Online Learning@IITGN: Tête-à-Tête with Prof Udit Bhatia
“Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids to work together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.” — Bill Gates, renowned business magnate, software developer, investor, and philanthropist
In continuation of my mini-series featuring the virtual mode of learning at IIT Gandhinagar, I, recently, had a conversation with Udit Bhatia, faculty in the discipline of Civil Engineering at the Institute, about some aspects of this way of imparting education. He also shared his experiences on the courses that he is currently teaching.
Prof Bhatia teaches the lab component of the Sustainability and Environment course to the 2nd year B.Tech Civil Engineering students. It focuses on informing them what sustainable engineering typically means — its underlying principles and approaches. It serves as an eyeopener for the students in the sense that they begin to understand the difference between sustainable and non-sustainable engineering practices after attending this course — how to make decisions under complex setups, where the trade-off is that one path can lead to faster developments and the other gives you a bit slower yet sustainable development. Furthermore, he is also the instructor of Data-sciences for Earth Systems, a new course started to engage undergrad and grad students from diverse disciplines so that they can learn various aspects of how machine learning data-sciences can be utilized to solve the problems related to earth and atmospheric science. A part of this course is taught by Prof Sanjay Singh Bora (Earth Sciences), who actively works on the seismic (earthquake) data and Prof Bhatia is involved in teaching the climatic and atmospheric aspects of this subject.
The Changed Face Of Education
The novel coronavirus pandemic has not only impacted our health but other aspects of our lives and lifestyles as well. Prof Bhatia expressed, “The education sector has not been untouched. We have seen drastic changes in the modes of teaching and learning within a very short time span. The ways in which students and teachers exchanged ideas in the pre-COVID-19 world, those entire interaction patterns have been disrupted suddenly. However, one thing that I would like to highlight is that academicians across the globe are trying their best to come up with solutions in real-time about how education can be delivered to students as effectively as possible in these times. I am sure that we will come out stronger once this crisis is over, but right now it is about immediate management.”
The objective is to try to make learning accessible to all as well as ensure that everyone is protected from the SARS-CoV-2 infection. In our quest to achieve this dual goal, technologies that were earlier existing at the periphery have penetrated in a much deeper manner. For example, nowadays we see more and more teachers becoming tech-savvy so that they can deliver their lectures efficiently to students from the comfort of their homes. “We should always look for the silver lining among dark clouds and in the current scenario, this silver lining is the extent to which technology is being positively adapted — it is in a much stronger way,” he continued further.
The Right Combination Is Essential
Our discussion progressed towards the courses that Prof Bhatia is teaching and some changes that he has come across because of the COVID-19 situation. He stated that the Sustainability and Environment course used to have a significant amount of field visits, where students studied certain operations such as the wastewater facilities and so on. These are some of the things that they would now not be able to do with the online mode of education. “This is one of the serious impacts — earlier we taught the students by taking them to sites, which was sort-of more interactive and engaging, but now we are teaching them by showing the images and videos. This can be said to be one of the limitations of online learning as compared to offline learning,” he said.
On the other hand, Prof Bhatia spends a lot of time on one-on-one sessions with his students for his Data-sciences for Earth Systems course. He explained “There are many students who are new to coding and also want to learn programming languages. These concepts are important to solve some real-world problems. At present, they totally rely on the online sources that I share with them, and they sometimes face problems (screen sharing, internet issues, etc.) as none of us have gotten fully used to this new normal in education that has arisen because of this viral illness. To overcome these hurdles, we need the right combination of online and offline education with time — hybrid learning.”
The Flipped Classroom Model
The flipped classroom pedagogical approach focuses on learner-centered instructions, exploring topics in greater depth, and creating meaningful learning opportunities for students in the process. Redefining classroom activities, it uses video lessons, online collaborative discussions, digital research, and text readings to educate students.
Elaborating further, Prof Bhatia described that he has primarily moved to this model for all the courses that he is presently teaching. He puts up some lectures and related study materials online. These sessions are pre-uploaded on YouTube and the students can watch them as per their convenience. There are one-hour interactions every week, where he goes over the problems that his students encountered while learning a certain topic.
According to him, “I use Google Meet. I have also learned to use some video editing software during the lockdown period since currently, I am doing a lot of lecture recordings. I carry out the screen recording as I am writing the class notes to simulate a real classroom experience for my students. I also try to clarify the applications of various principles by telling some anecdotes to them. All this makes these sessions more interesting and also gives them the required motivation.”
