REIMAGINING ENGINEERING EDUCATION FOR 'TECHCELERATING' TIMES

Education 2047 #Blog 05 (30 NOV 2020)

The concept and format of a four-year undergraduate degree programme in engineering is more than 200 years old (shorter/ longer versions also exist) and has remained the same- unchanged, unquestioned and unchallenged since its creation; needless to say attempts to rejig have been strongly resisted and rejected. It evolved at a time when books (democratized to some extent by the libraries) and teachers were the only source of information/ knowledge which students would receive and use it for practising it in their profession as engineers. It was then, over two centuries back, possibly realized that a full four years' worth of knowledge needs to be there in the memory of the student, “just-in-case” of need, at the respective workplaces. To ensure that prospective engineers rose to the expectations their employers had from them, examinations were conducted to ascertain that they carried the knowledge all the time and examinations were a tool for that, besides pronouncing the calibre and competence of the engineers.


Nobody really knows how much of knowledge was actually needed, how much was useful and how much was used. The entire batch of students was administered the same course, same set of instruction and same examination obviously for jobs that demanded the application of previous knowledge and left little scope to invent or add new knowledge to the pool, which was left to those who chose to study more for higher degrees. Clearly, the aim of engineering courses was the preparation of professionals for engineering new solutions based on scientific principles or extending the known solutions further. And for this, it was important to arm them with knowledge needed "just-in-case".


The qualification of a person to be an engineer depended on books and teachers, both repositories of knowledge. Thus, the activities that could be taken up during the course were limited by the access to information that was in the books or the journals or technical manuals created. A limited amount of hands-on experience came through the practical classes- structured and pre-defined. Thus, there was no room to apply or practice what was learnt and one had to carry four years of academic load, to the shop-floor or real work-places. Much later, internships in research institutions and industries were introduced, as they had a better infrastructure, were focused in their activities and introduced the students to the professional work-spaces before they got initiated in a professional world.


Now that we are in the knowledge era and knowledge of not just four years but of entire humanity available in a democratized form, at the click of a button or gesture before a screen, do we still need to persist with the status quo? Why not let the students learn how to learn in the first year, practice it in the next three years and stay a lifelong learner? Why not challenge the students with problems for 4 years (or at least three years) and let them learn engineering, sciences, humanities and all the skills required, even as they crack the problems and fail also in the process? Why not train them in four years to spot the dots (of knowledge) initially and then on connecting the dots, using all the resources? Yes, it is about challenging the status quo of 200 years, warranted by 'techcelerating' world!


Let's imagine how the elements of engineering education would or should change in this configuration, the focus being not on subjects but exposure to a wide range of real problems and training on the application of knowledge and pick-up skills. Foremost, the hard infrastructure consisting of laboratories, workshops etc. must be open 7x 24; yes, that is, 7 hours a day for 24 days in a month. Over the decades, there has been drastic reduction in practical exposure over theory (which can be accessed online now). This infrastructure, however, needs an infusion or integration of equipment that allow training on currently missing 21st century skills- problem solving, critical thinking, communication, lifelong learning etc and placing it at the centre. Actually engineering education which should be around these skills and hands-on/ practical experience, has veered away into the cognitive domain from the union of cognitive, affective and psycho-motor domains, seemingly because the latter challenges the comfort zone that most institutions have gravitated into.


The emerging trends conditioned by exponential technologies point towards engineering education being geared towards creation of not just jobs, but also opportunities, knowledge, applications, resources, products, processes; to put it succinctly, for innovation. But in reality, the efforts in education institutions fall short when it comes to delivering on innovations. According to a recent study published in the Harvard Business Review,  most of the successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged, even in the tech sector. This was a study of 27 lakh start-ups which revealed that the average start-up founder was 45 years, when s/he founded the most successful tech companies. The engineering students are not even half this age, and driving them (and their faculty) for innovations needs rethinking. However, the finding should not be a deterrent to graduating youth from adventures and ventures, and in making attempts and meeting failures- so as to train them taking on changes/ challenges after leaving college. It is against this reality and exponential changes in technology that we need to reflect upon for deciding on the knowledge, skills and values to be imparted through the curricula/ courses.


For the digital learners past their teens, the coursework should be left open as common for all branches and must essentially be a set of problems from all possible domains, to allow pursuit of their interests than what a university can prescribe and examine them in. The students should be encouraged to find a problem/ challenge, put it into a theoretical framework, recall/ fetch relevant knowledge, apply skills while working on the solution and document all attempts (including failures in solving); also, leave it freely available, for anyone to use as such/ build on it. A series of such do-it-yourself, learn-by-yourself, test-by-yourself activities should be at the heart of engineering education now. How about then, letting students create their own degree, even as they get trained to handle the unknown, uncharted and unforeseen? After all, technology now allows tracking all the activities and in building up one’s academic credentials.


Instead of conducting EXAM (Examining Xeroxing Ability of Mind), the students should be given TASK (Testing of Aptitude, Skills and Knowledge) by the assessing and certifying agencies, as they are all digital learners and under training. Their certification can be based on two things: (a) number of problems attempted (not solved included) and faithfully documented (b) open book examination to test the understanding of concepts. While the first could involve peers in the assessment, the latter can be open evaluation with generous use of rubrics (evaluators too will learn in the process!). Promoting 'race-ism' as they are, serious thought also needs to be given on having examinations integrated in pedagogy (peda (greek)= child) as they are at school level, particularly for adult learners who now get trained as digital learners first.


