Modern technology has brought about unbelievable change in the world in the last couple of decades. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has not only revolutionised information dissemination, it has also made phenomenal contributions in social networking. Though no one is certain how the future technology will shape up the world in the near future, what is certain is that the universities are going to be the pivot of that change. Universities thus will have to continually make optimum use of the existing technology and progressively work for the advancement of novel technology.
The Government of India has made concerted efforts to leverage the potential of the ICT in teaching and learning both in school and higher education. The scheme of Educational Technology (ET) was introduced in 1972 with the establishment of six State Institutes of Educational Technology (SIETs). Two major initiatives were undertaken in 1984, one was the establishment of the Central Institute of Technology (CIET) by merging the Department of Teaching Aids (DTA) and the Centre of Educational Technology (CET) as a constituent unit of the NCERT and another was the Computer Literacy and Studies in Schools (CLASS) project. A little later in 1988, three more schemes namely the Vidyarthi Computer Scheme, Shikshak Computer Scheme and School Computer Scheme were added. In higher education, the beginning was made with the introduction of National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL) in 2003 followed by the National Mission on Education through ICT (NME-ICT) in 2009, e-PG Pathshala in 2010 and the Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds (SWAYAM) as national Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) platform in 2015. However, the outcomes of these initiatives leave much to be desired.
The recent entry to the field is the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The move towards developing and delivering courses under the MOOCs is intended to provide online courses to all who desire them free of cost. There are a number of premier international institutions like Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc, which are offering MOOCs like Coursera, edX and Udacity. Several institutions from India are joining the MOOCs platform to offer online courses and Swayam is an initiative in that direction. MOOCs remain mostly common among the urban, English-speaking, technology-friendly groups.
Though the technology-enabled learning initiatives show how the technology has made deep inroads in methods of pedagogy, the challenge now resides in ensuring that it reaches the end-user in the remotest place. Digital divide in India does not work in isolation from other divides but actually gets aggravated due to them. Universities in India cannot only adapt their institutional spaces to technology-enabled climate which is most important, but can also find mechanisms to take technology outside the campuses to spaces which do not have access to it and that can truly be a welcome first step in the direction of democratisation of technology-based remote education.
One of the serious problems in education has been the lack of innovation. It is evident from the antiquated means of curriculum transaction even when there is so much of emphasis on the use of ICT in classroom teaching. Universities are busy doing different kinds of things depending upon their own requirements as they believe in customised solutions. There are very few which invest on innovations to make an edge. It requires a changed mindset because successful use of ICT is now like one of the inevitabilities of teaching and learning. According to David Warlick, “We need technology in every classroom and in every student and teacher’s hand, because it is the pen and paper of our time and it is the lens through which we experience much of our world.”
Though Covid-19 has terribly exposed the hollowness of the system, it has taught numerous lessons to policymakers, educational planners, and policy implementers. Among others, it has underscored the importance of remote teaching and learning. One might have some reservations for cent percent remote education but the time has come when we need to plan to deliver a sizeable component of education remotely even in normal course of time. But it would not merely mean shifting of in-class sessions into virtual sessions. It would require a lot many other enabling initiatives.
Remote education essentially requires a lot of preparation in terms of advancing both hardware and software facilities like mechanism for developing high quality e-courseware in different domains of knowledge, audio-visual capable classrooms or immersive educational studio fitted with microphones hanging from ceiling and multiple cameras, virtual labs, means to promote cooperative learning, tools for assessment of students’ potential and application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ensure improved learning experiences. It would not require any novel technology as the existing one is good enough to make it happen. It is only the application of AI which would require a little adaptation in the existing technology since so far it does not exist in education as in other professions like health, financial markets, predicting weather calamities, self-driving cars, etc.
Remote education should be considered a matter of prime importance in present times. It should rather be made an integral part of Institutional Development Plan (IDP) of every university. The Vice-Chancellor of the university should be the prime mover of this change. Maximum capital expenditure, as far as possible, should be made on augmenting the infrastructure facilities which can facilitate remote education.
The entire exercise needs to be planned and executed in four different phases. First, teachers need to identify the course contents that could be remotely delivered and then prepare each lecture in four quadrants using text, visuals, simulations and exercises prior to recording. It is a low-barrier entry which requires only infrastructure investment in the form of an immersive educational studio and teacher’s capacity to record in a manner that gives the students the sense of what the teacher is trying to convey. Second, teachers need to create a comprehensive and fair assessment system to validate how much learning has taken place. This is also a low-barrier option as there are commercially successful models available for carrying out both proctored examination and remote assessment. Third, it is important to facilitate interaction amongst students to promote team spirit, cooperative learning and inter-learner learning without which the remote education will fall short of acceptable benchmarks. There are standard procedures developed by companies like Google and Facebook for creating virtual campuses whereby students can interact with each other and jointly work on projects and file their submissions. Such models can be safely adopted for the purpose of promoting cooperative learning.
Fourth, greater emphasis needs to be laid to ensure that the students are making the right kind of progress in remote education. This would require scaling of teachers which can be accomplished in two ways. One way could be as per the existing model to provide Technical Assistants (TAs) or Research Assistants (RAs) who can assist teachers in addressing the issues of students by splitting them in smaller groups. Another could be through the use of AI by figuring out the concepts that are not understood by the students on the basis of formative and summative evaluation. AI can also be used to pick up signals from the facial expressions and body language of the students during the live streaming of lectures. Accordingly, AI can help identify concepts that turn out to be hard spots of learning and recommend their automatic recalibration. It basically would mean revamping the curriculum and delivering another set of instructions to the students. Thus AI can greatly help teachers to customise education based on the ability of individual students. One can do lots of interesting things through artificial intelligence and make teaching and learning very lively.
Remote education is going to prove an invaluable mode of teaching and learning as it has the potential to augment higher education in a variety of ways. On the one hand it will help increase the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) and bridge regional, gender and social inequalities, on the other it will enable teachers to devote more time on research and innovation. However, it can be successfully implemented by making substantial investment in creating requisite infrastructure in universities and colleges besides ensuring the availability of broadband connectivity and laptops to every student. An exuberant and unrestrained progression would be essential for the growth and development of higher education. This initial investment, though may be large, will give a much needed fillip to the economy the moment these skilled youth enter into the world of work.
The writer is former Chairman, UGC. The views expressed are personal.