Technology amplifies teacher’s impact, but cannot replace human connection
Teachers, like their students, must become lifelong learners, continuously picking up new skills in digital pedagogy, data-driven assessment, and AI-enabled personalisation
With the exponential growth of technology, especially internet access and digital learning resources, teachers today are moving towards becoming facilitators of learning, guiding students in navigating information, critically analysing content, and applying knowledge through a practical lens. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated this trend, inducing a transition to online and hybrid learning models. Teachers showcased their resilience, mastering video conferencing platforms and maintaining student interaction remotely. Despite their adaptability, Indian educators today face several challenges, including uneven access to technology, lack of adequate training, lower pay packages and resource constraints. Institutional Support The truth is that teachers, like their students, must become lifelong learners in the digitised era.
“They need to continuously pick up new skills in digital pedagogy, data-driven assessment, and AIenabled personalisation. Institutions should support them with structured training and opportunities to engage directly with industry and new technologies,” says Prof V Ramgopal Rao, vice-chancellor, BITS Pilani group. “Teachers benefit when they move from being observers to adopters, collaborators, and innovators in AI usage. So, educational institutions must focus on hands-on training. That could start with scenario-based workshops, peer learning, mentorship, and online modules. It must include ethics, privacy, data literacy, and classroom application. Technology amplifies the teacher’s impact.
However, it does not replace the human connection,” says M Jagadesh Kumar, former chairman, UGC. Mind is the Source “The real value of a teacher lies in contextualising knowledge, in adapting it to the learner, and in inspiring curiosity–no machine can do that,” Rao says. Despite tech disruptions, the relationship between the teacher and the taught will thrive. “While technology provides information and knowledge, the teacher imparts human values. Books, teachers and technology will coexist, with one complementing the other. Technology fosters singularity in an essentially pluralistic world. Till our exam system changes, human intervention will persist unlike in foreign universities where they allow students to use technology to get knowledge in an instant. But even there, the mind is the source,” says Shayama Chona, former principal, DPS, RK Puram, New Delhi. Covid underscored technology’s impact in unprecedented ways. “The latter can at best be a supplement but cannot replace the college experience which contributes to students’ holistic development,” says Prof Vijaya Venkataraman, HOD, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Delhi (DU). Some worry that the human mentors will lose their importance in the face of technology. But evidence points to the opposite.
“Teachers focus more on emotional and motivational needs when freed from routine tasks,” Prof Kumar says. Collaboration between teachers and technology can improve education on multiple fronts. “AI can handle routine evaluations and even help design personalised learning paths. Virtual labs and simulations can create experiential learning opportunities for students who otherwise would never access such facilities,” Prof Rao says. Towards Inclusion Across India, AI readiness is however uneven—not for lack of intent, but for lack of structured pathways. “We need to treat AI-readiness as professional literacy, not a luxury,” says Prof Suman Chakraborty, director, IIT Kharagpur, underpinning the need for a hub-and-spoke mentoring model where the use of institute/school clusters such as the NITs/IITs and DIETs/ SCERTs—can run quarterly ‘learning hackathons’, tele-mentoring, and mobile teacher studios to upskill teachers. At the macro level, the AI India Mission has the potential to transform how rural teachers gain new skills by giving them access to digital training platforms in local languages.
“To access and use AI tools, one needs smartphones and reliable broadband. The situation is rapidly changing, as rural India has 488 million internet users while urban India has 397 million users. Imagine a teacher in a small village using AI-driven apps to learn classroom strategies or even practise coding. That picture is no longer distant because India’s digital public infrastructure has grown remarkably, from UPI to Aadhaar-enabled services. With the proliferation of low-cost data and government-supported platforms, the direction is unmistakably towards inclusion and opportunity,” Prof Kumar adds. But even if rural schools manage to have digital infrastructure, they often lack good teachers. “This is because teaching is not the first choice of the majority since it does not pay as much as the corporate sector,” Chona says. As India moves from contentheavy schooling to innovative learning, AI will not define our teachers; our teachers will define how India uses AI—rooted in ethics, powered by science, and focused on every child’s potential, Prof Chakraborty adds.
Enabling Access Collaboration between teachers and technology can make education more datadriven and student-centric. “The era has evolved from taking attendance orally and marking it on sheets to later entering it on computers, and now, using applications and even AI-powered face detection for attendance,” says Prof Debabrata Das, director, IIIT-Bangalore.
No comments:
Post a Comment