Govt college pioneers ‘blended learning’

Binu.Karunakaran@timesgroup.com

Kochi: 16.06.2020

As institutions of higher learning struggle to adapt to the new normal, a government arts and science college which successfully developed a ‘blended learning’ model three years ago using open-source tools has become a guiding force for the teaching community in the state.

Sree Neelakanta Government Sanskrit College (SNGS), Pattambi, has so far trained hundreds of college and higher-secondary school teachers in Moodle, using an open-source learning management system (LMS). It also employs a customized version of the LMS to train PSC and UGC aspirants. This has helped it generate annual revenues of up to Rs 8 lakh.

SNGS has its origins in ‘Saraswathodyothini’, a Sanskrit school founded by Neelakanta Sarma, popularly known as Punnaseri Nampi, in 1889. It attracted students of all castes and was known as the ‘Nalanda on the banks of Nila’.

At the heart of the model, which combines online learning with physical classrooms, is the studentcentric approach which is empathetic of their vulnerabilities and limitations of digital access. “A student attending live classes via video conferencing apps would have to exhaust at least 1GB of data. So our focus was on creating resources that require minimal data such as streaming audio and text,” says Santhosh H K, head of department of Malayalam, which plays a lead role in the virtual-learning initiatives.

SNGS, which has customized LMS platforms for several government colleges, uses around 50 tools to create accessible resources for students. The most prominent among them are podcasts, which, unlike videos are not data intensive.

“The impetus is on providing interactive content like quizzes. Students also use the Moodle app to access content, even while offline,” said Santhosh.

Sree Neelakanta Government Sanskrit College, Pattambi, has trained teachers using open-source learning management system