Virtual and Classroom Learning in Higher Education: A Guide to Effective Online Teaching

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced educational institutions and universities across the country to suspend classes and lectures, forcing them to resort to online education to continue educating students. While the change could have been smooth for the more technologically adept institutions, many others are still coping. The change affects students, and even more importantly, educators, who have to revamp their lesson plans and pedagogy. While many articles state the infrastructural disparities between regions within the country, few speak about the effectiveness of the online courses. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of online education in the current scenario. The subjects of this study were students currently pursuing a master’s degree in business administration, all of who are attending online lectures. Using online questionnaires for students and in-depth interviews with faculty members, data was collected via convenience sampling. A total of 141 students in business school responded to the questionnaire, and interviews were conducted with ten professors in Business Schools. The findings of the study reveal that despite the lack of adequate infrastructure, the students have found means to adopt this new medium of learning. The motivation is high amongst the teachers and students, who are equally enthusiastic about learning via the new platform.

Technology is central to learning in Higher Education. This learning style has been in the vanguard of ensuring continuity of study for many students worldwide during the 2020 pandemic. This chapter examines the impact of teaching and learning using technology from a theoretical and practitioner perspective. It utilizes the experiences of a practitioner who has worked in this field over the past 20 years. This chapter contends that there are both positive and negative impacts of technology in learning and teaching. However, technology is now central to enhancing learning, and using a constructivist approach can be the most effective learning strategy when using technology. Professional development is potentially a key focus area of added value when using technology as a learning medium.

In an era of revolution in digital technologies, virtual learning has gained momentum in the educational process. This research aims to identify the role of virtual learning as an effective tool for quality assurance in higher education. This will further explore the performance indicators of virtual learning at program and institutional levels. To understand the impact of virtual learning in organizational performance and achievement of strategic objectives, the interview method has been selected to receive a comprehensive view of the senior management towards virtual learning and its future in reshaping the paradigm of education. The interview questions will be designed to know senior management's perception across the universities regarding the effectiveness of virtual learning in measuring learning outcomes and stakeholder satisfaction. The research will finally propose an innovative approach towards successfully implementing virtual learning from a futuristic perspective. This will open the avenues for competitive advantage in delivering quality education and achieving institutional vision and mission.

COVID-19 has created the final push required for learning by/with Technology in higher education. Many institutes were already trying to offer higher education with Brick and Mortar kind of models using the various options starting from Audio-Video, E-learning, MOOCS, Virtual classroom, etc. The focus of offering higher education from the institute's (our) point of view is slowly shifting to their (millennials) point of view, meaning; providing education in the way and the place the (Millennials) wants to learn. Hence, understanding Millennials as consumers first and offering the education perhaps the same way (as consumers) could be the starting point. Later on, and after finding their specific learning abilities/requirements, one can develop a customized model of millennials' learning, combining the basic consumer model plus the student model. People-based marketing approach and multichannel approach of retailing come under the former, i.e., millennials as (consumer) learning models.

The chapter explores video to facilitate learning in Higher Education by discussing the literature about the effectiveness of video use in teaching and considering underpinning pedagogy. Many institutions and academics worldwide are trying to make sense of students’ emerging expectations, requirements, and the means to meet these uncertainties surrounding every aspect. The landscape of education is evolving with changes to where students study and technological advances driving the need for comparable or improved learning experiences online. One of the most challenging areas to transition online may be developing complicated practical or professional skills that have historically been acquired in a classroom or on work placements, e.g., difficult negotiations or technical engineering skills. Strategies such as asynchronous video and synchronous video conferencing have been commonly used to transition learning online to date. Evidence exists for the supplementary use of video in addition to traditional online methods to augment learning attainment only if carefully designed. The evidence supporting video to develop practical professional skills is reviewed to highlight key findings and summarise applications to practice. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the growing body of evidence supporting learning design considerations in this area and offers an underpinning theoretical framework to consider how video materials can be incorporated with other activities. Online curriculum design with integrated video is highly challenging to those who may be inexperienced, display low digital fluency, inflexible views, or limited digital tool access. However, this chapter aims to offer a coherent stepped approach to video construction within online curriculum design that is evidence-based and theoretically reasoned.

The modern era is a digital era. From banking to healthcare services to business, everything is becoming digitalized. So is education. Online education is a metamorphosed version of Distance Learning. Distance learning started more than 150 years ago. It was initiated by Sir Issac Pitman (1840) to teach shorthand. This paves the way for a more structured model of distance education by the University of London (1858) and the Society to Encourage Studies at Home (1873) in the United States of America by Anna Eliot Ticknor. Online education was started with the School of Management and Strategic Studies (1982) by Western Behavioural Sciences Institute, California. The earlier versions of online education relied on computer conferencing, but online education flourished with internet web browsers. Online education in India began with the use of satellites for Education way back in the 1970s. However, the version of online education in its modern form started with the advent of the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) in 1999. It is an initiative by seven Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) for creating course content in engineering and science. Ministry of Human Rights Development (MHRD) announced SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds) in 2014. It is India’s national platform for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) under its National Mission on Education through Information & Communication Technology (NME-ICT). The online course was designed as a four-quadrant approach.

