Chapter 7 - Contemporary Changes in Teaching Formats

Summary

Teaching formats are constantly evolving over the years to adapt to newer methods of student learning. In the ancient times, the practice of ‘Gurukul System’ where students would go and live with a teacher and learn all that teacher would know and practice by listening and observing. Here the method adopted was more tacit-to-tacit knowledge transfer between the teacher and the students. The learning here used to be a function of student’s ability to absorb skill and knowledge, and the evaluation used to be a function of real demonstration of student’s ability. This method has changed in the last hundred years where a more formal schooling system has evolved to get both teachers and students in one place, and the knowledge is transferred explicitly in the form of a prescribed curriculum. The learning in a ‘classroom’ environment is more formatted and the evaluation is based on formal assessments. In the recent years, lot of interest has been developed to innovate the teaching formats so that a ‘student centric learning’ can be practiced in a classroom environment. As described by Kaplan (2021) in this book’s first chapter, changes triggered by the COVID 19 pandemic have impacted the Education Sector extensively giving birth to a digital mode of instruction as the new normal. The digital platform and the transformation it can bring into the practice has created new interest among the teaching community to explore better teaching formats.