One needs to be mindful that with exponential growth in technologies, data is coming from all sectors (including education) and is expanding seemingly to fill the space available. Faster communication, computational and search speeds, together with declining cost of storage have altered the behaviours and also the expectations of stakeholders in the education system. Large volumes of data are being retained because users have no way of making out obsolete data and the disincentives for storing obsolete data are less apparent than are the disincentives for discarding potentially useful data. Further, the continuously refining ability to search out needed information in a jiffy or get help for the same from any quarter, is making the case stronger for “just-for-the-case” education. Clearly, a paradigmatic change is visible in teaching-learning in colleges: lesser attendance in classes, declining note-taking in classrooms, reduction in writing/ sketching/ doodling on papers, searching for answers from databases etc.; all suggestive of reducing need to commit information to memory.


Teachers in such an evolving dispensation would not be required entirely as subject experts but as builder, shaper and manager of ecosystem that prepares/ supports budding innovators, besides circumscribing the roles of problem identifiers, anchors/ players in problem-solving exercise, experts in technical documentation, accomplished in advanced level of search, well-versed with softer aspects like intellectual property, quality, safety, ethics etc. With their redefined roles and unique (re)positioning, the teachers can help graduating students to evolve as innovator, entrepreneur, manager, mentor, teacher, researcher, content developer, assessor, administrator or many more evolving roles. The change of role warranted gets accelerated by the fact that learners no longer want a teacher to only speak (there are a plenty online now) but see them apply knowledge to create something new; a sufficient pointer to why classrooms are not so interesting anymore and learning is happening outside. Moreover, it will become increasingly impossible for a teacher to stay updated with accelerating frontiers of knowledge, and put the learners on the leading edge. Thus, teachers will actually evolve to be everywhere, but as navigator, pathfinder, counselor and confidant (as delineated in Roadmap for Education 2035 prepared by TIFAC)- rolled into one. They need to skill themselves accordingly and also be prepared to compete with other online/ virtual/ robotic teachers!


The whole idea of teaching (by sage-on-the-stage and even guide-by-the-side) will be losing its relevance as the knowledge to be applied will be searched/ created by the learners themselves. The knowledge about resources so created and creators (and also associated experience) will be available for others to use, after having been put to use for which was created. So it will not be the knowledge alone which will get into the repositories but also experiences (documented text, audio, video, holograms etc) and delivered eventually through ‘immersive MOOCs’. Learners will be prompted to share them and get reciprocated, thus contributing to a huge repository of experiences which would be accessible anywhere, anytime and anyone, obviating the need of committing the entire course to memory.



We are in the times when technologies go obsolete even before the courses end; information retention is redundant as are most low-order skills and therefore, reimagining and realignment of engineering education merits serious consideration. The delivery of content, imparting of instructions, conducting of practicals, administering of examinations- all need a rethinking, especially when the identified graduate attributes in respect of engineers are heavily loaded in favour of non-technical and soft skills, emphasized upon by the industry too. Also, the trend should be on increasingly empowering the learners enrolled, to pursue their interests and realize their full potential rather than power the drive for enrollments and peddle mediocrity further. The reimagined future lies in less teaching and more learning, more of participatory learning than broadcast-reception, restructuring higher learning on the principles of andragogy (instead of pedagogy), moving from control of universities to learner autonomy, from promoting lapping up the known (knowledge) to tapping on the unknown and from EXAM to TASK- to turn out well-rounded, confident and responsive engineers prepared for handling technologies (and problems) that don’t exist, adequately armed with skills and committed to build a self-reliant India.

***



Author is an Adviser with All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) on deputation from Technology Information, Forecasting & Assessment Council (TIFAC).

Views are personal.

Feedback/ comments are appreciated and can be given in the comment box below. Thanks!






Previous blogs

Uprighting STEM Education with 7x24 Labs 

Dismantling Macaulay's Schools with 'Online' Support

Moving Towards Education Without Examinations

Disruptive Technologies in Education and Challenges in its Governance

Technology Roadmap for Education 2035 by TIFAC (Highlights)

Synallagmatic Industry-Academia Linkages

UPRIGHTING 'STEM' EDUCATION WITH 7x24 LABS

Education 2047 #Blog 04 (13 AUG 2020)

Imagine the scene in a physics laboratory, a 12th class student struggling to find out refractive index of a bar magnet. Sounds bizarre, isn't it? Possibly his teacher was wide-off the mark of what Benjamin Franklin observed, “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn”. The teacher started his job well by telling and teaching but did not finish it by involving the student who, evidently never learnt what was intended to be. This is a first-hand experience narrated in one of the alumni meets by my teacher Dr. J.K. Sharma who superannuated as HOD, Department of Physics, St. John’s College, Agra. He was to examine students appearing in Physics practical examinations conducted by the Board of High School and Intermediate Education Uttar Pradesh in the late 80s/ early 90s, somewhere in a remotely located and poorly connected school in adjoining Etah district. The students who are supposed to perform two experiments had already been allotted by the time he reached and were busy doing them. This student was allotted two experiments- the first one required tracing magnetic lines of forces formed around a bar magnet using a magnetic compass and the second one, to find the refractive index of a prism; both experiments interestingly required the use of a drawing board and get recounted after 40 years.  

