Go Digital – (ICT Literacy)

The Context:

ICT is pragmatic in education. It can bring a lot of benefits in the educational sector as well as to the community at large. ICT is inevitable and the COVID crisis has proved the same by showcasing accelerated usage of the technology in every field including the educational space.

Objectives of the practice:

• To enhance ICT literates among students for developing higher order thinking skills
• The objective is to make students use the ICT tools effectively in their learning process that would helps them to increase their understanding and thought processes in making independent decisions.
• To encourage the teaching and non-teaching faculty to extensively use ICT techniques
• The objective is to bridge the gap between the students, teaching and non-teaching faculty to enhance the E-learning and E-communication techniques for quick access to information and networking with all the stakeholders as this would provide excellent integration of ICT in every process.

The Practice:

ICT is mainly an aid coming in different forms to help higher education system and the students in-terms of getting the course content prepared, circulated to larger groups of students and ease of transmitting the course material across locations.

With the usage of ICT techniques, the conventional teaching techniques got transformed to digital teaching techniques offering varied advantages like location barriers, ease of transmitting the course contents, video sessions- Live/Recorded, Self-paced learning, Multimedia contents etc.

For an institution to adapt to this revolution in teaching mechanisms, there are some key factors of consideration like:

The institution equipping itself with latest technological gadgets and tools for video conferencing, making the campus a WI-FI zone for ease of access in teaching – learning processes.

The faculty re-skilling to accept and utilize these technology aspects in their day-to-day teaching methodology.

We, at AWDCKKD had accepted this paradigm shift in conventional teaching and making all possible logistic arrangements to fully utilize and take advantage of the techniques offered by ICT to deliver the best of teaching – learning experience to the students.

While the college is spread across an area of approx. 2 acres, the campus has been made a WI-FI zone enabling the students to access the material anywhere in the campus. While initially there were challenges and issues like WI-FI strength, data protection etc, the college took every step to leverage the best of equipment to overcome the challenges.

With college being an old establishment (established in 2000), there are many faculty who are senior and on the verge of retirement or in early 50’s. The institute took every endeavour in-terms of training the senior faculty from various departments with a focus on ease of using the technological facets in educating the student community.

Challenging issues:

The following challenges were faced in making ICT an integral part of every student, faculty and non-teaching faculty:

Internet Connectivity: Due to huge campus area with different buildings/blocks spread across, the WI-FI range of internet was very weak in few locations.

Teacher’s adaptability to technology and its associated aids: There were a few departments in the college with faculty facing difficulty in migrating their teaching methodology and assessment process from conventional to online techniques and blended learning especially during the period of pandemic.

Evidence of success:

The college has been on the fore-front of using ICT based techniques and also encouraged students to learn and make use of these techniques. The college conducted webinars, co-curricular activities using these ICT based techniques making student learn through real-time sessions. The students are frequently shared google forms to update their details or for any assessment, usage of google classrooms for circulation of important class material or announcements etc. has helped the students learn these ICT techniques practically. These students in-turn would spread their knowledge to large student groups making our college to achieve goal#1 easily. With this, students were able to register and take various MOOC courses from Swayam – NPTEL portal, courses from IIT – Bombay Tutorials etc. With this, the students higher order thinking skills have been enhanced phenomenally. While students have been learning through the practical way, college took enough care and steps for helping the teaching and non-teaching faculty also equip themselves with these ICT techniques by conducting trainings periodically. The faculty of Computer Science department also attends to the requests or doubts of the non-computer faculty and help by resolving them spontaneously making sure they are not disturbed or lose interest in learning these technological improvements.

Resources Required:

• The wi-fi signals were not strong enough for students to download the class material or to join online classes. The college had to install routers to strengthen the signal.
• The desktops with internet were provided to students, there was a threat of data being shared to wrong groups and about virus getting downloaded in the systems. There was a need to connect all computers in the college through WAN / LAN and have data security protocols in-place. Antivirus software was also required to protect systems from all virus attack.