BENGALURU: No classroom, no textbooks. Instead, the sudents of Shri Bhagawan Mahaveer Jain University attended classes from home via Twitter on Monday and Tuesday.
“Ten days ago, we had discussed about Periscope, the live video broadcast app by Twitter, with one of my colleague. Little did I know that it will help me take classes for two consecutive days. With the help of the app, my class was full- virtually,” Prof Sachin Tantry, head of the department of Arts at Shri Bhagawan Mahaveer Jain University said.
Prof Tantry took a class for first-year BA Journalism students where he taught ‘Models of Communication’ on Tuesday. He took a class online via Periscope app on Monday too.
He said that all it needs is a smartphone or computer with internet facility, a Twitter account and the Periscope app.
“As Monday’s classes were marred by the bus strike, a student gave me this idea. We also have a WhatsApp group for each class. I sent a message at 9 am asking students to download the app. After initial hiccups, we started the class at 10.45 am on Monday,” he said.
“Of 79 students, 55 attended online, while 20 of them were in my classroom,” Prof Tantry said.
One of his students who has gone for a sports meet at Guhwati, too attended the class.
The app has an option where the user can change the view to private or public setting.
Prof Tantry said that more number of students attended the class via the app on Tuesday.
“There is an option where one can interact with the speaker, but many of them who were listening to the class through their phones, did not have that option. So we interacted through WhatsApp,” he said.
“But there were some technical snags, the live video could be watched for only 20 minutes, after which it has to be restarted. We did this thrice for the hour-long class. I am going to write to Twitter to resolve the issue,” he added.
Tantry said the app can be made of use by those who enroll for distance education.