Speaker 1: Good morning, everyone. How are you doing? Okay. How are you doing? Great. Okay. It's good to see all of you. It's good to see all of you on this amazing morning. I really had a great time singing songs, listening to wonderful speakers. And so glad to see online participants also joining with all of us. Great to see people also putting on their videos. I really appreciate it. Thank you. So my topic for today is how to make every online class a very exciting one by following five simple steps. All right. How many of you have attended online class before? Just raise your hand. Okay. Please put your hands down. We are all in 2021, which means that we have crossed 2020 and came here. So we know what the world has gone through. So virtual class is the new normal for all of us. My second question for all of you, how many of you find the online class that you attended very exciting? Raise your hands. Okay. No hands raised. So that's what we're going to be discussing today. How to make it exciting. See, it's not a difficult part, but it's a transformative process. Because suddenly everything has changed into something new. But for me, when I want to start off, I just want to share a few stories to all of you. The first perspective that I wanted to share with you is something that happened when I was a final year student back in my college. I was doing computer science engineering at Sri Muthukumar Institute of Technology in Chennai. So this was the time I was very passionately involved with IEEE, the Institute of Electrical Engineers, which is a student branch. It's a global organization. We had a student branch in our college, and we used to do so many volunteering activities, right? One of these activities was called as cross-borders initiative. So this is something I actually I was so much interested when I was in college. So this happened when one of the cricket matches between India and Pakistan happened, right? And during the same time, student volunteers from India, from my college, got an opportunity to connect and interact with the IEEE volunteers of Capital University of Science and Technology in Islamabad, Pakistan. So we were having an interaction, 30 students from India and 30 students from Pakistan, having an interaction through an online virtual tool. So that's the first time I understood the power of what a virtual tool can really do. It can transport you to different places. It can bring you a world of perspectives. You don't need to get a visa. You don't need to travel. You don't need a passport. You can connect with the globe, right? So that's the first story. The second story that I wanted to share with all of you is something that happened again in my final year of Teach for India fellowship. So after I graduated from engineering, I went on to work as a full-time teacher in Chennai Middle School, MGR Nagar, where I was teaching 4th and 5th standard students. So these are my students. And this was a very similar initiative that I was doing back in my college. So what happened during this time, before I go into this, through the two years of fellowship, along with the help of my previous fellow who taught the students 2nd standard and 3rd standard, his name is Ashwin, both of us worked together, and we raised the funds of 2,40,000 Indian rupees from donors across the world, which in US dollars would be somewhere around $4,000, right? And we made it transform the classroom entirely into a technology-savvy one. We had a smart TV. You could see a smart TV, smart board. The students had tablets, and we also had Wi-Fi, and so much more. So during these times, I took up this initiative of connecting beyond borders, and I reached out to one of my friends in Bangladesh, who is doing the Teach for Bangladesh fellowship back there. He was also an IEEE volunteer. He actually really liked this idea, and we had a connection between both the classrooms in India and in Bangladesh in Dhaka, and 30 students from here was interacting with the 30 students in Bangladesh. So this was, again, a very interesting activity for us to do. The students asked so many questions around their cultures, and most importantly, they were singing their national anthems. These are 5th standard students, so they were singing the national anthem, the Indian one and the Bangladesh one, interestingly written by the same poet, right? The third story that I wanted to share with all of you is something that happened during 2020. The world was shutting down, and for me personally, it was a huge transformation because I was moving from a full-time job, and I wanted to do something on my own. This was the time I started the EduRise Global YouTube channel, which created educational videos in English, Tamil, and other South Indian languages. So we wanted to make online education into a much more engaging one. We also started running workshops, running so much of webinars, because I was experimenting with this initiative. I also got a lot of time. That's when I took this opportunity to speak at 100 plus institutions across the world, including Philippines, Singapore, Nigeria, Kenya, to understand how virtual learning can really happen. The reason I'm saying this is you don't need to... This doesn't work only in English and Viron, right? When I'm speaking on different countries, their understanding of English is very different. So the techniques that I'm going to share with you all today is going to work everywhere. That's the overall idea. And I'm going to call these five techniques as... Yeah, the A-E-I-O-U of any virtual class. Will you all repeat after me? A-E-I-O-U. Thank you, ma'am. So I think it's wonderful to see... I hope you all remember your primary school days. I was a primary school teacher, so one of my biggest responsibilities is to explain the most complex things in a much simpler way, okay? So these are the fundamentals of virtual learning that I thought is very crucial for any online class. And just by applying this, you can transform any class into a much more exciting one. First one is asking questions, okay? Imagine a physical classroom. When you're teaching in a physical classroom, the core idea is to deliver content. The teacher or the facilitator keeps on speaking. But when it comes to an online class, the whole idea is to engage people, to actually make them think. Because when you're listening, if someone is listening in a physical class, their attention is always on us, and their mind can actually roam around somewhere, right? But in a visual environment, people can switch off their videos, and they can even go to some different places. That's the biggest advantage they have. But asking questions can be very easily done, especially asking open-ended questions to students is going to engage them much more, and they could come up with their own answers and share, which is a huge opportunity in an online class. I'm also saying this because if you look at the type of questions, there are four different types of questions. One-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many types of questions. Especially these two types of questions, which are colored over here, the one-to-many and the many-to-one, is very easily possible in an online class. Imagine if I'm going to ask a question to all of you, and if all of you want to answer at the same time, all of you need to take turns. You need to raise your hand. I need to pick up one person, and then I do need to pick up another person. But in a virtual class, if I just pose the question, all of you could actually type it on the chat box. It can be very easily done. At