The most significant experiment underway in the history of teachinglearning during the forced closure of educational institutions is to identify and collect evidence on both the strength and drawbacks of teaching-learning in virtual mode. Teachers are at the epicenter of a massive scale switch over of practice of learningteaching. Teachers need to possess skills that are instrumental in ensuring desired learning outcomes. Research data shows that there are effective teaching strategies for the virtual environment. Still, there are disconnect and inadequacies in the application of these strategies and teachers’ perception of the outcomes, which demands capacity building for practicing teachers. Considering the emergency of designing unique models of the capacity building program for traditional teachers, in early June 2020, ‘Bichitra Pathshala’ conducted a short online course for teachers to help them overcome technical hurdles and create learner-centric environments in the virtual model. A combination of data collection methods, including the validated open-ended questionnaire and focus group discussion, was conducted on the synchronous virtual digital platform. The findings revealed that during the switch over to virtual learningteaching mode, initially, the teachers were at a loss to address the students satisfactorily, but gradually the teachers learned to apply techno-pedagogical skills in their teaching-learning designs, and gradually they could ensure components of social presence and teaching presence in the virtual environment. Teachers felt further empowered when they could adopt asynchronous learning mode and showed confidence in their professional role.

Online classes or digitized learning is not a novel concept; rather, it has evolved over 60 years. Its roots can be traced back to the ‘University of Illinois,’ where the researchers created a rudimentary intranet, where students could access previously recorded and compiled study material entailing documents audio-video lectures. Today, it has radicalized the global education system, wherein now there are various online platforms like Coursera, Udemy, Edx, Skillshare, Codeacademy, Future Learn, etc. In the present-day COVID’19 era, institutions are forced to go online, adopt, and adapt quickly to this highly dynamic technology-space. Therefore, the faculty embraces and imbibes the online mediums’ technical nuances of teaching and uses them to deliver effective and interactive lectures. This chapter will uncover various types of e-Learning methods, especially delving deeper into the concepts of Synchronous and Asynchronous e-Learning. The following pages uncover the outcomes derived from various journals, books, and articles as part of the academic research to measure online learning methodology effectiveness. It talks about online classes' clear advantages, disadvantages, and exchanging ideas between students and teachers.

Due to the spread of the pandemic COVID-19 across the world since December 2019, every sector, field, and organization has faced a severe lockdown. The education sector that was following the traditional method of learning has been affected worst. The interaction between the instructor and learner was not possible in such a situation. Their learning process was completely stopped due to social distancing during the lockdown. However, the educational institutions running on the virtual model could continue to work and promote learning. Viewing the uninterrupted teaching-learning process of such institutions in this scenario, the traditional institution also tried to adopt the virtual learning mode. Apart from the advantages, numerous virtual (online) mode challenges hinder the effectiveness and learning outcomes. These obstacles of the virtual (online) mode of learning can be removed primarily when they are identified. So, the first and foremost objective to overcome these obstacles is to find them. This chapter attempts to elaborate on various facets of these challenges: technical, Economic, Security, Practical or Experimental, Assessment or Evaluation, etc.

Various researches on the relationship between student engagement and learning reveal that engagement is a predictor of academic achievement, student performance, and educational development. A student’s performance remains a top priority for educators, and engaging students is a challenge faced by lecturers worldwide. Many efforts on how higher education might further inculcate and strengthen student engagement have been explored. This is truer when emphasizing the virtual learning platforms, especially during the actual COVID-19 pandemic, which has stimulated and propelled the virtual classes’ platform. However, among the tripartite nlms influencing students’ engagement in the virtual learning platforms, the students, technology, and the instructor, lecturers received little emphasis in the virtual learning debate. The present research focuses on certain basic instructor skills that might help overcome the students’ disengagement issue to address this gap. Instead of dealing with the condition of students’ disengagement in virtual classes, this review tackles the roots of the instructor’s mission and fundamental role, which can be traced back to the primary aim of delivering knowledge, hence, related to the “theory of knowledge.” Also, efficiently communicating knowledge is related to certain basic communication skills. Hence, the present research is designed with two main objectives. To advance the debate on overcoming students’ disengagement in virtual classrooms by emphasizing the crucial role of basic instructor’s skills and implementing strategies that support student engagement by digging in both the theory of knowledge and some basic communication skills.

