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 can predict just what kind of interactions they would actually come across in a classroom setting. The fact that some teachers can predict the responses and reactions of students is indicative of the validity of analyses that go 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, two basic experiences 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 are at loggerheads with each other resulting 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 blackout.
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 from expressing it 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 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.