Dr. Sharma confronted this student, who would have been next attempting to trace magnetic lines of forces using the prism! Clearly, the student had never seen a prism or bar magnet and upon being questioned, the teacher admitted that students were indeed never shown the items and kept locked, as the school feared them of being stolen. Curious Dr Sharma asked why the items were taken out that day and what makes the teacher confident that they will not be smuggled out that day, the teacher pointed towards a person seated at the gate to frisk the examinees leaving the school! A passionate teacher as he is, Dr. Sharma took the student aside and demonstrated the two experiments leaving him happy but he was himself unhappy having hit the pit, which actually is the tip of the proverbial iceberg!  Isn't it that doors are shut not only on the laboratory equipment but also on the aspiration of millions of students wanting to explore the world from the prism of science, drawn by the magnetic charm of discovering the world, by themselves? Yes, the practical component of science education isn’t placed where it should be and this is glaringly visible at higher levels as well! STEM (Science, Technical, Engineering & Mathematics) education isn’t upright!
 

One of the commonly heard grouse heard, again and again, year after year and from employer after employer is that our students are not employable and lack basic skills. The fact is, this deficiency in skills and expectation at work-places is linked with the culture and environment that we offer to our students not just in our colleges but in our schools and even our homes. Working with hands is considered lowly, degrading or subservient and abhorred, fully cognizant that skills like swimming or surgery cannot be learnt using touchscreens! It is through practical experiments and experiences that psycho-motor skills develop which are measured in terms of speed, precision, distance, procedures and techniques in execution. Unfortunately, the practical work, the practical classes and equipment/ infrastructure for practical- all stand marginalized or ignored, evident from the low weightage accorded in academic scores; largely because of being out of comfort zones and requiring extra resources and efforts from teachers as well. No wonder ‘working with hand’ to conduct the experiments and feel them, prompts ‘washing  hands off’ instead!
 

It is a common observation that in most of the well-to-do and aspirational families, the children are diverted to studies whenever they are confronted with manual activities or physical labour. The children too, these days find an opportunity to glue to their devices and gadgets, which at best put their thumbs into labour. Most grow up these days without having seen how food is cooked or laundry done or toilets cleaned. Most move into colleges without ever seeing any gadget opened for repair or having carried a load themselves. Thus, a disconnect with the real-world starts from homes- with head, hands and heart seldom getting the chance to work together and the trend continues in the formal learning spaces.
 

In our schools, we have compulsory science education up to the 8th grade and laboratory work for sciences till 12th. This is an opportunity for the students to confront and appreciate the very basic and simple concepts in science and fire the scientific temper. But the reality on the ground remains that most teachers tell their students to concentrate on the theory by assuring them of good scores in practical examinations. Many use it as a ploy to force students to take private tuition from them and give them good marks in return. In many cases, it is left to the lab assistants to facilitate while teachers bunk the classes. I am sure in many more, the practical classes are conducted to complete the course and not with an intent to complete the learning. Lesser importance to lab work in secondary education is also attributable to the near absence of the test of experimental skills in JEE type competitions. 

It is not a surprise that experiments get axed when it comes to funds for maintenance of lab infrastructure or equipment. Even the classroom/ lecture hall/ open-air demonstrations which were common earlier stand sacrificed to theory, which may otherwise introduce the students to a physical phenomena whose explanation they may look for or search in theory class. Lot of well-intended  activities are identified in the textbooks, to be performed by the students or teachers or both, but one wonders if they are conducted in true spirit. Clearly, the importance of experimental work remains low and many of the skills that should actually get picked in schools, remain wanting.  Possibly we have not developed the right tools and methodology to assess the performance in practical; one more reason why practical component remains at a low pedestal.   

 

Our system grades students as eligible for science and technical courses for which the eligibility conditions require the student to have 'learnt' sciences (mathematics included). These subjects have a practical component dominated by theory, and the format is such that theory precedes or drives the practical for hands-on training, sounding too prescriptive for graduating students.  With the lab-work that we currently have and the ‘generosity’ in its evaluation, one can see the learning stripped of skills. With rapid advances in information and communication technologies in recent decades and their incursion in education, there are multiple opportunities and options to teach/ learn theory and the same is not true for practical which remain irreplaceable. Shouldn’t the cart and the horse be placed right? 

 

Experience too suggests that it is practical classes that cause better appreciation of sciences, whet the interest of students and motivate them to move towards career in sciences. And this can be realized effectively only if the time-table is centered around practical classes and not the theory. Yes, the STEM education should be built around “7x24 labs” in the academic institutions; the labs should open at least 7 hours a day and for 24 days in a month, to ensure that capital investment is genuinely utilized in full measures. The basic idea should be to expose the students adequately to connect the real world they experience (both inside and outside the labs) with the theory, motivate them and charge them up to dive deeper. Technologies like Immersive Virtual Reality, Internet-of-things, Robotics, Drones, Holograms, Volumetric Screens, Mobile Apps, Wearables, Haptic interfaces can further amplify the joy of learning STEM. It should, however, be remembered that mobile apps, simulated or virtual labs can help in completing the course, not the learning and should, if at all required, be used for repeating a physical experiment.  
 

With free access to knowledge thanks to the internet, the discovery learning can be reinvigorated and the minds made more inquisitive, imaginative and creative. Why not let the students, for example, observe a natural phenomenon like a rainbow and then look for its explanation in the laws of reflection, refraction, total internal reflection and dispersion of light. After all, in the real-life too, we begin to talk first and then learn the grammar; learn to ride a bicycle and then appreciate laws of motion; begin to eat and realize the importance of nutrients and it is not the other way round. In short, we experience the world around us first and then connect with the knowledge, resulting in learning that outlasts the one acquired through memorization. Why not then get the pieces right- teach theory as an extrapolation of practical instead of peddling as interpolation of theory?  With (theoretical) knowledge fully democratized and accessible at a click or gesture (or thought in future), the differentiator for academic institutions in future will be the practical or experiential learning imparted in their "7x24 labs".  

