“You have three hours to complete this test. You will not talk to each other, copy from each other, or refer to any material.’ There are times when it looks as though the whole purpose of education is to prepare students for this moment when the invigilator announces these words in the solemn atmosphere of an examination hall.

All good teachers are aware of the pitfalls of teaching to the test.They know when to use stories, when to crack jokes and how to learn along with their students. They have excellent grasp over their subjects and are keenly aware of the need to allow students to explore concepts on their own. Most importantly, good teachers over generations have inspired students to be socially responsible citizens, not just salary drawing professionals. Yet, we witness education technology practitioners discussing lack of teacher quality as a reason to introduce technology in classrooms, and at the same time create content that teaches to the test!

Lack of quality is an issue in any field that requires a large number of professionals. In that sense, teaching as a profession too faces that issue.But, technology by itself cannot improve expertise in a field. It does have the potential to automate certain tasks or enhance existing capabilities using effective tools and platforms.

Here are six ways of looking at how technology could help the cause of education.

1. Diversity in Scale

This is a no-brainer. Technology has the power to reach millions in every corner of the world. The reach of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other open courseware are prime examples. We may cite drop-out rates to deride them, but the fact is learners everywhere today have access to more quality content than ever before. If there is a powerful idea, technology can take it anywhere. But, that doesn’t mean we need to create things for a global audience. What someone creates for a local population can have several takers elsewhere. Open technology allows for editing, customizing and making what is local to others local to us. Therefore, scale does not mean standardization. Designing for scale also means designing for diverse practices.

2. Access to Experiences

Today scale is mostly limited to access to content. The pedagogy is still didactic, where the isolated learner consumes content and attempts to commit it to long term memory. It’s time we moved towards an active and reflective pedagogy, where there are more opportunities to learn by doing, experimenting and collaborating.

How can we enable learners to contribute to the learning content, bring in their personal experiences and enable hands-on learning? Initiatives like cMOOCs where learners make use of social media experiences are small steps in this direction.

Education technologists should have one core commitment- to make the learner the biggest winner in this digital transformation

3. Immersion
Immersive learning in education technology is about creating an impression of participating in a realistic experience. Simulations and games were early forms of immersive learning which is now moving into the territory of virtual reality. Wearing a virtual reality headset, the learner can immerse himself or herself in the Paleolithic age or in a distant planet. This is the closest that we have got to experience the real world through technology. However, the use of VR in teaching and learning is still underexplored. The question pursued by learning technologists is about how VR can be utilized to provide students ‘direct experience’ of multiple perspectives and contexts, and how students can interact with that world, gather data and formulate inferences.

4. Connectedness

Connected learning is about enabling communication and a web of relationships in the pursuit of learning. Children from upper income and middle income families with access to smart devices are already communicating with each other and the world through Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. How can we tap into these collaborative tools to enable learning and teaching to occur in a connected manner, even outside of the classroom?A carefully thought out collaborative project that could link students with the local community as well as professionals to identify infrastructural issues and design possible solutions is one example. However, the tasks built around a networked collaborative learning environment should be closer to students’ lives and not built around drab textual content.

5. Personalization

Traditional education technology is rooted in architecture of uniformity. Animations and videos projected on a whiteboard and transmitted to all the students in a class are not much different from traditional lectures. In differentiated instruction, all the students are not required to do the same tasks at the same time. You see this many times in creatively run pre-primary classes where children do multiple things: some playing with toys, some with crayons and some with blocks. However, as children move on to higher classes, standardization sets in. With big data and analytics, today it is possible to provide personalized instruction based on student understanding and preferences. It is easier to imagine personalized learning in a self-learning mode, but its possibilities in classrooms cannot be ruled out.

6.Teacher Support

Several tasks that teachers do can easily be automated by technology, leaving them to focus on what is most important to their profession: that is, teaching. Creating timetables and academic plans, taking attendance, correcting standardized assessments (still a necessary evil), and making question papers – these are all things that can be taken care of by technology. So, can technology simplify repetitive tasks in the classroom like solving equations step by step, using mind maps to link concepts, or drawing diagrams? Smart mobile apps provide easy access to exclusive online teacher groups, the best of lesson plans, and great videos that they could even share with their students.In many schools that have adopted digital practices, technology still seems to be in the foreground. Ideally, it should recede to the background and become a nimble tool in the hands of the teacher. That’s when you know that technology is no more an alien thingin the classroom.

To sum up, technologists should closely examine the classroom practices of our best teachers, the work of educationists and the history of educational reforms that have worked as well as failed.How can technology amplify evidence-based educational practices and transform the possibilities of learning?