Interactive Learning: Besides access to Nature’s research papers, Scitable also provides students a forum for collaboration with peers (Source: Nature.com)

Is there a way to create a 21st century way of learning?

Nature, the top-rated research journal in the world, is trying to do just that. Its publishers, the Nature Publishing Group, have begun experimenting with a new method through a new website called Scitable. It launched the beta version of the website that provides educational content through articles written by experts. The website also provides access to relevant research papers published in Nature and its group journals. At the moment the only subject Scitable covers is genetics but more subjects will be added later. The website also provides a forum for collaboration with peers and mentors. The aim is two-fold. First, to give the students a taste of research literature early on in their undergraduate years. And second, to make learning peer-based through collabo-ration. Vikram Savkar, director of Nature Education, says, “Great teachers are not scaleable. We are trying to make education more peer-based.”

So what’s new? There are many good educational websites available on the internet today. Nature Education’s website is free; most good online edu-cation websites are expensive. Textbook publishers do provide online tools along with some textbooks, but they are too expe-nsive. A good text-book along with the its online tools can cost as much as $200.

So Scitable can work as a supplement to textbooks, some-times even replace them, for free but that’s just a part of the story. It not only provides access to research literature, which otherwise take three to seven years to find their way into textbooks, but also guides students to the relevant paper. Articles written by experts act as guiding material to the relevant research papers published in Nature Group journals. Since research papers are the chief source of experimental data, students are exposed to experiments early on in their career. Says Clare O’Connor, associate professor of biology at Boston College, “Science is evidence-based. Access to experimen-tal data is invaluable to a student.”

O’Connor is one of the many professors who have written content for the website. Nature Education has hired several professors who will generate content in other subjects. It has also hired Dimdim, a Hyderabad-based Indian firm, which specialises in Web-conferencing solutions, to make collaborative tools. Students can chat, share images, videos and text while they work through the website. Nature Education uses a software, customised by Dimdim, to let many students watch the same video simultaneously. D.D. Ganguly, CEO of Dimdim, says, simul-taneous video viewing was especially desig-ned for this website. “Watching video simultaneously is not a feature of normal Web-conference solutions.” Twenty-first century pedagogy seems to have arrived.

P. Hari in San Francisco

(Businessworld Issue 28 Oct-3 Nov 2008)