28 August 2012

Digital Classroom with Defective Content

In my previous post and some of my earlier posts I wrote on issues related to K-12 elearning/multimedia industry in our country. This morning I happened to visit the website of a Chennai based elearning company claiming to stand out from the rest in terms of quality. When I browsed through its webpages, I found the contents with a lot of mistakes, contrary to what they advertise. Following are screenshots of a few of its webpages:








As we can see, each of the above webpages contains at least one grammatical or conceptual mistake (for example disproportionate sizes of animals) in its content.

Instead of being satisfied with mediocre and substandard products, elearning companies should strive to develop quality products that can compete in the global market place.

In their turn, K-12 schools should get digital products thoroughly evaluated for quality by a team of competent professionals with extensive experience in technology backed teaching before buying the products. This probably needs drastic changes in job allocation of staff in most schools today. For instance, HODs should be given less teaching workload so that they can contribute not only in mentoring their colleagues but also play lead roles in evaluating educational technology backed lesson resources. Such changes can go a long way toward quality education.


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About Me

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Chennai, Tamilnadu, India
I am a retired K-12 Education Management Professional. I have worked at different levels in K-12 school systems, textbook publishing, elearning and Education NGOs. I have held memberships in The Association for Science Education (UK), American Association of Physics Teachers and The Malaysian Institute of Physics. I hold a 1st class B Sc Degree in Physics followed by B Ed [English and Physical Science] and M A [Childcare and Education] degrees. My published works include 59 articles in teacher development magazines in India and the US and a book entitled `Creative Classrooms and Child Friendly Schools' (listed in Amazon). This book is almost an anecdotal account of my professional experience in six countries (including Cambodia where I worked as Technical Adviser to the Ministry of Education, Youth And Sports). I served as mentor in the Certificate of Teaching Mastery Program offered by Teachers Without Borders.