By Parampadam Dasa
How in tune are we with educational changes in the last 20 years? Can Sastric education online provide comprehensive Vaishnava training? What are the most important challenges and weaknesses in education and online? How to achieve a common goal with both modalities?
In this article we explain the experience of 14 years that, together with my wife Ananta Śayana Devi Dasi, we had in the development of our Organization – Culture of Bhakti, www.culturadelbhakti.com, an online campus for training and formal education in several Vaishnava topics.
The Evolution of our Educational Proposal
In the year 2004, after facilitating several live courses of Bhakti Sastri, we decided to dabble in online education, it was not more than a system of forums where we used our explanations with some questions and, the answers of students were there too. This was more or less like a mail course, but a little more elaborate.
By Krishna´s mercy, advances on the Internet after that year became our great allies, and currently, in our online educational campus: We have a staff of eight professors and we offer more than fifteen different courses. We have more than two thousand (2000) registered students who have access to videos, audios, Power Point presentations, texts, interactive exercises, games and live meetings with their teachers, and in a completely online manner. A quantum leap in the way of transmitting knowledge or information.
We are very grateful to have contributed to the Spanish-speaking Vaishnava community, giving hundreds of titles of Bhakti-sastri, and courses for disciples and Bhakti-vaibhava.
We also extend our educational proposals to training areas beyond the Sastric education. We have a completely free training course in Vaishnava practices for all those who begin Krishna Consciousness, and we have developed and created the most famous ISKCON courses on vocational training (Communication, Leadership, Mediation, Effective Teams and Facilitation) in an e-learning format.
Ananta Śayana Devi Dasi is providing for the first time in history [online], a very developed and practical course on the Classical Dance of India, in Odissi style, where devotees and worshippers from all over the world learn steps, postures and mudras to glorify the Lord and represent His pastimes.
This course of dance is also being used by many other people outside of Vaishnavism who appreciate this millenary art. It is very crowded by dancers from other music traditions, teachers and professionals in different areas of education.
Soon we will also be offering courses of Ayurveda, Jyotish (Vedic Astrology), Indian Vocal Music, vegetarian cuisine and Sanskrit which opens up the range of educational proposals beyond Vaishnava community.
The Evolution of Online Education in the World
Online education (e-learning) has ceased to be a type of teaching that seeks to emulate the traditional school classroom, and has become an educational proposal with its own pedagogical rules.
Almost all the best universities in the world have their own virtual campus, which become essential in capturing the potential, modern, students of the twenty-first century. It now sounds retrograde that in a school knowledge is only transmitted in a classroom with only help of printed books.
This is all due to the revolution of communication that has been taken over in the last twenty years. Today people conceive communication in a very different way than before. If someone has a doubt, he does not go to the library or to a teacher, but looks for his answers in Internet. Surely a similar revolution happened with the creation of the printing press, where the students began to resort to the books as a great source of knowledge, declining in some extent to be in direct contact with a professor or expert in the topic.
But, the big question is: Which way does this jump in communications affects the assimilation of Sastric knowledge and our processes of learning?
Online Versus FACE-TO-FACE
The possibility of studying a career over a distance allows more students to continue their studies. But the e-learning system also generates challenges, contrasting with the ability to have contact with the teacher.
Although the practice of using virtual classes grows steadily between the latest generations, there is still a long way to go. In fact, it is common to hear many teachers saying that it is not be viable to replace traditional classes by online modality. But, fortunately, not all human beings are the same and this diversity of characteristics can offer home for reconciling these methods.
Let us ask ourselves about the advantages and disadvantages of the virtual classes, in respect to personal understanding, in two formats: The synchronous modality, in which are connected at the same time the teacher and students (or multiple students to perform a job); and the asynchronous modality, in which each one accesses the material in a digital platform whenever he wants.
In a live class what happens inside the classroom will not be repeatable, unless you have recorded the entire class. But in the recorded class, besides that we must have the consent of the teacher and their peers, the students will have to strive to achieve a good film recording, because you must capture what explained by professor, questions of the audience, as expressed in the whiteboard, the experiment conducted of projection of slides.
