Also culture is an important component of context. Culture is intimately related to both online
and offline communication and therefore various cultural aspects need to be taken into account while
designing and administering programmes for development of teachers.

Collaboration requires an environment of shared goal, peer learning, use of personal

experience and problems, dialogue in web-based professional development of teachers. Online
environment also promotes and facilitates dialogue and discourse among participants, in which they
openly contribute to the meaning created by each other, and in the process reconstruct their mental
models or frames of reference. Mentor observers can facilitate this by encouraging diversity of views
and advocacy, expansive questioning, making provisions for constructive feedback on each other’s views
and performance as well as engendering reflection.

Teachers as professional developers must be helped to transform their frames of reference so

that they can best appreciate and understand their own experience. To do this both observer-mentors
and facilitators need to be more critical reflection themselves. Transformation of online facilitators is
the goal visualized in the framework discussed. To affect this we definitely need to design and develop
online resources of various kinds. The online resources can be categorized into five types:

Orientation and organization tools, learning activity tools, interaction and collaboration tools,
support tools and Analytic tools.These components need to be designed such that reflection can be built
into various activities that the use of resources can promote reflection and that transformative learning
and transformation in professional practice can take place. Any digital intervention in teacher education
must take this aspect into consideration as today’s professional development needs considerable
transformation.

Digital education could be a powerful tool in providing learning environment where teachers
and learners are partners and where learners have scope and prospect for choice in the nature and form
of their learning. Digital education learning environment offer many opportunities both for teachers and
learners including. Provision of improvement to education, flexible modes of content and presentation
and delivery, presentation of content and information in authentic contexts, interactive and engaging
learning settings, communicative elements to support the independent learner, support for customizes
educational programmes to meet the needs of individual learners.

The value of digital education in forming and sustaining learning partnership is based on its
capability in providing for many different types of learning activity and its capacity to sustain the forms
of communication needed to maintain the partnership. There is an emerging pattern in higher education
for new technologies to be used in the delivery of student centered courses and programmes. These
moves must include active support for learning partnership. Already the use of communicative
capabilities of technology both in synchronous and asynchronous modes provides means for
communication.

BARRIERS

Some barriers need to be dealt with while implementing teaching learning partnership through
digital education. Difficulty in accessing services that appear to be down or overloading, problems with
pages requiring unexpected plugs-in and helpers, long download times caused by bottleneck in external
systems, lack of familiarities and experience with the appropriate search engine not only part of learners
but also the teachers.

More burdens and responsibilities are placed on the learner as the learning activities require
higher levels of cognitive engagement and processing than others. Not all learners are willing
participants in changed learning environment so some time lot of convincing is required by the teacher.
Some learners hold that the best teaching takes place in a face to face mode through direct instructions.
Student-centered learning can be uncomfortable for these students because they feel that it generates
distance between themselves and the teacher.

Many teachers are reluctant to take up the challenge to use the new online media. Some have
deep rooted concerns about changes in work practices and other see a huge gap between the rhetoric
surrounding technology and the reality of educational setting while others boldly embrace new media
with seemingly little pedagogical concern.
CONCLUSION

The use of digital education in teaching learning can enhance the quality of learning, make
learners more independent and capable of sustaining their own lifelong learning. But student centered
learning can be a difficult process for some learners. It aims at promoting understanding and deep
learning as against shallow or surface learning that usually occurs in the conventional mode. The onus is
placed on the student to explore and inquire to reflect and articulate, to collaborate, co-operate in
active tasks requiring enhanced degree of initiative, interest, motivation and cognitive, physical efforts.
Teaching learning prospects for ensuring that the needs and interests both of students and teachers are
met.So educators need to take lead in the design, development and effective use of digital education to
convey specific content to any learner, no matter the location or goal of study.

REFERENCES

Candy,P.(1991) on the attainment of subject-matter Autonomy. Developing student Autonomy in

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Freeman,M.(1997) Flexibility in access, Interaction and Assessment: The case for web based Teaching
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Oliver,R.(2000) Using new Technologies to create Learning Partnership. In:Evans,T. and

Nation,D.(eds),Changing University Teaching. Kogan Page,London.

Raidal,R.(1997) Problem based Learning for Veterinary Student Using simple Interactive www pages. In
What Works and Why: Proceeding of the 14th Annual Conference of the Australian Society for
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Ramsden,P.(1992) Learning to Teach in Higher Education. Roultedge, London.