The Creativity Factor
One of the biggest differences in online vs. offline education is that the instructors are able to monitor better the facial expressions and body language of students in physical classrooms. This helps them in analyzing the extent to which the students are understanding the lectures. Prof Bhatia remarked, “From the creativity point of view, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of students and think about how we would have liked a particular concept to be taught in a captivating and thought-provoking manner. When we are teaching them remotely using technology, we have to make sure that the kind of animation, images, and demonstrations that we are using appeals to them. These should aid them to get proper visualizations of how real-world settings would look like.”
Technology makes life much easier. Imagine a situation six to seven years ago, where we had to go completely online suddenly. We would, probably, have to set up a camera in front of our blackboards and write the content. But in the present times, we have access to a lot of apps and platforms (used by developers like Coursera) that are much more efficient as well as effective to deliver online lectures. There is a need for the teachers to be creative enough so that students are successfully able to make the most out of their lectures, bearing in mind that the two modes of education require different types of creative capabilities.
Some Pros And Cons
Talking about some positives and negatives of online technologies, Prof Bhatia said that one of the obvious cons is the absence of the joy of writing on blackboards. Demonstrating everything from scratch in front of students and seeing their excited expressions — it has completely vanished!
On the other hand, one of the pros of this technology-enabled virtual classroom setup is that our efficiency has increased — once the study material is recorded and uploaded on the platforms, students can watch it as many times as they want to get comfortable with the concepts. This is typically not possible in a physical classroom setting.
The Network Science Course
This was the first course that Prof Bhatia offered to students immediately after the beginning of the nationwide lockdown (imposed by the Government of India). It ran for one and a half months and was his first experience to design as well as teach a new course from scratch on the online platforms, implementing a completely flipped classroom model.
In his words, “I wanted students to enjoy this course. I wanted them to define their own projects that are targeted towards addressing some burning issues of society today, in some way or another. To my surprise, even though this mode of teaching and learning was new to all of us, the students did a fantastic job with their class projects and poster presentations.”
One of the students was looking into the networking of student bodies with each other outside their disciplines. They found that while the 1st and 2nd years try to interact with students from other disciplines, this clustering becomes more prominent and specific as they climb higher up the academic ladder. “Basically, sitting at home and working on these things online with the real-world datasets was the real charm. The experiences of my students gave me good insights and prepared me better to run online courses with ease,” he added.
Students — Questions And Evaluations
Prof Bhatia mentioned that he motivates his students to write their queries in the comments section of YouTube, which he answers immediately. He has also created a Google Classroom Space where questions can be posted. The students are free to contact him via email and can also clarify their doubts through discussions with him on WhatsApp. Sometimes, they wish to discuss certain topics face-to-face. For this purpose, Prof Bhatia conducts weekly live sessions over Google Meet.
Since before the onset of this pandemic, Prof Bhatia always encouraged the open-book examination system. This is the reason why his assignments and quizzes have not been impacted significantly during this crisis. This type of exam approach involves designing questions in a unique way so as to test and analyze the critical thinking and problem-solving skills of students regarding different courses of study — basically, one would not find a direct answer anywhere! He is a promoter of collaborative work where his students are free to have discussions and brainstorming sessions with their classmates, but they should properly acknowledge the help that they had while submitting their final reports. “The micromanagement of individual students is not as effective in the case of online mode of education as compared to the offline means. In such a scenario, I am finding that my strategies have been working quite well so far,” he discussed.
In terms of the project component, he has made some pragmatic changes. Earlier, his students were supposed to work on big data while on campus, and such data files are very large, ranging from 10 to 100 gigabytes. Now, keeping in mind the irregularity of internet services that his students might face, given their geographical locations (and other such factors), he has advised them to develop some conceptual models (rather than solving the entire picture) that could produce some relatable outputs so that they can understand the underlying principles with ease. Moreover, there are some assignments that students solve on pen and paper, scan those, and submit them online.
Dealing Positively
In the end, Prof Bhatia feels that the longer we remain frustrated about these changes the worse all this will turn out to be for us. The present pandemic was a big shocker for the world and abruptly gave rise to many new normals in pretty much everything that we need in our lives. Rather than feeling dejected or disheartened, it would be much easier and better for everyone to understand the situation. The faculty and students should be empathetic towards each other because everyone is going through tough times, some way or another.
There is a need for us to grasp the genuine concerns and be equally respectful towards others in terms of adapting to these new changes. Now is a good time for us, not only as teachers and pupils but as human beings, to be more considerate and compassionate, tackle this situation in an optimistic way and emerge out stronger!
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- The first installment of this series can be found here. The third one is available here.
- Prof Bhatia recently headed a team of researchers to develop the interactive COVID-19 dashboard. The aim of this platform is to help hospitals, administrators, and the public, in the efficient planning of containment of community spread under different post-lockdown conditions. The article on the same can be accessed here.
