Is it possible to future-proof learning in our institutions in the age of artificial intelligence? How to teach about tomorrow in a present day classroom is a question posed by futurist Alvin Toffler half a century ago. It remains a concern for all those who are interested in education. Updating the curriculum is no more about decisions on where to cut, what to add or copy and where to re - arrange in specified update cycles.
Many update cycles of curriculum and revision intervals of syllabi span beyond relevance. It takes significant time for any new concept to get academic acceptance. It also takes time to be included in the curriculum and textbooks, after procedural approvals. This means even a recently updated curriculum may be procedurally new but inadequate, in terms of future requirements, while we maintain the fallacy of novelty. Many institutions and students suffer seriously from this illusion of newness.
Comprehensive approach
While accepting the universal values as eternal, all others come with an expiry date, including our own physical bodies. Why not attach an expiry date to a syllabus while creating it? Every curriculum has essential elements which may have timeless value along with other contents which may need timely review, revision and refinement. To address this issue comprehensively, a shift from update cycles to live-feeds is the ideal way. However, as the first step, we at least need to make a revision inevitable. For each syllabus we may brace an expiry tag signifying a valid life period of those contents, making review and revision inescapable. It is not hard to update the syllabus in time, but it is hard to update it correctly — or even near correctly — if there is a benchmark for correctness.
An informed educator can understand the life period of various themes in the syllabus. One way for this is to step out of the discipline and look at the work of futurists, at how the direction of their discipline is described by experts in different domains, including their own. Critically looking for those directions and variances among practitioners will give the educator a firm stand on the way in which disciplines are created and collapsed, how they merge and emerge. Acknowledging this dynamic nature of developments in a discipline and how it is reflected in education will create the need for reflection in the curriculum. It will also equip an educator to create a syllabus with an expiry date and to creatively deliver the syllabus with confidence and credibility.
Transformation
Most curriculum and pedagogy can incorporate vital and instantaneous changes, if design thinking is used in the curriculum preparation instead of mere statement of policies, prerequisites, practices, and outcomes. The shift from preparing a syllabus for the class to constructing an experience for the students requires a transformation, not interval based improvisations. A living curriculum and live syllabi in many progressive institutions are not too far away. It is already there in limited forms and versions, available to be decoded for creative educators.
The writer is an education officer with University Grants Commission.