***

Author is an Adviser with All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) on deputation from Technology Information, Forecasting & Assessment Council (TIFAC).

Views are personal.

Feedback/ comments are appreciated and can be given in the comment box below. Thanks!

Other blogs

Dismantling Macaulay's Schools with 'Online' Support

Moving Towards Education Without Examinations

Disruptive Technologies in Education and Challenges in its Governance

Synallagmatic Industry-Academia Linkages

Technology Roadmap for Education 2035 by TIFAC (Highlights)

DISMANTLING MACAULAY'S SCHOOLS WITH 'ONLINE' SUPPORT

Education 2047 #Blog 03 (23 JUN 2020)

The COVID-19 pandemic gives us an unprecedented opportunity to rework and break-free from the education that was shaped by policies beginning with the historical Minute on Education by Thomas Babington Macaulay (who may not be the only person responsible to set in the decline) almost two centuries back and evolved in response to the needs of an industrial society. All through, the education was prescriptive and intended to create initially clerks, then managers and of late coders- trained to follow the manuals and rule books. Educational institutions also were raised and configured to turn-out workforce with attributes of, basically conformists at the workplaces. 12 years of schooling-  classified into primary (1-5 grade classes), upper primary (6-8 grade classes), secondary (9-10 grade classes) and senior secondary (11-12 grade classes) became the standard in India's school education. The upward movement towards higher grades could happen only if the student passed an annual examination, involving reproduction of what is taught by the teacher or is there in the books, in certain fixed hours. The examinations other than those at the 10 and 12 level classes are generally conducted by the schools while national or state level boards conduct for these two (secondary levels), crucial to the students and their parents, for deciding the career. 

The secondary schools have served as a source for professionals/ work-force who get educated for 3-5 years in colleges/ polytechnics/ standalone institutions, before getting the first degree/ diploma/ certificate and moving on. The schools are affiliated to one of the boards of examination where students typically learn two/ three languages, Mathematics, Sciences and Social Sciences at 9 & 10 grades and given options for choosing Science, Commerce or Humanities stream, for 11 & 12 grades. Clearly, with fixed choices (limited by the offering from the schools), the education at this level has been constrictive and restrictive for students in pursuing their interest and in turn, realizing their full potential. The examinations are conducted only to stamp the product as pass/ fail based on rote-learning and top-scorers privileged with more opportunities and prospects. The creativity and imagination get muzzled completely when the students are in 11 & 12 classes, most of them taking coaching for entrance examinations in parallel and in the process, the secondary education becomes secondary to coaching! The distortions brought about due to this, at least for the students entering into the engineering that we see closely, have been alarming and show up during their four years course, visible in their lacking of skills that make them well-rounded and job-ready.

Intending to facilitate smooth initiation of engineering students into the new settings and make them develop awareness, sensitivity and understanding of the self, people around them, society at large and the Nature, the AICTE has introduced a three-weeks mandatory Student Induction Programme (SIP). With an apt acronym (that is administered right at the beginning of graduation) the SIP- not to be offered as a classroom activity- allows students to get a fresh breath that doesn’t smell of coaching. The programme covering sports, fitness, yoga, creative arts, literature, universal human values, extra-curricular activities etc. not only exposes them to what they missed in yesteryears but also begin to appreciate the importance of being a responsible and ethical professional.

SIP has been conducted across India for the last three years now and the feedback tells volumes about the life and times, travails and tribulations of the freshmen before leaving the school. From these youngsters, it turns out, as is also visible, that there is an acute and irrational pressure on them- the schools, teachers, parents, neighbours and even the colleges they aspire to join- all conspiring to see them score 95+ marks! This is where our schools and clueless teachers go completely wrong and are forced to, as they are mandated to, squeeze out students having been tested only in what a school can teach or books tell. This is a glaring limitation on the part of these elements of education and misaligned with higher education completely. Few precious years of adolescence are lost in the race, at times, without realizing what lies beyond the race. Alas!

There is a pressing need to reboot the secondary schools that must prepare, for the knowledge-age that we are in, youngsters armed with 21st-century skills and ready for careers and skills that are yet to emerge and; not 90+ scoring students but smart learners- the ones trained to learn on their own, agile and resilient too.  This requires moving away- in the secondary level itself- from memorization of knowledge to its application, from fixed syllabus to open questions, from fixed-hour tests to exciting challenges and from memory tests to problem-solving. There is, thus, a need for realignment of educational systems and subsystems, to empower the tech-savvy learners, by making use of ensembles of technology and adoption of online learning must happen, to transform education at the secondary level.

It, however, needs to be understood that online education does not and should not mean making teachers deliver instructions before a camera,  conduct quiz/ tests using a social media group or putting a camera on the head of an examinee or tracking their eye movements. The greatest benefit that online learning brings in (by reinforcing the traditional mode and existing with it), is the flexibility in the education system and also empowering the learner by increasing the choices of subjects (including skills, competencies, languages) of interests and calling; facilitate learning from anywhere and anytime (and any language in near future); in creating one’s learning pathway; in choosing a source of learning/ teacher; collaborating with peers in learning or experimenting; taking assessments as per convenience etc. All these are unthinkable in the current ossified structure that privileges knowledge over skills and not just rewards the toppers but treats harshly those whose passion lies beyond what schools offer. Needless to add, the present system is also harsh to drop-outs, late-bloomers, left-out, left-behind, second-chance seekers etc.  

