One more budget was presented on the first of February this year, that is completely silent on any new initiatives for education and skills, save setting up a central university in Leh or setting up a national research fund (NRF) of Rs. 50,000 Cr over five years, that will amalgamate all research grants currently given by various ministries independent of each other. How the Rs. 10,000 Cr available per annum is distributed amongst a host of institutions for research or how thin it will spread are matters of detailing. COVID-19 has shown us that we can succeed in several ways other than what we were used to. Apart from impact on research, there have been profound changes in delivery of education too.
There are 35 million students enrolled in the higher education system in India contributing to a small Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) of 26. India has 65% of its population below the age of 35, which simply means that there are at least four times as many, who could have gone to colleges but did not. Is it feasible to build more brick-and-mortar units to accommodate them? Will they attend colleges if they were to be built? Aspirational supply chain seeks better educated and skilled personnel. Hence, upskilling and reskilling, both are imperative. What then is the way out? COVID-19 has shown us that online and blended learning have answers if we care to see. That the budget has not done so is a matter of concern.
Though Online education has been there for many years, its institutionalization has been made possible by the pandemic. It compressed the development and adoption cycles of online education. That several ed tech companies have set base in the country is a statement of purpose. Certain sectors of education like those that do not need hands on skills are eminently suited for online education. Others that need competency-based skills will need a blend of both online and offline modes. Its adoption needs IT infrastructure investments. Are our institutions ready to make the investments? At a time when the government should have been promoting, handholding adoption of online / blended learning majorly, it is silent as evident in the budget. The NEP’s studied provision of multi-point entry-exits and credit banks will come to a naught if they are not adequately facilitated for adoption in an online environment. Personalised learning that connects students to tutors, through Analytics and AI on an online platform such as a Learning Management System (LMS) to make learning effective and credible was required. A case for setting up a futuristic Virtual University (VU) with an administrative control in every district seems to have been lost.
All online courses require access to high-speed internet services. One also needs a laptop or a smart phone, a webcam and a headset or microphone. 51% of courses that are conducted worldwide are either hybrid or blended. Massive open online courses (MOOCs), offer large-scale interactive participation and open access through the WWW or other network technologies. VU would be the enabler.
Good content is at the heart of the model and is expensive. Good teachers with domain expertise, presentation skills and access to effective technology can all come together creating an experience to cherish. Can a system as large as 900 universities and 45000 colleges ever dream of creating content individually and port it on their individual LMS services? The answer lies in collaborations of different kinds.
With smart classrooms and LMS, it is now easy for teachers to conduct interactive learning sessions, map students’ knowledge, and create progress reports. Online examinations are conducted on web-enabled devices like laptops and desktop computers. They help to accurately assess a student’s knowledge in a wide range of subjects. Actually, it uses fewer resources and reduces the need for question papers and answer scripts, exam room scheduling, arranging invigilators, coordinating with examiners etc. A new department of content Management or (DOCM) under the Ministry of Education should have been created. The necessary state of art technology/recording centres could have been established in each of the District headquarters to provide the technology support. Such content when ported on a common LMS like Moodle, suitably customised and maintained by the DOCM could beam all content even addressing the digital divide. Sanitised mobile vans with PC’s and smart devices and access points to all remote locations would have been the carriers of the VU. For a maximum throughput and minimal interference required for conduct of nationwide teaching or conducting examinations, VU could have functioned on channels 1, 6, and 11 in the 2.4 GHz ISM Band. DTH Channels, Cable TV Network are all vehicles of equity. DOCM could have even aggregated third-party content like that of EdX, Coursera or Udemy or similar, in various disciplines, and ported them on a common LMS. Cost to student would have been minimal.
A collateral advantage of such a partnership is that the multi-point entry-exit option, accumulation of credits, the credit bank concept, designing one’s own Degree or Diploma, provided for in NEP, becomes meaningful and realisable. Physical entities of our Institutions/Universities would still remain in the physical space. A 50 GER envisaged in the next fifteen years could have been realised in the next five years. One could even aggregate similar research, thereby optimising the funding options. A National Mission on Education through information and communication technology should have enabled virtual laboratories which provide remote access to laboratories in various disciplines. Blended learning should have been recommended instead of disaggregated distance or online learning paradigms. Is it a case of lost opportunity?
For long, we have hypnotised ourselves into imagining that this is how things have been running and will continue to! Our schools and colleges must shift to online teaching. Our students to online learning. The VU would have enabled us to do it. It’s simple; the teachers now at their own homes, record their lessons on video and send it to the students on WhatsApp. That also prepares a digital library of content for the schools and colleges. The students could visit that content several times rather than over a single limited period in the class. This is the paradigm waiting to blow conch unless we want to ignore the war cry of COVID! That the budget missed it is even more painful.