Connected classrooms

The digital age has led to a paradigm shift in the way we live. Fuelled by the internet, we are now in an era where the Internet of Things (IoT) has a profound and transformative impact on the world and its people. This immense effect has been felt across sectors, spheres, both personal as well as professional. Education too has been metamorphosed with the advent of the Internet of Things.

So how exactly, and in what ways, does IoT make its undeniable presence felt in the realm of education?

Students’ perspective

For learners, IoT has been revolutionary. IoT offers myriad possibilities, access, connectivity and shared learning.

Transboundary collaborations have been made possible thanks to IoT. Until now, it would have been extremely cumbersome for students across cities, towns and countries to work jointly on a project. Now, with the internet, with video-conferencing, shared and cloud-based storage solutions, shared access and the ability for multiple stakeholders to simultaneously work on documents, presentations etc., the meaning and scope of a joint project have been transformed.

Studying, tracking and assimilating data, and then analysing and presenting it, have been hugely facilitated by the Internet of Things. A group of students can, for instance, relatively easily install a tracking chip or device on an animal, track its movements, behavioural pattern and then collate that data on the cloud, share it, and get other perspectives on it, compare and contrast, and arrive at much more insightful conclusions, all thanks to the internet.

At school, and especially later on at college, time management, scheduling, and seamless communication with multiple stakeholders can take place due to IoT. Managing multiple classes, assignments, internships, teacher apprenticeships, can now all be flawlessly integrated into a connected and dynamic scheduling system, largely facilitated by the internet, exponentially increasing the efficiency of students.

Educators’ perspective

Even educators, largely helped by the same set of tools as students, are now living in a much more connected, collaborative environment where they can communicate with peers from all over the world, from allied institutions with whom they are able to undertake joint projects, teach in different institutions, run joint programmes, have much more robust evaluation systems, and organise conferences and conclaves with varied perspectives from a much richer diversity of attendees and participants.

Management’s perspective

IoT paves way for a more convenient and connected system of management which allows students and faculty to make payments, use various resources, all using their individual, unique, connected accounts and identities, mitigating mistakes, hassle, physical burden and wastage of time.

In a similar manner, the IoT allows campus management to run a more well-informed and efficiently managed ship. The school or college campus is quite dynamic in nature with transportation, classes, usage of different resources such as rooms, conferencing, sporting facilities, labs taking place simultaneously. With everything on a smart network, redundancies can be built-in to ensure optimum utilisation of resources and minimum wastage and impact on the environment.

Smart, efficient, connected, and collaborative: these are the attributes that cut across situations and scenarios and present the best opportunities for students, faculty, and facilitators alike. Education is undergoing its biggest possible transformation. This undeniable revolution is all thanks to the IoT.