All through the years and decades, we have been worried about the enrollment and dropping-out of the students; but here comes the historic opportunity when we can focus on empowerment and allow dropping-in (at any time or age) of anyone who wants to learn. Yes, the schools (and boards) must grow-up and extend opportunity to learners to choose what they want to, which wasn’t possible hitherto because of limitations of physical infrastructure, topographical disadvantages, shortage of teachers etc. They must, instead of teaching, testing, grading (A-F) and certifying in 5 odd subjects, consider exposing a learner to 10-20 subjects+ skills+ competencies and issue a certificate with all that a learner scores 'A' in. The students must be trained to generously use resources including the internet and other technologies and make the learning discovery-based and pick-up skills, to stay a lifelong learner.

A realization needs to dawn on the schools/ boards that memorization or rote-learning limited to 5 subjects is not going to help the students anymore, as 21st- century students no longer need to be skilled and tested in this! This also becomes clear from the list of 12 attributes identified for a 21st-century graduate of which only 3 are technical skills! Accordingly, administration of courses and memory-based examinations, that too decided by a school/ board in which it has strength does not make sense anymore. Let classrooms, books, teachers and examinations not be a leash anymore, gagging the potential of a human. The schools (and boards) themselves not being able to adjust the sail (by mainstreaming online education) will mean, they are off the line while they push their students to come online.  

The realignments may leave the teachers confused and fuming as they have been at the centre of the education system of the industrial age. Fortunately, for good teachers online learning is the best thing to happen; they can now be reached by students of schools other than theirs or even in other locations anywhere in the world. Likewise, the disinterested students forced to sit in their classroom can find an online teacher of a subject that genuinely interests them, anywhere on the internet. Thus, with contented teachers and students, the sum will be greater than the parts!

Another unsettling concern may be the examinations/ tests to which I can say, that with online learning mainstreamed and advanced technologies deployed, the pathway can be cleared for moving towards education without examinations. The questions to test the memory can be built into the online material, embedded into apps, gamified or left to classroom interactions. The testing of higher-order cognitive skills can be done through projects, group activities or evaluation by peers/ teachers/ mentors. This may produce even more students ending up for admission in courses for higher education/ jobs, for which we already have entrance examinations/ tests. Such examinations/ tests can also be made less taxing with more focus on aptitude than on subject knowledge which a student is already trained to deal with, in the secondary school.

Is there anything wrong in these realignments of education by integrating online learning that empowers learners, earns wider recognition to teachers, frees up schools of factory-like functioning and provides motivated learners to higher education or jobs? Even if your answer is in affirmative and in favour of status quo, it needs to be noted that learners have moved on as digital natives, navigate virtual spaces effortlessly, experienced sufficiently in the art of searching, choose their source of learning independently, have even stopped writing and taking notes; and also that shift is happening towards "personalized and adaptive learning" aided by technology. Let's not forget, India commanded one-third of the global GDP for most history when our education system was apprenticeship-based (characterized by personalized, analytical and exploratory learning).

The online learning and adoption of emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Immersive Virtual Reality, Internet of Things, Robotics will continue to tilt the scales in favour of a learner-centric system. The global pandemic gives us an unprecedented opportunity to regain the lost muscles to build, not an assembly-line but an assembled-line of motivated, ethical and smart workforce for India, that has committed itself to be self-reliant.      

***

Author is an Adviser with All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) on deputation from Technology Information, Forecasting & Assessment Council (TIFAC).

Views are personal.

Feedback/ comments are appreciated and can be given in the comment box below. Thanks!

Other blogs

Moving Towards Education Without Examinations

Disruptive Technologies in Education and Challenges in its Governance 

Synallagmatic Industry-Academia Linkages

TECHNOLOGY ROADMAP FOR EDUCATION 2035 BY TIFAC (Highlights)

Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connection
or reload the browserDisable in this text fieldEditEdit in GingerEdit in Ginger×Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connection
or reload the browserDisable in this text fieldEditEdit in GingerEdit in Ginger×Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connection
or reload the browserDisable in this text fieldEditEdit in GingerEdit in Ginger×Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connection
or reload the browserDisable in this text fieldEditEdit in GingerEdit in Ginger×

MOVING TOWARDS EDUCATION WITHOUT EXAMINATIONS

Education 2047 #Blog 02 (19 MAY 2020)

The global COVID-19 pandemic has slammed brakes on the academic cycle  at a time when the students were ready to go for the end semester/year examinations besides lakhs of school-leaving students aspiring to pursue professional/ higher courses, waiting to take competitive examinations/ tests. The stunning unprecedented scenario has sent academicians into a huddle thinking hard about the options to conduct the examinations. As embedded presently, examinations serve as checkpoints for both the learner and the certifying bodies and in handing them out an acknowledgement that a certain level of education (sadly not the competence or proficiency) has been acquired. But is it not striking that education content and delivery have changed over the last two centuries, but examinations have not? By examinations in this blog, I refer to the proctored test of fixed duration conducted by an authorized/ certification body and demanding recall of predetermined content, in the answer sheets. Sadly, the efforts these days, as evident from the array of webinars on examination/ online courses, are about how to stop copying of answers instead of getting better answers and hardly anyone speaks about the assessment of everything else that makes a graduate well-rounded!

