Former U.S. President Obama once said that the currency for the 21st century will be education and innovation. Dr. R.A. Mashelkar, former DG-CSIR, went further by saying that what we need most now is education in innovation and innovation in education. And, India needs it the most.
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Within a few years, around 30 new Central Universities, 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology, five new IITs, six new IIMs, and five new Indian Institute of Science Education and Research were created. Around 800 multinational companies have set up Research and Development (R and D) centres in India and employ around 2,00,000 scientists, engineers and technologist. But, the question as to whether we have repurposed our education system for the future, to appeal to the need of the world of work, still needs to be addressed.
Dramatic changes
The two years of the pandemic has led to a drastic change among students. which would have otherwise normally occurred over the span of a decade. In addition, global socio-cultural changes have also augmented the change how students think, learn, and value things. Consequently, the changes that the academic sectors have to navigate, pose a huge challenge. This includes the need for reorientation among professors in empathising with students and engaging them without judgement, but with a clear action plan to normalise the academic climate. The new normal solicits a specific capacity-building among the faculty to navigate the normalisation of the academic climate.
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According to recent industry reports, India’s online education market is poised to grow by $2.28 billion between 2021-2025, at a CAGR of 20%. Consequently, it suggests that stakeholders are already on the verge of readily adopting reshaped pedagogy and redesigned curriculum for the new dispensation. Are higher education institutes (HEIS) equipped to handle this change to create engaging online modules to appeal to this generation?
Outcome-based attendance
We expect students to be confined within four walls and listen to the conventional instructions as part of the teaching and learning. Irrespective of whether the lectures lead to concept progression among them, their physical presence is marked as attendance. Specifically, the need is to define attendance by liberating it from time and space, and considering it in terms of learning outcome intended for every hour by designing an appropriate formative assessment as metrics. Outcome-based attendance would be meaningful, engaging and liberating since the blended learning or flexible scheduling or hybrid flexible (HyFlex) as modus operandi and culture is emerging to be the new order and Online Distance Learning (ODL) is likely to be legitimised in collegiate education. A personalised and foolproof online assessment system to monitor their asynchronous learning and measurement of learning outcomes per hour, irrespective of whether the student is confined within walls or engaged through online learning, has to be redeemed as attendance. The University Grants Commission (UGC) has been advocating blended learning to appeal to the current generation, subsequent to the pandemic and institutions abroad have come up with hyflex models of engagement to promote teaching and learning.
The next aspect that bothers institutions is the inability of the present generation of students to handle information overload from social media. Among students, the processing of information acquired through the context or content would typically happen through the progressive organic maturity acquired through social learning and life experiences including extracurricular activities in the college or school, friendships made during their education, and leadership skills learnt by being involved in organising cultural and co-curricular activities. If the information processing does not happen through adequate social learning, it may lead to a cognitive overload. Subsequently, this may lead to difficulty in comprehending an issue and making effective decisions. Consequently, the inability to assimilate the information as personality traits would render students to be puffed up with pseudo-cognition, thus triggering them to make hasty decisions, ignoring the prerequisite for negotiation and coping skills, social skills including people skills as part of life. Reports have shown that, in the post pandemic, emotional intelligence seems to be missing among students.
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Period of transition
On the one hand, we are in a rat race for organisational accreditation or ranking and the operation appears to be successful. On the other hand, we fail to take into cognisance the real failure in assessing the quality of students placed in industries or organisations with adequate social skills required to cope with the world of work. It is not clear whether ranking or accrediting agencies are really concerned about these aspects to adjudicate the mental health index of students or offer a clear provision to incentivise such measures administered by the colleges as part of their assessment.
Students, teachers and learning itself have transformed. Learning tools too have evolved accordingly. The ways of thinking and working and tools for working have also undergone a dramatic change. Teachers, today, have to realise these aspects, as this is a period of transition. Teachers need to liberate themselves from the past and think along with the present generation to render the teaching-learning process pleasurable.
The writer is the Principal and Secretary of Madras Christian College. wilson@mcc.edu.in