Education must facilitate learning, acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, beliefs, and habits. Its methods include storytelling, discussion, teaching, training, and focussed research. Not since the times of Vishnu Sharma in Panchatantra, storytelling, as a mode of teaching-learning been used at any level. Guru-Sishya tradition thrived in the ancient days where scholarship flourished. Ekalavya from Mahabharata who, after being rejected by Guru Dronacharya, began a disciplined program of self-study over many years and became an archer of exceptional prowess proving that education and impart of knowledge, can take place in formal or informal settings. All the age-old pedagogies are back with a bang, albeit nurtured under different, recipes such as synchronous, asynchronous, virtual and blended learning.
Technical education, in the country, traversed many challenges, since the first IIT was set up in Kharagpur in 1951, and soon after in Bombay, Madras, Kanpur, and Delhi. The graduate studies were as good as that offered anywhere in the World. Post Graduate studies and research left a lot desired on the quality front with many talented leaving the country for better facilities. Industries here laboured on imported designs and processes to keep their shops open. The low annual growth rate of the economy of India before 1980, which stagnated around 3.5% from 1950s to 1980s, while per capita income averaged 1.3%, never allowed a shift in traditional markets and traditional job roles. A thriving informal economy put paid to innovations.
The economic liberalisation, initiated in 1991, and the country’s economic policies, made the economy more market and service-oriented and expanded the role of private and foreign investment. Education had to follow suit and expanded, reaching a peak around 2010. The inflation, needed to cater to an ever-expanding young population, was However, found wanting in quality. Like any system, this too saw a plateauing off and extremely demanding, to maintain global standards. Is it time to look beyond the tried and tested?
A job market, lukewarm at best, to the ever increasing pressures of a burgeoning youth, lack of quality faculty, poor networking, poor leadership, rising costs, inadequate curriculum interventions, an infrastructural deficit in the ever demanding resources in our institutions, painfully low teacher student ratios and a woefully low planning quotient, both in the public and private education space, have all contributed to an alarming fall in quality levels in our education system, and contributed to a growing impasse, the result of which, seems to be a shift of students from technology oriented courses to science based courses. The Universities, falling under their own weight of affiliation, never rose beyond making a feeble attempt to raise quality levels, barring a few.
Manufacturing Industry with a thrust on digital manufacturing, has undergone a phenomenal transformation in the last two decades. Large scale Automation, AI, Robotics, special purpose machine tools and retrofitting have redefined job roles and rendered serval traditional ones redundant. The relevance of conventional universities will be challenged even more, as we traverse the next decade, with online education, poised as it is, on a growth trajectory. Rethinking education paradigm is then, an emerging truth that we cannot shy away nor wish away.
One of the major ills of current delivery models is the regimentation and structure it seeks, in implementation. With a surfeit of information available in the public domain, and children addicted to social networking sites, must be allowed to learn at their pace and understand at their leisure. Visual mediums are at least 30% more effective than any other. YouTube is the second most popular social network as of late 2016, and Snapchat, Periscope, and Vine are at the top, as well. Almost every major social network like the Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more, have all made it easier to upload, view and share videos on their respective applications and websites. Teaching, learning methodologies, must evolve and not stagnate with time.
Today, the most important challenge involves a shift in the way students perceive higher education. Instead of attending a single institution, students receive credit in multiple ways, including dual-degree programs, skill-based courses, online providers, and multiple universities. Students are embracing online courses and undermining core curricula, which served as a cash cow, by turning to alternate providers, and pursuing fewer majors that require study of a foreign language. As a result, colleges must become more nimble, entrepreneurial, student-focused, and accountable for what students learn.
An innovative way out, for at least the institutions in the State domain, would be, to be run by Industrial houses, under their CSR or any other scheme. Operationally, the State needs to mandate such a process. This also can address the problem of industry connect, best practices, product or process-based research and development, in areas that do not necessarily fall in the curriculum domain. Patents and IPR would be necessitated by need and hence institutionalised over time. Consequence would catapult such institutions into a higher plane of operation and a few notches above, in the global rankings. A PPP initiative in education, which has been a patented argument, of the government thought process, must be subjected to jetsam, for education institutions can never function like toll collecting agencies. Education “not for profit” theory also needs to be relooked at, for the funds have to come from somewhere.
Why should our institutions continue to languish out of the global rankings even with autonomy and leaders, both having metamorphosed? Running Universities and institutions, need nurturing and caring, both with funding and the rule book, as is with the industries. As far as the private institutions are concerned, they would be at the mercy of the market forces, but then, they were never meant to be bailed out by the State.
One other important factor, of fall in global rankings, is the lack of internationalisation in our education. Students from several African, some Asian and even trans-pacific nations, would love to come to our institutions, for the sheer cultural diversity and relatively better education. A National level entrance test on the lines of GRE, targeted against these countries could bring them in hordes.
An eminent faculty, would look to either making more money or work with better research facilities or explore a possibility of interaction with the best in his/her domain, or be privy to industry consultancy that can lead to new products and processes, thereby adding patents and IPR’s to his/her repute. None would venture out, except for a week’s visit at most, if the above are not perceived as available which is neither here nor there. Internationalisation calls for an outside faculty to be on the campus, teaching and doing research for a whole semester, if not less, and the model repeating, semester after semester, with the researchers and their departments mutating. Post doc researchers on our campuses are as rare as ‘aussi rares que les dents de poule’ as they say in French, which is as rare as hen’s teeth. Faculty from across the world would hand hold such initiatives adding great value.
The success of any university depends on its ability to forge strategic alliances with global international partners. The true nature of internationalisation is not universal or specific.
An IAUCI or an ABET or an IET accreditation brings a completely new dimension to the way we understand delivery models and the way we practice quality in our class rooms and institutions. The World moved from simple open loop assessment practices which were highly input based to more reliable closed loop technics that allowed measurement of outcomes and feedback. It is time we moved from closed loop accreditation methodology to more adaptive based systems for Quality Assurance is the only truth that will prevail in future.