The idea of examination seems to have percolated into the education system, geared up as it has been for mass production of trained workers aligning with the needs of the industrial age. Examinations in the education (prescriptive learning as I would call) that we have had, have been extensively used for facilitating clearing the grades, upwardly progression, conferring degrees, admitting people into elite folds etc, basically for grading, segregating and labelling scholars. They have also been used to admit students whenever the supply has been overwhelmingly higher than the demand and in the process created a highly competitive, at times cut-throat, environment that rejects the majority.  What's more striking is that each individual is admittedly unique and different in the terms of abilities, proclivities and capacities, yet the same yardstick or battery of tests is used to grade each individual and label her/him as passed or failed. Can a human pass or fail? Only an object meeting or not meeting predetermined parameters can. So do examinations fit into the learning process and academic transactions? Why not check a person for what she or he can do? Why identify a person with what he cannot do or is lacking in? Should not there be an assessment of what the person can improve upon in further? Why not empower a person to chart her/his own learning trajectory that aids in unleashing the full potential?

Before delving deep to explore answers to these questions, let’s see if the term “examination” itself is the right word or expression at all. One examines an object against set standards and finds it deficient or conforming to them and labels them accordingly. Health of a human can be examined because the vital parameters of a healthy human have been found to be within a certain range and soundness of a body can be declared by recording the vital parameters and comparing them with range. Can the same be applied to declare or certify the level of knowledge with the same set of questions administered to tens, to hundreds and to even thousands of students? Certainly not, and the word “examination" therefore, should be reserved for use in the context of inanimate objects and “assessment” be used for humans, possibly with a befitting adjective, as we shall see later in this blog.

Having denounced the term examination, as we understand it in the context of education, let us see why examinations (or tests) exist there in the first place.  Examinations have been there as tools or interventions because the knowledge was not readily accessible as and when needed until recent decades, for application to "just in case" situations and committing it to the memory (even without associating with the real world) was the only option. Therefore, it was quite appropriate to, after a course had been administered, check whether a student had added things to her/ his memory or not, and will be able to or not- recall to use it “just in case” situation. Here came in the limited-hour examinations to serve like dipsticks, to gauge and ensure that memorization of information was up to the order or not. While the dipstick serves as an excellent tool for checking the capability of a person to memorize, it is not a credible pointer to sound comprehension.

Examination, in a way, gives an assurance that education has been acquired so much to the hardened belief that those who were able to reproduce with accuracy, were in a better position over others in applying that knowledge needed “just in case”. And that’s how high scorers have been privileged to better opportunities in higher studies and jobs. Certainly then with a large number of aspirants for the coveted goals, every single mark counts in the competition, and all humans go rat. Alas!  Examinations to create competition, to admit some and reject more, and expect people to collaborate at workplaces; surprising and shocking too! In this knowledge age, when the same knowledge is accessible in equal measures to anyone with access to the internet, do examinations really aid in learning? Are weekly/ monthly tests or biannual/ annual examinations still relevant?  Let’s try to see the things retrospectively and also try to put things in perspective and see how useful (or useless) the examinations that we currently have, are.

We all have arrived in the knowledge era and can feel that knowledge stands democratized, for the first time in human history, thanks to the internet, communication and display technologies. The knowledge accessible to one person is accessible to anyone, anywhere and anytime, that too at a click of a button, at an oral command, swipe on the screen, or even a gesture (and soon with brain-computer interface, brain implant technologies maturing, even the present mediations will vanish).  A deep retrospection reveals that all through the past, resources of all types were used to create or generate knowledge, preserve it in books (and libraries) and its, dissemination though multiple agents including teachers, schools and colleges. It was also about gaining knowledge, amassing it, retrieving it and getting into even deeper layers to add more to it and the entire education system built around it. Clearly, it was more of knowledge creation from resources all along, than resource creation and the equation was tilted in favour of the creation of knowledge than resources. But in the knowledge era with near assured, equitable access to all sources of knowledge, creation of resources from the knowledge that we have around us- is gaining traction and it is nothing but “innovation”! Are our institutions, courses, teachers, curriculum and examinations as they are presently- designed and aligned to support innovation? Let’s attempt a reality check.

Education is now happening also outside the class-rooms, learners have knowledge of the universe accessible on their palm, teachers are what libraries have been to us to be connected with only when we need, the joy of learning is found in hackathons, cafes and on-the-go. Things have really started flipping as we talk about flipped-classroom- which has mainstreamed the online learning. A teacher-centric education system is flipping to be a learner-centred one. The purpose of education is understood as not for creating jobs but for creating opportunities (jobs included), for unleashing the potential of a learner; a shift if not flip!  Driving this polar shift are technologies, a number of them growing at an exponential rate; it is no more in electronics that we see Moore’s law being followed- of doubling the numbers of transistors on a chip every 18 months. We have examples from disparate domains- the cost of DNA sequencing, the cost of solar power, cost of 3-D printing etc, seem to be following the same progression. When these technologies are inducing changes and poised to disrupt the education, should not the utility (and futility) of the examinations (as we conduct now) be subjected to review?  Let’s see some unsavoury side of examinations, shorn of any innovation as they are, when “innovation” resonates.

