Skip to main content

Of zombies and physics - online education 1

A few years ago, maybe 5-6 years ago, I was approached by an upcoming ed-tech start up. The salesperson was aggressively trying to sell us a bundled course of 3 odd years complete with a free tab thrown in. 

As someone in L&D (and this was pre covid), I was not a great believer in online learning when depth and understanding is required. So, I asked, "What is so special about this" and the answer "We teach physics using zombies (as an example)". That statement completely put me off. 

This is a decoration versus construction fallacy. Zombies on physics are a decoration at best. There are many other, better, intuitive ways to learn physics. And there are many videos of professors teaching physics using various concepts, contraptions, demonstrations and stories. 

So, we said no, we are keen on a more classroom model for learning. And went ahead with it. For the most part, it worked for us. 

Then covid happened. I learnt the skills of virtual facilitation - delivered many hours of virtual training - I still hate it. The EO did have an online component of learning through Covid - he struggled and managed. 

Somewhere along the way, this upcoming edtech company had become a unicorn or some exotic animal and gobbled up, an offline classes center. That was some climb down for an ostensibly online platform - plus they also opened up tuition centres. 

All this is not to diss the edtech firm and many others in this space. This is to share my observation on online learnings and their possible constructs. 

Simply put, it is practically impossible to create a perfect online self learning experience that does not have human interaction.  Atleast so far - will an AI powered bot enable to make the transition - perhaps. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Be Civil. Make nice!

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...
Post a Comment
Read more

Waigaya and Sangen Shugi - Honda

Two big takeaways from Driving Honda were Waigaya and Sangen Shugi. A few days ago, we were working on a strategy module for a company. As we leafed through old and new theories and books around the same - one comment which caught my eye was Henry Mintzbergs comment where he says "Strategy is like weeds, it has to grow all around your company" A lot of times organisations dip into their pool of employees (and sometimes customers) and solicit ideas from them. This happens either at an offsite or a meeting or some quarterly review and the ideas pile up. Most companies today have an innovation program that encourages bottom up ideation. Many of these ideas are future strategy - provided someone is listening. Sometimes these ideas are not immediately implementable - but if one keeps looking, there might be valuable stuff in there. And if (post such programs) ideas die very often, the motivation of someone to keep doing it will also diminish. Waigaya is what Honda call
Post a Comment
Read more