Educators face turbulence while organizing the learning experience of students. They have to adhere to the schedule and syllabus on one hand and learners’ interactions on the other. Very few are able to predict just what kind of interactions they would actually come across in a classroom setting. The fact that some teachers are able to predict the response and reactions of students is indicative of the validity of analyses that goes behind their attempts at organizing learning and their depth in particular. The insight hitherto reveals the classroom-context from the educator’s perspective.
From the learner’s perspective there are two basic experiences that have a direct impact on their learning. Both these experiences are the result of academic expectations. Learning as a natural outcome ensues without the rigid structure of the dynamics of expectations of learners, teachers and parents. One experience that students often go through is the underlying conflict between the intellect on one hand and self esteem on the other. The two at logger heads with each other result in a state of schematic chaos. This affects the learner and he/she would find the concepts to be intellectually intangible. In the educator’s parlance schematic chaos is what we would describe as a black out.
The second experience that students often go through is the fear of not being able to learn. The fear in question arises out of the teacher’s attempt to extinguish some behavior of the student on account of some default in perception. This default in perception is the teacher’s, as the learning experience that he/she should have organized has gone out of hand. The student remembers the extinguished behavior and gets discouraged to express without being able to learn as a result. These two experiences have a direct impact on learning when actually they may appear to an observer as extraneous. They are in truth not extraneous as human learning is about traversing the cognitive, affective and psycho-motor domains. Young students cannot be made to worry about what to say when it comes to learning. Teachers need to understand this. The academic expectations must therefore be reviewed in order to nurture learning and not limit learning under the pretext of managing group learning experiences. In this respect, online tutoring cannot be perceived as merely technology enabled. It is built on the concept of designing a learning experience and not limiting it. Learning cannot happen without involving the learner and the lack of individual attention in a classroom can be a deterrent to the experience. The online interface accepts the learner into the design thus enabling learners to overcome schematic chaos and the learning block of fear.