the same time, students could also pose questions to the teacher in a much more easier way, because all the students can pose questions at the same time. Otherwise, in a physical class, it would be, again, taking turns and doing it, right? And the teachers could group the questions and then answer at the same time. Or if they want to do it separately, they could also do that. So this is a beautiful opportunity when it comes to asking questions in an online environment. Okay, the second one is about engagement, which comes directly after asking questions. There are so many ways in which you can engage students. In a physical class, just the teacher standing and teaching the lesson is an engagement, because they see the board at the back, you're seeing the teacher in the front, that's an engagement for you. Whereas in a virtual class, the teacher's picture will appear on a very small box. The PPT is going to be much bigger, right? The moment you see PPT, you'll feel like all your energy has dined up and you'll feel like you want to go to, you want to take some rest, right? So the idea here is to do the engagement in much different ways. You are using an online platform, so you could use a lot of online tools. This is very hard to do that integration in a physical environment, because you need a projector, you need a laptop, you need to do that planning, and you need a screen where you can project all these things. Whereas in a virtual environment, because students are already watching it on a virtual place, you could easily do it, and a number of tools are actually available. Quizzes are my own favorite. If you do a quiz, the students feel really engaged. They also feel the sense of competition, and it keeps them really running. And you could also do a lot of creative brainstorming activities. There's so much of tools available, you could go and explore that over there. The third one, any guesses on what's the I? Iridescence. Iridescence, okay. People are sticking to their theme. The third one that I want to talk about is inspiration, right? If there's one thing that's needed in the world today, that's truly inspiration, because coming beyond adversity, what we're doing right now, right? Coming beyond the adversity of the COVID, we are now having a hybrid event. All this is possible because we're thinking of something new and creating a new idea altogether. The idea is to inspire the students, not just teach them the content, because at the end of the day, education is not about transferring of information and knowledge. It is about transferring the inspiration, the motivation, creating curiosity. All these things could happen only if you inspire the students. Some easy ways of inspiration, tell them how you learned something, and how whatever that you learned was very helpful to them, was very helpful to you, right? That will motivate the students to learn more. And you could also use a lot of local people who have achieved so much, and set up global examples for them, and inspire the students to do much more. The next one is ownership. O stands for ownership. Again a question for all of you. Who owns the classroom in general? Teacher, right? They are the ones who come. They are the ones who tell you what to do. Whether you should be sitting, or you should be standing, or you should be going out, or you should be doing homework, or you should be copying something from the board. It's the teacher's responsibility. They own the classroom. Whereas in a virtual environment, the focus on the ownership should be transferred back to the students, because they have the similar resources of whatever the teacher have. They have the same Google. They have the same YouTube. They could learn anything that they want, right? That's the power of having a ownership. And the idea of flipped classroom is gaining so much of predominant importance. Whatever content you're teaching on a class, you could transfer it to the students much earlier. They could read the content. They can come back and just ask questions, or engage in a conversation. These are ways in which you could make the virtual class much more engaging, as well as much more useful for the students. The final one is something very interesting. We have an education system today that's based on rote learning, remembering, memorizing things, right? But we are slowly moving to a place where all these things are not going to be completely workable, right? The students need to understand whatever that you are teaching. They need to go beyond remembering. One easy way of doing this is making them share whatever they are learning. Today, so much of opportunities are available. People could write a medium blog, make a YouTube video, put it on their Facebook, right? Nobody told you should use all these platforms only for entertainment. You could also use it for education. So when you are doing these things, they not only share their knowledge on these platforms, but they also learn to use how to make the best use of these platforms, which is a great learning altogether. Yeah? So that's understanding. I need one favor from all of you. Will you all do it? Yes? If yes, please raise your hand. Okay. Please put your hands down. First of all, you need to ask what's the favor, right? It's going to be a very easy one. Today, I'm getting this opportunity to voice out what are the things that I want, what are the things I figured out of a virtual class, right? All of you have voice. All of you have social media. My only request for all of you is to voice out what type of online class is something that you need, what type of a virtual class that you would really enjoy, right? Of course, sending a tweet will not change the education system itself, but it will get a spark that's getting started, right? We need to have this conversation because this is a time the entire business, finance, and everything is transforming, right? So we can also transform education very drastically if we are taking a point at this point because at the end of the day, we shouldn't make the classes boring because life is too brief to get bored, right? So before I close off, let's do an interesting activity. Can all of you close your eyes? Okay. Please close your eyes. Think about all the five letters. Okay. I can see everyone closing. Okay. Some people are opening their eyes. Please close your eyes. Okay. So remember all these five letters. A, E, I, O, U. Okay. Think about all those techniques and think about how many of these things I used during my own talk, which I'm doing it here. You've been witnessing for the past 12 or 13 minutes, right? Open your eyes. Shall we discuss this quickly? What was A representing? Ask questions. Did I ask you questions? I posted some five to six questions, if I'm not wrong. What is the second one? Was it engaging? I made you close your eyes. I made you raise your hands, right? Third one? Inspiration. I told you some stories in the beginning. That's inspiration. What's the fourth one? Ownership. Remember you all promised me that you'll go back to your social media and share what is the type of online class that you needed, right? That's ownership. Now, this is not my own idea. You're going to go back and share your own ideas on social media, which is ownership. And the final one is you understand. If you are able to remember all the five points that I told you, if you are also able to remember all the actions that I done associated with all these five points, you have truly understood the five ways to make every virtual class an exciting one. Thank you so much for this opportunity.