Extended Microteaching (XMT): Innovative Teaching Pedagogies for the New Normal Education System in India

Abstract

India's latest National Education Policy (NEP) has been updated, revised and approved on 29 July 2020. The policy signifies a huge milestone for India's Education system, which will certainly make India an attractive destination for higher education world-wide. However, to transform India into a vibrant knowledge hub and motivate Indian students to focus on “Make in India” initiatives, it is highly important to focus on innovative teaching pedagogies at the Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). Integrating Information, Communication, and Technology (ICT) with improved traditional teaching pedagogies can be one of the main elements in transforming the country's future development. Innovative practices in pedagogy have by and large crept into the domain of higher education in India in the last 30 years. But these innovations need to be improved and developed further considering the overall development of the students. We identified “Microteaching” to be a potential teaching strategy for blended and/or complete on-line teaching. In this paper, we identified few more teaching pedagogies - brainstorming, knowledge sharing, interactive case study, mnemonics, field trip, role-play & practical group activities, field trip, peer review of teaching and learning, data-driven approach, problem-driven approach and technology-driven approach that could fit within microteaching and we coined the term as “Extended Microteaching (XMT)”. We conducted a pilot study to determine the improvement that will be achieved by applying extended microteaching pedagogies in teaching and learning in Indian engineering colleges. From the results, we understand, in the new normal all the institutions will have blended or purely on-line teaching, that might start adopting our proposed teaching pedagogies, and many more pioneering practices will be implemented to improve the education system in India.