After COVID19 outbreak several countries across globe declared long term total lockdowns with measures like closure of industries, businesses, educational institutions and domestic as well as international travel.
Schools and colleges around the globe switched to e-schooling related online platforms and apps as they wanted students to continue with course curriculum and save academic year.
Switching to online learning platforms has been challenging for students, teachers and parents as well. For teachers and students the challenge is in adapting new apps while parents have challenge in terms of keeping children busy across the day while limiting their screen time, making devices and internet available to attend online classes etc.
The mantra of new normal during COVID19 is analyse the problem, find solution, adapt it and move on. Everybody is doing it, including education segment.
There are various online applications and platforms available for Teachers and Students that make online teaching and learning fun. So you have applications making your kid (and you too) expert in multiple languages, becoming a fluent speaker to learning computer programming, there are various applications out there to sharpen your child’s mind.
I have observed a lot of eduTech platforms being used by schools, students and working professionals in past few years, prior to COVID19 lockdowns.
In this article I have listed 10 different eduTech platforms best suited to learn from home, especially during COVID19.
1. Google Classroom
Looking at growing use of technology in every aspect of day to day activities of education system, let it be handling institutional emails to handling admission process, Google remained pioneer and popular company in providing solutions.
From In an educational institute or university, students are regularly required to finish and submit assignments. At the school’s end teachers need to check and grade the assignments. Google Classroom is a platform which transforms all these activities online.
Google Classroom can be used for sending notifications, creating classes, starting up group discussions, submitting and reviewing assignments, requesting feedback, sharing school notifications, parent circulars and educational articles.
In short, Google Classroom is useful in Upgraded Learning, Improved Classes, and Quicker grading process.
2. Microsoft Aspire MASP Suite
The objective of MASP Suite is to empower educators & students to enrich learning outcomes.
It provides access to Microsoft Empowered Teacher Sessions and Microsoft Student Associate Engagement. Under Microsoft’s business strategy to promote its own range of productivity tools, it provides Office 365 across campus faculty and students. Other benefits include usage rights & access to the latest Windows Education, Windows 10, Microsoft Intune, Office 365 ProPlus and Minecraft: Education Edition
The zero cost access to Microsoft Imagine Academy gives students and educators the curricula and certifications they need to succeed in nowadays tech-driven economy. The certifications include technology subjects like Computer Science, IT infrastructure, Data science, and Productivity. Students learn coding skills based on the latest tools and technologies, Develop in-demand skills in IT administration and cloud platform solutions, Get an introduction to data science concepts and tools and Master the productivity applications in demand in today’s workplace.
Other useful feature from school’s perspective includes Virtual Master Training for teacher readiness, eFee Online solution to enable e-payment of fee by parents & students and recognition as MASP School and Marketing PR Asset support
3. edX
All students dream to enroll to the courses of top colleges like Harvard, MIT, and so on while they are aware of the fact that it is difficult to get in enrolled into these universities.
With edX on a student’s mobile device, nothing stops him/her from fulfilling those dreams. edX brings these and many prestigious institutions to a student’s fingertips.
There are around 2000+ courses of top universities in edX, for example, software engineering, business management, designing, and many more. The main features of edX are Video instructional guidance, Study material and tests.
4. SWAYAM
The Indian Government has started SWAYAM, a MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform, which hosts educational multimedia content of all courses taught in classrooms from Grade 9 to post-graduation. It can be accessed by anyone, from anywhere, any time at convenience. The content is broadly divided in to video session, reading material, self-assessment tests and an online discussion board to discuss queries.
5. UMANG
The Government of India’s UMANG application offers school-going youngsters a collection of more than 1 crore digitized books, interesting courses, and study materials. The UMANG application allows students to get NCERT’s E-Pathshala from within the application. The application is available for free on Android, iOS, and Windows.
6. Coursera
One can join Coursera for free and learn online, build skills with courses from top universities like Yale, Michigan, Stanford, Princeton, Bocconi, Centrale Paris and leading companies like Google and IBM. As of now Coursera offers over 500 courses from more than a hundred universities.
While courses are free but one has to pay to receive a degree.
7. Udemy
Udemy, Inc. is an American online learning platform aimed at working professionals and students. As of today, the platform claims to have more than 35 million students and 57,000 instructors teaching over 130,000 courses in around 65 languages.
Udemy is the perfect platform to acquire knowledge and skills in any particular domain. The main difference Udemy brings that anybody can enroll as an instructor and create his own course. This allows Udemy to expand the type of trainings the platform can provide under one roof. On the other side, it means quality and cost of courses vary a lot depending on the teacher. Better to be sure to check the reviews of online course before enrollment.
8. Canvas
Instructure, Inc. is an educational technology company based in Utah which has developed and published Canvas, a Web-based learning management system, and Canvas Network, a massive open online course platform (MOOC).
Unlike MOOC platforms like EdX and Coursera, Canvas is not only limited to prestigious educational institutions. It has courses from a much wider selection of less known universities too. This strategy makes the courses more accessible and less unapproachable in case the learner want to understand a completely new field.
On the other hand, The Canvas Learning Management Platform allows schools to build the digital learning environment that meets the unique challenges faced by their institution. Canvas simplifies teaching, elevates learning, and eliminates the headaches of supporting and growing traditional learning technologies.
9. Udacity
Udacity’s mission is to give access to knowledge from all the best universities around the globe. They offer online courses in programming, data science, artificial intelligence, digital marketing, and more as they are generally focussed on science and emerging technologies.
Udacity claims to partner with leading technology companies to learn how technology is transforming industries, and teach the critical tech skills that companies are looking for in their workforce.
10. Duolingo
In era of world being considered as a global village, knowing a multiple foreign languages has been considered as additional advantage. It takes great determination and practice to learn new languages and dialects, especially if one migrates to a new geography.
Duolingo has taken this opportunity and made language learning easy for beginners. It helps to learn many dialects like English, French, Spanish, Mandarin, German, Japanese, Latin etc. in a fun and smart way.
Duolingo has an array of lessons that use listening exercises, flashcards, and multiple choice questions to drill a user on new words, phrases, and sentences. Most questions have a comment thread where users can discuss a particular question in detail. It begins with basic picture marking games and as a user completes more levels, a wide range of more options open to improve lingo and sentence structure abilities.
The primary features of Duolingo are 30+ languages, interactive stories, conversations, Leaderboards, and Language learning options.
That is all for now!
During these continuous lockdowns, while we accustoming new normals like e-schooling and work from home, or even after research labs find a vaccine on COVID19 to end it and everything gets back to normal, don’t forget to download some of these apps and continue learning!
By, Atalbihari Baddar