The examination (as delineated earlier in the blog) expects students to regurgitate what is there in books or has been taught by teachers, with best possible accuracy. Let’s admit that this quest to reproduce, prompts the students to copy in a bid to score over others. What makes it worse is that students get initiated, with due support of clueless teachers, into this mindless quest from grade/ class one itself! Thus copying, though abhorred, becomes a way of not only learning but also an aid to upward mobility by way of "clearing" or "passing" examinations. Also, the faculty of imagination, critical thinking and creativity get ruthlessly muzzled as the entire focus is on solving/ recalling the known. With the ease of conducting tests, posing one (or few out of fear of copying) set of questions to a large number of examinees, pro-scoring questions, multiple-choice questions (MCQs), established styles (read decipherable patterns) and also inertia built over decades, the experiential learning through practicals (field activities, internships etc. that connect head, hands and heart), has been put on a very low pedestal- the worst thing to happen in education!  Isn’t it ironic that, past the higher/ professional education received after “clearing” examinations, we expect the employees at workplaces to be ethical and persons of integrity; taught only inside-the-class to be out-of-the-box thinkers; those made to follow strictly the instructions and not to question, to be visionaries? What a gap between reality and expectations!

Instead of making a question paper that tests known knowledge and expects a learner to pass during the course of education, what we need is to give a person is a learning experience which will always be accompanied by failures, opportunity to correct by self and most important of all, connect experience with theory (and not the other way). Yes, failures need to be appreciated as an integral part of learning, which the current examination system fails to (and is inexorably harsh to the failed) and is, therefore, all the more a reason to be junked away. Interestingly, it is now found (discovered in alumni meets) that while those who succeeded in scoring high in the exams were able to get highly paid jobs and opportunities in higher education, the students who were not able to memorize things are now emerging better off as innovators, entrepreneurs or job creators largely because of their ability of organization, interpersonal skills, and in making good use of resources available whether knowledge or the human resource. A point to be noted, while conducting an examination of the examination system and its (ir)relevance too!

Taking cognizance of the low employability of technical graduates and aiming at a turn-around, as part of its initiatives to improve the quality of technical education, AICTE has formulated an Examination Reforms Policy, with Bloom’s Taxonomy at its heart. The taxonomy proposed in 1956 by Benjamin Bloom (recently updated) includes six levels of learning which can be used to structure the learning objectives, lessons, and assessments of the course. The revised Bloom’s Taxonomy in the cognitive domain includes thinking, knowledge, and application of knowledge. It is a popular framework in engineering education to structure the assessment as it characterizes complexity and higher-order abilities. It identifies six levels of competencies (Remembering, Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating and Creating) within the cognitive domain considered apt for the purposes of education. While remembering is recalling from the memory of what has been learnt, understanding gets reflected from ability to explain ideas or concepts. Applying is seen through the ability to use the information in another familiar situation and its higher level, analyzing shows up with the ability to break information into the part to explore understandings and relationships. Further, evaluating is justifying a decision or course of action which is topped by the ability to generate new ideas, products or new ways of viewing things i.e, creating.

Bloom’s Taxonomy is hierarchical, which means that learning at the higher-level requires that skills at a lower level are attained, a fact that needs appreciation to overhaul our examination system. At present, the first three learning levels; remembering, understanding and applying and to a small extent, the fourth level analyzing, are assessed in the examinations/ tests administered for a limited time. Abilities like analysis, evaluation and creation which really turn a graduate into a professional cannot be assessed by the examinations that we conduct and can only be assessed in extended course works, projects, etc. There have been attempts, concerned about the over-emphasis on rote learning, to include questions to test higher-order abilities, but the intent still remains scoring higher marks over better learning. The employability of passing graduates then remains questionable as examinations fail to comprehensively assess them on other graduate attributes which never get reflected in degrees.

The AICTE Policy emphasizes that assessment must test higher-level skills viz. ability to apply knowledge, solve complex problems, analyze, synthesize and design. Also the professional skills like the ability to communicate, work in teams, lifelong learning that matter for employability of the graduates more than ever. The Policy proposes "open-book examination" as a solution which is less taxing on memory and can fulfil the requirements of a degree/ diploma/ certificate issuing body. Open-book examination is time-bound, designed in a way that allows students to refer to approved material while answering. They are particularly useful to test skills in application, analysis and evaluation, that correspond to higher levels of cognitive skills in Bloom's Taxonomy. The Policy recommends the use of Rubrics as a tool for assessment and grading of student work, being a transparent and inspiring guide to learning. Rubrics are scoring, or grading tools used to measure a students’ performance and learning across a set of criteria and objectives. They communicate to students (and to other markers) the expectations in the assessment, and what is considered to be of importance.

The Examination Reforms Policy comes at a time when knowledge is freely available for creating resources, opportunities for more knowledge, which requires the skill of higher-order beyond remembering and comprehension. Towards its implementation, faculty across technical institutions are being made aware of the reforms and encouraged to work in teams to prepare questions for testing the higher-order cognitive skills. It is expected that other examining bodies (Boards/ Polytechnics/ Universities/ Training Institutes), across all levels (Primary/ Secondary/ Higher) and formats of education (conventional/ open/ distance/ online/ continuing), would pull up their socks and to pioneer changes. The COVID-19 shock throws, an opportunity to reset the examination button as we have presently, which smacks of academic lethargy on one hand to anachronism on the other. Yes, we need to profusely infuse into the courses- generous dosage of projects, open-ended experiments in laboratories, project-based learning modules, co-curricular experiences, internship experiences; a portfolio of experiences, etc which allow acquisition of disciplinary knowledge along with other abilities.

