By Madhavi Jain
When Raghav Mahajan was struggling with his French course last year, help was just a click away. “A friend in the US who is very good at the language uploaded videos on YouTube so that I could learn. That’s the only way I managed to get my diploma,” says the 20-year-old, who has landed a job with an advertising agency in Mumbai.
From mastering French and Pilates to solving algebraic equations or the Rubik’s cube, more and more Indians are finding their tutors online. Thanks to the countless how-to videos posted on sites like YouTube, do-it-yourself learning has become a growing trend.
It can even get students an IIT education without going to IIT. Vivek, who is doing his bachelors in engineering from the Manipal Institute of Technology, couldn’t get admission into the elite institute but that hasn’t stopped him benefiting from lectures that IIT and IISc professors have posted on YouTube in a project funded by the Indian government.
The institutes, who took their cue from US universities, began posting course content on YouTube in January and already 40 streaming hours of IIT teaching video is available for students whether they are in Nagpur or New York.
“In our country, there is a huge shortage of teachers. So the idea behind the project was to give engineering students a chance to access quality peer-reviewed course content for free,” says Mangala Sunder Krishnan, chemistry professor at IIT-Madras who is one of the co-ordinators for the project. It’s been quite a success judging from the fact that one lecture on basic electronics has been viewed by a whopping 100,000 viewers. Under Phase 2 of the project, quality teachers from other institutes besides the IITs and IISc will also be roped in to prepare lecture videos, says Krishnan.
But not all information is as reliable as that posted by the IITs. A problem with the user-generated model of YouTube is that students have no way of verifying the source or the information, point out some academics. Despite these reservations, YouTube, Wikipedia and similar sites dubbed by techies as part of “Web 2.0” are attracting students who enjoy learning in the comfort of their own homes and at their own pace.
“It’s often embarrassing for a student to ask a teacher too many questions, specially when it is about something basic that he or she is expected to know,” says Salman Khan, a math tutor whose 700 videos have become quite a hit with students abroad and in India. Based in California, this hedge fund manager of Indian origin says he spends one to three hours a day making videos.
“A student may not have got the classroom lecture, but once they see a video, they say, ‘Ah, this is what it is about’. They can also pause a video or watch it as many times as they like,” says Khan who gets dozens of requests from Indians who want help solving problems.
And has he learnt anything from YouTube? “My wife and I did try out a sooji halwa recipe last week,” laughs Khan.
It’s riffs and not recipes that drew Sandeep, 14, to YouTube. “I had to give up guitar classes because the tutor lived far away from home. But I checked out YouTube and figured out that the videos made it very easy to pick up songs,” says Sandeep. He has learned to play ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’.
No comments:
Post a Comment