Ms. Aggarwal has worked in New York for a leading EdTech company and worked with publishers in the US, UK, and Asia Pacific. With over half a decade of experience in the EdTech space, Ms. Aggarwal decided to move back to India to set up instrucko. As passionate as she is for education, growing up Ms. Aggarwal realized how little importance is given to communication. In her words, “People always know what to communicate, but they don’t know how to communicate it. With instrucko, her objective is to emphasize on language learning and focus on Emotional Intelligence as it plays a key role in our daily lives.
We have all heard about the woes of conventional learning. A teacher steps into the classroom delivers a lecture, assigns homework, and at the end of the term, the students are assessed based on their performance in an exam that primarily tests out how much of their lesson they remembered. And for the most part, the conventional method of learning has its framework based on the age-old formula of learning: understand, practice, and test yourself. I have experienced this first-hand, and it wasn’t fun. But it isn’t the early 2000s, we’re living in 2021, and the education space is being disrupted by Ed-Tech companies that seek to revolutionize learning and the field of education as we know it.
The last decade has seen a tectonic shift to digital and more kids have access to their very own tablets. This has created a new era of learning called ‘edtech’. This new era has been ushered by instrucko offering personalized lessons, which are feedback-driven and focus on fast-tracking learning by incorporating games into lessons and vice-versa. Learning should be an experience and instrucko is based on the ethos of learning through storytelling.
Online learning has led to students getting access to courses of their choice and teachers from around the world. This has allowed more learners to upskill themselves and choose what they want to learn when they want to learn, and who they want to learn from. This has multiple advantages as one no longer needs to physically be present, which results in making learning accessible and easy. It allows students to consume better content, which is digitized and gamified. It also results in ensuring learning objectives are being made. Online classes have led to measurable progress. Another advantage of course is we can leverage technology to essentially bring the best teachers to your doorstep. Want to learn Spanish from a teacher in Spain? Done! You’re booked for 4 PM. Want to learn creative writing from a novelist? Done! Join the link to your meeting. Not only is it convenient, it has given global exposure to these children.
Advantages of gamified?
The average attention span of a school-going child is anywhere in the range of 10-30 minutes. Add to this, distractions such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, TV, etc. And you have a recipe for misfortune.
And that is we have disrupted the education space as we know it.
By incorporating games into lessons, they keep the students engaged all the while delivering knowledge through the superior mode of one-to-one coaching.
Clearly, the road to high calibre learning is in embracing technology and leveraging it to elevate the existing modes of education to the upper echelon of learning.
Advantages of online and personalized coaching
It has been plenty of decades since Bloom’s discovery and it has been well established that one-to-one coaching, and in general tutoring smaller groups of learners is more effective than conventional classrooms and lecture halls. But that’s only one part of the story. You see, the advantage of one-to-one coaching is that a teacher is dedicated to the cause of working on the learner’s shortcomings and key areas. With constant feedback and back-corrective measures, the efficacy of coaching and classes can be vastly improved. The advantages are innumerable:
- The more intimate nature of classes is conducive to more detailed learning.
- Quality interactions with the student where paint points and weaknesses of the students are heard and improved upon.
- Removal of peer-driven performance pressure and fear of failure.
- Allows room for the teacher to gauge the performance of the student.
- Classes go at the pace of the learner and not at the pace of the lecturer.