The Higher Education Institution (HEI) moves from the face to face and chalk and talk traditional method to the online learning method. Higher education in India has witnessed remarkable expansion in the last few years regarding access, equality, and inclusiveness. In recent years the focus is on quality, inculcation of wide knowledge and employability enhancement. India is the world’s second-largest market in terms of subscriber base, after the US, and amongst the fastest-growing markets for such digital platforms. Globally, more than 800 universities offer 9,400+ courses on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) digital platforms. MOOC offers creative and innovative modern approaches to the growth, distribution, and application of enhancing knowledge in teaching, learning, and research. The main aim of MOOC is that knowledge should be shared freely, any time access to material, self-learning, costeffectiveness, the interface among diverse learners, and the desire to study should be met without financial, economic, demographic, and geographical constraints. Seeing the importance of MOOC, the Government of India has also introduced an indigenous digital program named Study Webs of Active Learning for Young Aspiring Minds (SWAYAM), with the aim to serve a huge domain of learners and to fulfill the increasing needs of learners as well as the demands for economy and society. Based on the above importance of virtual/open online education, this empirical book chapter identifies the real opportunities to enhance wide knowledge among young aspiring minds through MOOC.

COVID-19 has changed the whole scenario in the education sector. Till now, virtual learning/online learning platforms were used to increase students' interest in subjects and learn something apart from the course curriculum in educational institutions. Virtual learning was used as a support to the available physical infrastructure. But since April 22, 2020, this scenario changed, and by default, virtual learning became the main platform for teaching and learning. All the classes are now being taken online for all the students, whether in schools or higher education institutions. In this study, researchers have tried to find the effectiveness of virtual learning environment on education. A total of 440 students pursuing undergraduate and postgraduate courses from different Universities of Rajasthan were asked to rate different aspects of virtual learning. Weighted Average, Rank Analysis, Correlation, Regression are applied to analyze the data. It is concluded that VLE is an effective technique for teaching the students and its major advantages are effective communication with the whole class, board visibility, doubts clarification, etc. However, there are some technical issues connecting to the virtual classroom, which has been the students' biggest problem. It still has been proving an effective and all the more necessary tool for learning and evaluation at a time when physical classrooms have become unfeasible. It is keeping the students on track and in sync with the courses in all subjects.

The purpose of this chapter is to understand the Effectiveness of Virtual teaching-learning when integrated with Traditional teaching and learning in the current scenario. The study attempts to determine the opinions of teachers and learners and their acceptance and readiness level to adopt virtual teaching and learning. The role of technology is to facilitate e-mail, web database, audio/video conferencing, online conferencing, etc. which will help the participant interact with each other on various grounds. Many software tools like Google classroom, WebEx, MS teams, etc., are also available to teachers and learners in teaching and learning and sophisticated and complex tasks. The study's conclusion is also based on various literature reviews on Virtual and traditional teaching and learning environment. Data was collected from two types of respondents, i.e ., teachers and learners, from urban and rural areas. Data were collected from 116 respondents of the teacher’s category and more than 217 respondents of the learner’s category, using a stratified random sampling method. The structured questionnaire was used for collecting the data considering various factors like the adoption of new technology, availability of resources, the effectiveness of virtual teaching and learning, Evaluation pattern, etc., and the SPSS package was used to analyze the data.

The chapter received an expressive way to analyze the effects of cybernetic classrooms on MBA learning. Cybernetic classrooms are mechanically determined class halls that help self-coordinated and self-directed learning. The examination was done inside MBA students in the Coimbatore area. The research is handled with different sectors of virtual classroom-related factors. The example involved 233 MBA students. Stratified random sampling was utilized. Other example procedures utilized were; those students who have been associated with online projects as of late and those at present in the program. Students' assent was likewise looked for determination. The different factors of questionnaires were analyzed with experts and finalized for further investigation. Inward reliability was processed utilizing Cronbach alpha of the virtual classroom questionnaires. In this manner, the factorial reliability values for the different sections of the questionnaires were 0.83, 0.85, 0.77, and 0.89. The detailed descriptions of the factors were analyzed and executed properly. The information gathered stayed dissected utilizing implies to examine the virtual classroom factors. The outcomes appeared among others that cybernetic study halls have constructive effects on the understudies of MBA, they revealed emphatically on their proceeded backing and readiness for cybernetic classrooms. In light of the discoveries, the proposal was that a lot more students ought to be made to be progressively mindful of the effects of the cybernetic study halls. They ought to likewise be persuaded to be taking an interest more in cybernetic classrooms.

Virtual learning is a part of the new technology development among learners globally, with the help of technology from anywhere anytime as per your convenience. Virtual learning has gained momentum recently after the lockdown in almost all the countries in the world due to the corona pandemic. There is a flood of webinars, workshops, FDP’s, and online learning, be it a school or college or any other institute. Everybody is using virtual classrooms for the teaching and learning process and to conduct all educational activities online. But the question here is; Are the learners learning and improving their performances through virtual learning? Are they enjoying virtual learning than the traditional face-to-face leanings? What do they think about the future of the learning system? All these questions were asked to the post-graduate students in the Mumbai region in an online survey who have attended the virtual classrooms. The results were analyzed based on their responses.