The pandemic and lockdown have introduced many terms in the education industry .
Schools and students, when infrastructure, network and home connectivity allowed, switched to online learning.
What did online mean for teachers?
Teachers had to adapt their lesson plans, deliver over video conferencing to remote students in their own homes.
It also meant that the assessments were online – some in creative ways. In rural areas, teachers sent homework assignments and received submissions to students using platforms like WhatsApp, while in the metros some schools used more sophisticated timed assessment systems and with students on video – and in some cases with a mirror and tripod with a camera besides their own laptop camera to ensure that there was no cheating or help during examination or that tools like Google/the net were not used to find answers during the exam.
In traditional offline settings, teachers taught and students learned and then answered.
Most schools started adopting a flipped classroom style of instruction, where the teachers gave reading material first. A live class was then conducted which was interactive and based on the reading material given.
This transformed into a student-driven session rather than a teacher-driven one.
The advantage of flipped classrooms is that they are much more interactive due to the discussions based on doubts.
Hybrid classrooms are a combination of sometimes when students are in school and sometimes at home and also at times when students are doing live classes with a teacher as per a schedule. On other occasions the sessions are recorded and listened to by students at any time asynchronously within a time period, but not the exact time.
Omnichannel teaching is used as a term to refer to when different channels of communication are used.
Multimodal, multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary learning happens when you’re using different methods of learning, for example active learning, that is not theoretical and an activity is carried out by doing it.
In enquiry based learning, the teacher’s role moves from a provider of knowledge to being a moderator of discussions – as a guide or mentor to students.
When students work on projects and are challenged with problem solving , rather than providing a step-by-step instruction, the teacher guides not by providing solutions but by steering them in a direction that could help them in the process of learning. This helps students to think for themselves. Rather than providing them with ready made answers as solutions to their problems, independent thinking and curiosity is encouraged.
STEM stands for Science Technology Engineering Art and Math
Multimodal learning is a combination of all the different methods of our learning which have been described above.