Teaching is an art.
Presentation of material is the style of art. Producing quality in teaching is
the essence of art. Teaching major components are content, communication and
feedback.
There
is a close relationship between teaching and learning and to improve learning
it is necessary to modify, improve and develop teaching quality. Teachers are
key position to act as catalyst to initiate curricula, design programs and to
meet future needs of the students. The qualification of a teacher in the
present time should include competence in the designated teaching areas,
technological awareness and effectiveness in teaching.
There are various ways teacher can make use of
IT to improve their teaching. They can make teaching a web-based learning. When
the course is Web-based, the course web-site extends the classroom beyond its
physical and temporal boundaries. The teacher is immediately connected to students’
discussion and other activities occur well beyond the classroom and well after
class hours.
Every
age has its needs of development and education is an aid to such a development.
It must be attuned to the age it operates in the 21st century, being
primarily a knowledge manager of 21st century would be a knowledge
worker with a mandate to lead, to facilitate, to motivate, to encourage and to
empower his co-workers, students and the community. The students have to
function as knowledge workers rather than subservient, uncommitted,
non-productive, uncreative robots that carry-out tailor made task based on role
ability. We need generators of knowledge, creators of knowledge, promoters of
knowledge and self-teachers with skills to operate in a competitive world.
Just
as the development of printing Press forever changed the teaching enterprise.
IT represents a fundamental change in the basic technology of teaching and
learning. IT after great potential but in order to reap the benefits,
institutions will have to transform themselves in fundamental ways.
A
pertinent question is what can IT contribute to increasing learning? The most
humble answer to this is that it offers economics of scale. After a front end
investment, the cost of usages per incremental student is apt to be low.
Moreover, access to very large amount of information can be obtained at low
incremental cost.
IT after mass customization, Technology allows
faculty to accommodate individual difference in students’ goals, learning
styles and abilities.
IT
eases the limits of time and space for educational activities. Such activities
as chat sessions with teacher, assignments on net are important especially for
non-traditional students who after have job or family responsibilities limiting
their possible school hours.
IT
enables self-paced learning with sensitivity to different learning styles and
continuous assessment of students’ progress. The areas that can profit most
from IT based strategies are those subjects that have large number of students
and in the case of some multimedia programmes, those areas trigger further
practice automatically so that students receive more instruction just in time
when they need it most. IT provides the data needed to map the relation between
cost and benefit, thus opening the way for experimentation and innovation.
Because
of its capacity to focus on individual assessment, IT makes the teaching and
learning enterprise much more out-come oriented.
IT
will empower students to have greater control over the learning process.
Students will decide, when to learns, how to learns, what to learner and how
that learning is to be certified.
Achieving
information technology’s full potential would require far more extensive
changes, which would be problematic. A small core of traditional institutions
and traditional learners, who can afford may continue to seek out the
traditional education that has been the hallmark of over system while the bulk
of students deprived of these facilities for various reasons may take shelter
under IT based teaching and learning.
