Experimenting with Collaborative Learning in a Virtual Classroom

The Problem

As COVID-19 upended campuses and classrooms across the country like the rest of the world, instructors across India have been struggling with the problem, “how do you maintain the magic of classroom interactions when the classroom has no campus?”

Isolation with students watching faculty video lectures at 2X speed and taking proctored exams online was the new normal going into 2021..

The result - educational gaps that existed before the pandemic—in access, opportunities, achievement, and outcomes—all widened across colleges in India.

Collaborative learning in a Virtual Classroom

Overview of the project

MBF reached out to Yellowdig, a community engagement platform built specifically for educational institutions started by IITB alumnus Shaunak Roy. We launched a pilot programme at IIT Bombay ( Autumn 2021) with faculty from 5 courses across departments using the platform to engage over 360 students registered for their courses.

Two of these courses covering 250 students were from the Department of Electrical Engineering where our new collaborative learning classroom and experiential learning lab was coming up.

The data shared in the subsequent section are the results from EE 899 ( Prof Prashant Navalkar and Swaroop Ganguly) which involved the largest number (180) of students.

Significance of the Project

In terms of scope

Yellowdig was used as as an add-on to Zoom /Microsoft classrooms exclusively for colloborative learning and community building.
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In terms of impact

It enabled faculty to share content, initiate discussions on course related topics, incentivise participation from students awarding points that also added to their final garding.

In terms of time

The pilot ran for a full semester and evaluation at the end indicated that it helped faculty track student engagement and learning outcomes without adding to their workloads.
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