EdTech – Why MOOCs and ZOOMs won’t cut it anymore?

Let us talk about EdTech! The Technology enabled education aka EdTech has revolutionized the way we learn.  What started off as Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC) by popular portals like EdX , Khan Academy, Coursera have changed education upside down. Amazing quality content has been made  available for free, that too from top-notch universities like MIT, Stanford etc. This is a dream come true for many students worldwide, who can’t afford such quality education due to many reasons. Thanks to proliferation of mobile phones and high-speed internet, MOOCs over the years has played a significant role in reducing the digital divide. Followed by MOOCs came   course providers like Udemy who offered more specific courses at a price, as low as 10 USD.

Why MOOCs won’t cut it anymore? 

The user experience is seamless on these MOOC portals. Information is presented well. Lessons are engaging because they use a mixture of reading, listening, and writing. In addition, quizzes and networking through social media make learning on such portals effortless and enjoyable.Having said that, I can’t shy away from asking the following questions:

• How many enrolled students actually complete the course? A recent article cites in Udemy that the course completion is ~3%, numbers are not very impressive in MOOCs as well. 

• Assuming MOOCs and low-cost high-quality portals are helping highly self-driven and self-motivated learners (who, let us say 5% of overall learners) , how are we going to address the remaining 95% of the learners? 

• Among the folks who complete and showcase the completion in terms of certification, how much percentage of them will be able to apply the obtained skill in a workplace? 

• The remaining 95% are aspirational learners who are going to be the larger chunk of tomorrow’s workforce. They lose steam in the face of the uphill learning curve, and there is nobody to mentor them by hand on these platforms.

• How to tightly couple the outcome of the learning program, say for example achieving job placements, with an online learning program?

For me, being in Edtech field for a while, the message is coming out very clear — MOOCs or just buying a ZOOM license to teach / learn online is not going to cut it anymore. 

How to address 95% of learners?

Aspirational learners (95% of the crowd), find it difficult to consume content from learning portals. This limits how much a learner is able to understand and process. Learners often use their friend’s networks and social media platforms for doubt clearance. However, this may not always yield the correct results. Professional mentoring and guidance is of prime importance.

The lack of mentoring and support is the main cause of drop-off rates on the majority of the online learning programs. The learning experience then loses its charm and becomes uninteresting. Hence, learners are not upskilled and therefore, not able to implement knowledge.

What have we done about it, so far? 

We at Emertxe remained a physical class-room driven finishing school for a long time to make entry level engineers employable by imparting practical hands-on courses. The pandemic I would say has come as a blessing in disguise. Even though we had plans for going online, the pandemic has accelerated our transition. During March 2020, when our students were forced to get back to their home due to country wide lockdown, there was a huge pressure on us to take care of them as it was a question of their future. However, we were sure we didn’t want to compromise the high engagement driven, mentoring based approach which that do in our physical classroom. 

So we came up with a hybrid model of online training programs with excellent intervention and support mechanisms. Hence, balancing the larger reach with technology and personalized attention required by learners. Delivering content to the learner only consists of 20% of the job. The remaining 80% we divided into:

• Structured Interventions: The instructor would explain a sub-set of assignments or projects in sync with what is being covered in the online class. Learners are provided with a timeline to submit assignments.

• Doubt clearing: When learners go about doing those assignments, there is a high possibility that they would get stuck somewhere, say the code is not compiling or partial output is seen. Here seeking support becomes critical to unblock them. We came up with 12 hours a day asynchronous online support channel, which the student can reach out and take support.

• Assessment and Evaluation: Once they complete the subset of assignments, they need to submit to the mentor for evaluation. This is very important to assess the quality of their work and provide regular ongoing feedback. Added to regular submissions, a bunch of code based assessments were added to ensure they continue to build on their skills and subsequently increase their self-confidence.

• Recorded Sessions: There is a high chance that a student might not have grasped a particular section of a video or got into some network issue while listening to live class. So all classroom sessions were recorded and provided via our online learning platform so that they can access them whenever they want in a later period of time.

The overall approach is shown in the diagram below. 

Alright, What about results? 

When we transitioned to online during March 2020, we were fairly confident about our abilities to deliver the course online, as mentioned above. However, the next big question popped up — Can students get jobs with this approach?. Honestly, we didn’t have answers during March 2020 but started getting positive results from May 2020 when the country wide lockdown lifted. By then, our hiring partner companies were clear that the pandemic is going to  stay for long, but they can’t stop their work because of this. Steadily they got adapted to online mode of hiring. Our initial placements started coming in May 2020, and we started getting a view that it is working! 

It’s been more than a year since pandemic has altered our lives. We fine-tuned our mechanisms further and closely worked with our 500+ hiring partners. As of July 2021 I confidently say it works and our placement numbers are testimony to that. I don’t want to get into specific statistics here, but results are evident. Added to that, students in India found learning online may not be a boring activity, but results can be achieved in terms of placements. Staying from the comfort of their homes, they can also save a lot of money by avoiding traveling all the way to our Bangalore Center and paying a lot in terms of accommodation. 

Moving beyond content push

I would say the majority of first generation online learning portals like MOOCs has definitely helped a lot of students globally. However, for the average learner which consist of 95% of the segment see it as a content push where they felt overwhelmed with videos, tutorials, downloadable contents, quiz etc. Rather, this content need to be chunked and drip-fed to them with hand holding and care. While this approach takes comparatively more time to work at ground zero, we are certain and convinced to scale it up.

PS:  Good number of contents for this post  is leveraged from my company blog.Here is the reference URL about Emertxe online learning.