Rain Classroom
The Birth of Rain Classroom
Online education represented by MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) has seen its rocketing development for the time being, which enabled more people to have access to free opportunities to learn and in the meantime, broke the limits of traditional mode of education.
Recently, Classroom Online Company (A MOOC platform in China) released “Rain Classroom”, a smart teaching tool. Rain Classroom was co-developed by Classroom Online and Online Education Office of Tsinghua University. The major objective of the tool is to connect students and teachers’ smart terminals to enable teachers to cover all links before, during as well as after the class.
This smart teaching tool integrated IT technology with classroom Powerpoint shows and Wechat (A Chinese social network media). Teachers can push MOOC video, exercises, voice and preview courseware to students’ smart phones and interact real time with students whenever necessary. In class, students can use their smart phone to answer questions, interact with teachers; after class, rain classroom can provide complete statistics support, personalized worksheets and automatic assignment alarms.
Since February, 2016, Rain Classroom was openly tested in 15 classes from 8 universities in China. In on April 1st, Rain Classroom was open for free use. Their officials said the smart teaching tool are being used by more than 7000 teaching institutions with over 80000 active teacher and student users. Next, the Rain Classroom team will upgrade their product from aspects such as the digging of teaching data, diversified situations and extra-curricular activities.
Classroom online is the first Chinese language MOOC platform in the world, which was launched by Tsinghua University. The platform now holds courses from dozens of universities home and abroad such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, Fudan University, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, etc. There are 3 million registered users, 5.5 million course selections and over 1000 courses by mid-June, 2016.
Classroom Online is actively exploring in the field of “Internet + Education” through cooperation when eminent universities home and abroad while continually increasing courses types and quantity and pushing educational reforms.
Advantages of Rain Classroom
In traditional classrooms, especially in classrooms with a large size class, the biggest problem used to be single direction of information transmission from teachers to students, or at least mostly like this. Thus, the consequence is that teachers teach with high clarity, but students do not understand and master what was taught. The reason is that teachers did not get feedback from students immediately. Although experience teachers can obtain such information through questions, observations and interactions, these data are not consistent and will not enable teachers to have an overall and clear grasp of situations of students.
Besides, teachers proceed their class at a scheduled pace in traditional classrooms so that the “teaching” can be finished on time. The truth is that students are not synchronized in their cognition, some are quick, some are slow. If a student can keep with the teacher’s pace, he will consider that the teacher teaches well. Students’ with faster cognition speed will feel bored and they will lose their concentration in class. While those who have difficulty to adapt to the speed will think what the teacher taught is too difficult, then they will also lose their concentration. It is very hard for a teacher to adjust his speed to meet all students’ demand.
Rain classroom can provide solutions to the two problems mentioned above. First, teachers can know how much students understand the teaching content by pushing exercises to students before class. In this way, teachers can obtain a lot of feedback information from the students, and, the information obtained in this way is accurate. So long as the exercises are well designed, the feedback acquired can in a sense be used as an “indicator” of classroom teaching results. Students will also now their answer speed and quality from these exercises and feedbacks, which will help them adjust their learning status.
Besides, by pushing materials after class, teachers can enable students to engage in preview and review activities. The quantity of these exercises is appropriate for students. In this way students of different cognition paces will improve themselves and catch up with the average students with the help of these pushed materials. Meanwhile, teachers also benefit from this practice, because now students can better follow teachers schedule and most students will benefit from it.
Apart from the advantages mentioned above, pushing PPT in class can avoid students’ wasting time on taking notes and neglecting teachers teaching in class, which is also helpful to the interaction between audience and the reporter (in a seminar, for example).
Most of the functions and operations are performed in PowerPoint and Wechat. So, to most teachers, they will have no technological problems and difficulties in using the Rain Classroom.
Rain Classroom, Really So Beautiful
One of the features emphasized by the Rain Classroom is its real-time interaction. Students can ask questions to teachers and teachers can respond to these questions in real time. But teachers may not have enough time to answer all students’ questions, which is also a kind of burden for teachers in class. While this problem can be solved by sharing the questions and answers after class instead of doing QNA real-time in class. On the other hand, this online tool may make learning easy, but it can also make students lazy.
Rain Classroom is not the first tool in classroom teaching. There are other tools like Google Classroom.
In September 2014, Google released its online educational product -- Google Classroom, which turn classroom teaching into real-time communication and cooperation. According to Google, this platform can help teachers quickly create and sort assignment, provide feedback and communicate with students in class.
In Google Classroom, students can finish their homework assigned by their teachers via Google Drive. Teachers can also give their feedback via shared files on Google Drive. Via the same UI, Students can see the progress of each assignment and their scheduled school work.
Teachers’ UI allow teachers to deliver individual assignment or assignment in batch. Teachers’ can view the progress and submission of these assignments and grade and give feedback to these assignments. All the files will be saved on Google Drive. What’s more, there are also tools for teachers and students exchange their opinions.
Generally, Google Classroom focus on offline (after-class) activities, while Rain Classroom mainly concentrate on in-class functions such as in-class interactions. In addition, Rain Classroom has a platform of more than 16000 free online courses.
As for whether Rain Classroom can bring benefits as expected, we have to wait and see.