Making Teaching "Humanly Possible"

Many view the role of a teacher as an educator and mentor for students. But it has come a long way since then - now they are full-time researchers, student counsellors, motivational speakers and sometimes office assistants doing paper crunching for thousands of reports colleges have to send to different agencies. Personal life becomes a myth, often forgotten!?Thankfully like the pathetic state of our democracy, it's nobody's fault - we always have low points as the system evolves!

In other words, teaching has grown into something that is not humanly possible. What better motivation to look into automating your day-to-day tasks? Cutting the root off by automating the process of teaching would be suicidal. CoViD and our online classes have taught us that we are a million years away from computers stealing the personal touch from classrooms. Instead, I employed some automation and technology to simplify some menial tasks.

From attendance management to personalising mentoring to all 100 students you teach, taking your mind off privacy invasion during online classes - some daily routines, saving up to nearly 20 minutes a day - but that's not a lot!

Let me trick you with the cliche argument that 20 minutes a day adds up to 34 hours a semester that I can invest more in students? All of these slowed down a bit since classes went offline - it takes extra effort to convert offline data to soft copy - making it not worth the time.

Apart from teaching, I have employed Excel and Watson NLP to cut some slack on months of reporting work into a few hours and much more.

Then what is the point of this entire article? It is always good to educate ourselves on "What kind of problems can be solved by programmes/AI/ML?" Nowadays, it is as easy as a few clicks and drags to make simple appliances of your own. If you are not confident to pull it off yourself, trouble that friendly neighbourhood programmer with a call! And trust me, no one other than you can start finding problems and solve them better than you at your workplace - because no scientist or programmer knows your work better than you!

I'm not saying I can sleep more than 4-5 hours a day trying to catch up with my work assignments and teaching/mentoring duties with these minor fixes. But it does take some load off my shoulder. Definitely a step toward making teaching humanly possible!?And hey - it's an adventure exploring the unknown!

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I have avoided more technical details here - if you are keen on knowing more about it/have some tricks/suggestions in these lines up your sleeves, leave a message!