Social media is mostly for interacting with friends and sharing personal pictures and opinions, but a lot of useful information is also available on such platforms. Bengaluru-based educational startup Sookshmas has introduced a platform that is helpful for students.
Sookshmas is an organisation that helps connect students, teachers and institutions and allows them to share their thoughts, ideas, questions and teachings. Social media platforms are flooded with political discussions, entertainment and sports news, food and travel stories but when it comes to education little is discussed. Sookshmas’ major goal is to unite the education industry where every element can connect to each other and exchange their ideas, solutions, answers and notes to take their understandings and reachability beyond the classroom/ physical limits.
Telling us more about the platform, managing director of Sookshmas, Kamlesh Jang Bahadur Singh, says, “It works like any other social media platform, for instance, students can follow their teachers online, but the only difference between other platforms and Sookshmas is that the teachers can only post academic content such as notes, lectures, quizzes or answers.”
It just requires one click for students to access these files uploaded online. To clear their doubts, students can have discussions with their teachers or fellow students.
Social media can lead to constructive learning, if the platform has a special focus and the flow is controlled and monitored. “When it comes to regular platforms what happens is that educational content flows with the mixture of entertainment or other stuff that can be irrelevant to the requirement of the student which can cause distraction and loss of interest in learning,” says Singh.
Sookshmas helps students to finetune the content flow as per their course, degree, standard or subject of interest. “So if an engineering student is in his fourth semester, then he can access content with respect to the fourth semester syllabus. The content can be posted by teachers that the student is following, or friends or from anyone he is following,” Singh explains.
When asked why it is important for teachers and students to connect with each other on a social media platform, Singh says that in today’s world every student is attracted to digital platforms and they spend a lot of time on the internet. This investment of time by students for connectivity or entertainment is creating a learning gap.
“Hence it is important to have a platform with the same modern concepts for the purpose of educating youngsters. Also, such platforms can help expand the network between students and teachers that are limited to their schools or colleges now. With such educational platforms they will have greater access to information and this will eventually create a good understanding between students and teachers and also increase productivity in students,” says Singh.
Digital education has been talked about for a couple of years now in India but “the problem with digital education is that it is mostly restricted to reputed schools and colleges in our country and is not being used to its fullest capacity,” says Singh pointing out that currently, a few parts of digital education is implemented in some of the schools and colleges like digital boards, digital teaching material which mostly include animated and video lectures etc.
Even though the speed of digital education is quite good he believes that with newly emerging digital learning technologies in the next half a decade India will be 70-80 per cent digitalised in terms of digital education methods which will be an added benefit for students.
Talking about the upcoming trends in technology that are pushing the limits of digital education in India, Singh says that bringing education on social media will enable people to integrate the whole education domain and spread learning in every corner of the country, from the deep rural areas to the metro cities.
“The engaging property of social media will minimise the potential education gaps in the layers of our country, help in up-skilling the students and will also reduce the time required to connect the whole of India with digital education,” Singh concludes.