On the contrary, the audiovisual material of an on-line class is conceived from its beginning with the intention of facilitating learning, with levels of animations and text. As a complement, in the synchronous on-line courses, it remains implicit that the meetings are recorded, not only to favor the absent pupils, but also to allow access for a as many times that it is necessary, braking it, stepping back and advancing to students´ will.
With regard to this last aspect, among the major advantages of the online courses is that we can count on the ease of seeing the material at the moment that we want, even from non-traditional environments such as a trip on the subway or a sunbed close to the sea. But here overlooks the first possible difficulty that could jeopardize this apparent paradise: connectivity. We all have knowledge of the vertiginous growth of communications, but we cannot discard the flaws and failures in the connections or the insufficient bands of any leases, especially in countries that do not belong to the labeled: First World.
In “Culture of Bhakti” we try to manage these challenges and strengthen e-learning as much as possible. To accomplished that we offer to our students a great variety of audio visual resources, including the recorded classes of the professors, which they can see, read and download during the week all the times that they want, and then, during the weekend, we meet them in a live online meeting where we share the learning experiences they have had.
In this way we try to ensure, as far as possible, a personal contact of the teacher with the student.
My teaching experience in both modalities (face-to-face and online) has allowed me to make a comparison between these two ways of education, and I can say, without a doubt, that I have not found large differences in training outcomes in the Sastric education students.
We were able (me and my wife) to realize that the success in the educational processes depends not so much on the modality of the course (online or classroom) but not to fall into the most common trap that happens in each of these two proposals.
The Most Common Fault in Online and Classroom Education
The weak link in face-to-face education:
ISKCON Educators’ Training Courses (TTC1 and TTC2), which we offer in on-line format, give a very clear guide of the weak links that might exist in any learning process; and although the list is long, in a personal matter, I think that there is one which especially stands out like the great weakness in the face-to-face teaching of Krishna consciousness. This refers to the deception of believing that only instructive speech of the teacher creates training and learning in the student.
Despite the fact that we can see victims of this deception in educational establishments outside of ISKCON, in our movement this deception legitimates confusion of the processes of sravanam kirtanam, which are very successful in the field of the development of Bhakti, with pedagogical proposals in themselves.
If a process of face-to-face learning is based on this misleading premise, then, the instructive videos of youtube could be more effective for students that a live classroom, since the videos offer more facilities for review and observation and repetition.
In this case, live education would be positioned below the online way of teaching.
We must always remember that: There is no impression without expression! This is one of the “Sutras” of the Teacher Training courses in ISKCON. It is therefore imperative that a teacher in a face-to-face modality creates ambiences to promote interaction and expression for the students.
The weak link in on-line education:
The e-learning system tries to ensure and demand that the students make contributions. This is done from audios or written media or creation of audio-visual resources. Therefore, it is very difficult in this modality that the professor falls victim of the previous deception and tricks.
Nevertheless, in this system there is a tendency to think that automation of the educational processes and evaluation by means of very sophisticated and creative web platforms creates in itself a great success in the training of the student.
Without a guardian “alive and aware” tutor in contact with the student, the learning is very limited.
Therefore, a professor in the online modality must be very aware of this, and include in his educational proposal areas where you can exchange the most possible personal relationships with their students.
Conclusion: Invitation to Professors
To conclude, we want to communicate that we are having a lot of success with classroom teachers who are working along with our on-line proposal, using its resources and offering them to its students.
This, undoubtedly, would be promoting the “best of each world” and benefiting the actual Vaishnava community which is eager to obtain an integral experience in its learning processes.
We invite all teachers of the Krishna Consciousness in Spanish-language to take advantage of the resources e-learning that we offer in our educative campus and in this way improve our services which are vital to the improvement and evolution of our institution and our communities. 16
Trained in social psychology and then initiated in ISKCON in 1988, in 2002 he received the Bhakti-sastri diploma. Since 2004 he coordinates and directs, with his wife, Ananta Śayana Devi Dasi, the first virtual educational platform for the Spanish-speaking world about the philosophical foundations of the Bhagavad Gita and other spiritual texts of India: www.culturadelbhakti.com. Their physical bodies reside in beautiful country Ashrama near Cordoba, Argentina.
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