How Videos Can Be Game-changers In Education?

If we observe the new breed of schools in India within our surroundings, one thing we will notice is how most, if not all of them, are trying adopt technology. We would seldom find any pre-school today sans an interactive-white-board (IWB as the toddlers fondly call them) or any well equipped high-school without any smart-boards. Educators are agreeing to the fact that including interactive modes of learning while teaching in classrooms is enhancing student learning across levels. Of all the interactive learning methods, videos are gaining faster popularity both among learners and educators as videos create a platform for contextual learning. Wikipedia defines contextual learning as the process, which involves the presentation of information in a way that allows students to construct meaning, based on their own experiences. This automatically translates to better understanding of contents and concepts.

How blended learning is enhancing student experience?
Many recent scientific researches have indicated that using video in classrooms improves learning. A UCLA research states that people generally remember 10 per cent of what they read, 20 per cent of what they hear, 30 per cent of what they see, and 50 per cent of what they see and hear. This concludes to the fact that audio-visual teaching techniques are the most powerful. It is also the reason why most Montessori schools use a mixture of visual, auditory, demonstrative approaches to teach various subjects.

Progressive educators are starting to utilize multi-sensory teaching methodologies, including video to facilitate offline or classroom learning, as videos have been shown to drive greater knowledge retention. As an audio-visual medium, video finds multiple pathways of seeding information in brain. Students readily embrace new technologies like video and are also able to retain information gathered in classes better and longer.

Videos are becoming a favourite among learners because it enhances self-paced and anytime anywhere learning. Because video is a blend of many kinds of data (images, motion, sounds, text) packaged to arouse a student's interest, learning becomes more personalized and the learner has a greater control in the manner he absorbs information. Additionally, content could also be tailored to suit students learning capabilities. Thereby, the student is able create a deeper learning experience for himself as he is able to view, evaluate and replay content and understand better.

Video as a tool to increase teacher effectiveness
Videos are also being used as a powerful teacher improvement tool, allowing educators and administrators to constantly improve on the quality of education.

According to a study titled 'A game changer - Using videos to achieve high performance in the classroom', 91 per cent educators felt that simply filming their instruction would help them improve their practices. 85 per cent of school leaders said that using video in observations would help them provide more meaningful feedback to their teachers.

Administrators and educators feel that through solutions such as lecture capture they can potentially transform teacher performance and ultimately lead to higher student achievement. Concepts such as 'flipped classrooms' are being effectively tapped by teachers and help promote greater teacher-student interaction. Thus classrooms have become more interactive and learning doesn't remain limited to classroom hours anymore.

Videos could transform education in emerging markets
Emerging markets are one of the most explosive areas of growth in education and in countries like India, Kenya, South Africa, and Malaysia there is a growing hunger for quality education. In most of these countries, parents and governments are unable to provide young people with quality education, which would make them rightly skilled and future ready. To top it, growing population in these regions add another roadblock for basic education rights of children. High student-teacher ratio, lesser interactive classrooms all lead to low quality of education in these regions.

Adoption of online teaching methods such as video-based learning could be the answer to most of these challenges as videos could be used as a learning tool even outside of the classrooms and may help overcome the issues of overcrowding schools and colleges. Usage of videos can also help these geographies access quality education.

Conclusion
2015 Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) released by Pratham shows that over the last decade, basic learning levels for children in elementary school in India have remained low. Only about half of Class V children in rural India can read a simple Class II level text. It says that at least half of all Indian children - close to 100 million - are at least two to three years behind grade level.

This eventually has a cascading impact on students entering the higher education institutions.

Adoption of technology will do wonders to our students and greatly enhance the quality of learning too. Integrating videos into the learning management systems of our existing educational institutions could help address the quality and learning gap the nation currently faces. But this would only be possible when education practitioners along with policymakers of our country come together and strongly advocate technology adoption in the current education system. This could also mean working towards setting up a robust Internet infrastructure in the country. With technology becoming ubiquitous in our lives, it has become imperative for the education sector across markets to expand its methodologies to incorporate the newest advancements like its being done in the west.