Learning needs to go mobile

World is mobile. Everything is constantly on the move. People are on the move, work is completed on the move, music is heard on the move, shopping is done on the move and we are entertained too, on the move. The roughly 17 billion devices that are connected to the internet have rapidly changed the way mankind does business on a daily basis.

Yet, there is a serious disconnect the moment a student enters a learning campus. He is disconnected from the online world. The pace slows down and suddenly, everything is static.

According to a Cisco Virtual Networking Mobile Traffic forecast, mobile video traffic has increased by 50% in past few years. The number of tablets has trebled to 34 million, and there are 175 million laptops connected over the World Wide Web.

Things are moving quickly towards cyberspace. Earlier, students went to a library in search of knowledge, thronged bookstores to buy books, and met friends at somebody’s place. If they wanted to go shopping, departmental stores or supermarkets were the resort. Today, all of these needs are sufficed by an Amazon, Facebook or a Flipkart.

Learning, however, does not match up to the current ways in which students interact. Though we acknowledge and encourage diverse styles of learning, we are unable to cope up with the fact that every year students are arriving at our campuses with higher degree of digital skills. Their style of learning are not fixed in time, pace and history.

If education is a result of how we culturally react to people and places, and a product of our culture, its history and geography, then we must accept that everything is changing. Internet will ensure that the change is continuous. The learning environment must ramp up to this culture to stay contemporary, and meet needs of this digital generation of students.

As flexible, creative and adaptive educators, there is a need to make ourselves capable of harnessing potential that digital learning has in classrooms. Instead of waiting for school administrations to impose this environment, we must include digital experience so that schools do not feel disconnected. Digital technologies are transforming teaching methods with boundary between our daily existence and internet becoming more porous to almost diminished.

For students, there is hardly any boundary between internet and their lives. When we ask students to draw graphs for 30-40 minutes which can be done at a click of a button or when we ask them to learn topics that can be Googled in a jiffy, we cause them to wonder if this education is meaningful.

Our lives and our learning is no longer standalone. It is connected, shared and accessed by millions across countries, generations and demography. In fact, we longer go to the internet anymore. The internet is upon us, it is an integral and imposing part of our lives.

The writer is an entrepreneur and educationist
shroffmp@gmail.com