Way back in 1999, as a young engineering student, I had a start-up in education called ‘Activity’, and we conducted Life Skills workshops in schools of Bangalore and organised ‘Activity – The Kool Skool Festival’ which later was rebranded and went on to become the legendary school event ‘Horlicks Wizkids’. Not being happy with one start-up and being highly influenced by the ‘dot com’ bug, I started a company called ‘SchoolKingdom.com’ with an aim to bring education online. We offered websites to schools, online marks and attendance, student information management system, et al.
The project was so innovative that Wipro Netkracker – one of the original ISPs – funded it and provided tech support. The only problem was that we were doing this at a time when we had to dial- up for the internet, and the penetration of the web was very low. We were at least a decade ahead of time, and the venture failed.
Almost a decade later, around 2010, when Mentor Magazine was taking shape, we had visualised an online platform for educators called ‘Mentor Connect’. It was an online platform that gave educators an opportunity to learn, share and connect with each other. As wonderful as the idea was, the educators in India were still not ready for the online medium and preferred the print magazine to the online platform. We tried hard and failed again.
In 2019, we launched the Mentor Magazine Middle East edition. This time we had no choice but to make it a digital edition as we were working with six different countries and getting media publishing permission in so many countries was a nightmare. With the success of the Middle East edition, we have been seriously contemplating making our Indian edition digital. While our thinking hats were still on, we are now struck by the Corona Virus pandemic, and it made our decision simple. The Indian edition of Mentor is going digital from April 2020. Chances are that most of you will be reading this article online, and if you are not, then, LXL.in/Mentor is where you will find all the articles of Mentor present and past. You can now share your favourite articles on all digital platforms and contribute many more articles.
While we at Mentor Magazine are moving with the times, I find it quite amazing that despite having such amazing online learning and teaching tools available for more than a decade, most schools have not even attempted to experiment with them and keep it as an option for home learning. Today, we are faced with an unprecedented situation, and most schools are caught unprepared. I have said this very often and written about it multiple times in my articles, that schools of the future will be a combination of online and offline learning. Subjects like math, science etc. can be taught by the digital medium as effectively or at times, better than classroom learning. Schools have to gear up to this reality; they have no choice now with the kind of situation we find ourselves in.
Every school should now have a digital learning plan along with their regular classroom learning plan. Children should spend more time on getting doubts cleared, interacting with fellow students, doing art, life skills, value education, sports, etc. in their school time. Let us trust in the power of digital learning and leave some of the Math & STEM learning online, and when we are offline, let’s focus our time in making humans of our future generation.