Even as the AICTE policy gains traction on the ground and picked up by other examination bodies, it makes a lot of sense to look at the limitations posed by the current global pandemic- going online for delivery of learning content with no option to exercise and that of social distancing in real learning spaces. It will be in the fitness of things that we resolved and stopped altogether asking questions to check the memorization skills of the students at least in higher education to begin with. Also, it would be apt to shift focus from examination to assessments, built-in to help the learners chart their own learning path and advance at their own pace- personalized and adaptive learning, aided by technology of course. This means departure from placing examinations as ladder-steps for upwards mobility in academic or professional spaces (for which open-book examinations are recommended). The questions to test lower-order skills must be left for use in the classroom discussions/ quizzes, or embedded into online courses or can be outsourced completely to the teaching/ learning machines which can adequately take care in an independent and impartial manner, the learning needs of the students. Also the practice of holding proctored limited hour examinations must be stopped if at all we are serious about the learning of the education to be impactful, for the simple reason that what needs to be remembered gets actually tested automatically if the questions are properly framed and are aimed at testing the higher-level cognitive skills. Ever wondered how many answer-sheets filled-up in limited hours get thrown away every year (and also cost us 6.6 million trees in India, as per my back of the envelope calculation),  with answers that have neither contributed to knowledge nor to ideas nor solutions!

The questions of higher-level skills will, by design, be open-ended, with no known answers and will require awareness of the world around in general and in that subject in particular and skill to use search tools. These questions need not be answered in a fixed duration and can be from a couple of hours to few days, evaluation of whose answers should be left to be done using rubrics, by the peers, teachers and even practitioners. The advantage of such a practice would be that the learners come to know about the views of peers, understand their side, and begin to appreciate them rather than forcing their own views and prepare them to collaborate than compete. This unburdening approach to the teachers would ensure that learners start having a world view and develop an inclination for the same rather than harbouring their own views and persisting with them. After all, from the education system as a supply-line of workforce, we expect people of integrity, with work-place ethics and trained to collaborate and be productive.

When higher education institutions change the gear, schools should not be left behind in giving up the examinations they have been conducting. There have been attempts to supplant questions aimed at testing higher-order thinking skills but their purpose gets smashed by the limited time. Furthermore, the shift in 90+ scores leaning towards 100 in the Board examinations in recent years only indicates how the system is working more for the same. The pandemic blow gives us the best opportunity for the secondary school level examination bodies, to take full advantage of mainstreaming of online education and open up the choice of subjects to the learners as wide as possible. One needs to be mindful of the technological advancements happening on an unprecedented pace, enhancing the uncertainty on the future skills. The secondary schools must prepare the kids smart enough to be prepared for a career and skills that are yet to emerge; not really 90+ scoring kids but smart learners- the ones trained to learn on their own, agile and resilient too.  This requires moving away from memorization of knowledge to its application, from fixed syllabus to open questions, from fixed-hour tests to exciting challenges and from memory tests to problem-solving. In the process of alignment of educational systems and subsystems to deliver comprehensively in this knowledge age, it would make enormous sense, to instead of teaching, testing, grading (A-F) and certification in 5 odd subjects, consider exposing a learner to 10-20 subjects+ skills+ competencies and issue a certificate with all that a learner scores A in. Let examinations, constrictive and restrictive as they are on abilities and passions, not be a leash anymore, gagging the potential of a human.

At the primary school level, there must be no examinations/ tests and memory testing be built into games, physical activities and social engagements, so that young mind can explore the world freely and encouraged to be imaginative. This for sure, will groom them to be good observers, responsible thinkers and quick learners when they move to secondary and higher levels, at least free of tendency to copy or cheat; which of course, aids in assimilating human values better. At the upper primary level, the students can be empowered with tools that help them bring out their talent and abilities and whet their appetite for knowledge and fire-up the passion. It is at this level that technologies must be used to help each student to delineate and create their own learning path, encouraged to pursue in what she/he wish to excel in (and not what schools or its teacher can teach or examine). Fortunately, it is possible to do that with Information & Communication Technologies, Display & User-interface technologies, Internet Technologies, Computational technologies, Simulation & Modelling technologies whose costs are only going to sink. The challenge, however, would be for teachers who are fast losing their role as disseminators of knowledge, to be that of confidants, counsellors, pathfinders, and navigators to the young learners and shall have to be trained accordingly.

In a world that is abounding with information and knowledge and its access becoming easier and easier, there is no need to accumulate everything in the memory; instead, the time should be spent in gaining experiential learning and connect things/ experiences with theory which resides in the memory longer. It would make enormous sense now to train the students and arm them with skills, along their learning pathways to learn how to convert knowledge and resources into something better, offer clever solutions, improve things around and make lives better and for this reason, higher/ professional education should be recalibrated. Here the learners should be assessed for how they attempt the problem and not on actually solving the problem besides how they document. This would not only discourage copying as the answers are not known but also make learning an engaging exercise and not repulsive. In fact, low-order questions in higher education should be treated at par with publication in a lowly journal. For the purposes of degrees/ certificates, open-book examinations should be resorted to, unburdening as it would be to the students, teachers and the system alike.

The entire education system now needs to be rebuilt to aid innovations- allow room for students to be imaginative and creative, build infrastructure and ecosystems for the same, train the teachers to be key enablers of the ecosystem innovation, enliven curricula with real challenges and replace examinations with “personalized and adaptive assessment”. In short, in our quest to move to higher versions of Education 4.0 or 5.0, examinations focusing on testing of lowest cognitive abilities should be outsourced to machines (can be embedded in the online learning material) or left for classrooms. For middle level, rubrics could be the right tools with the involvement of peers and teachers while for the highest levels of cognitive abilities, the assessment can be best done by the person/ agency for which evaluation or creation is done or by the professional bodies. For academic requirements (for issuing the certificate or degree which is losing relevance to nano-degrees now), as mentioned earlier open-book examination is an option which can take care of all levels of cognitive skills; and for employment (which should have a strong pull from the recruiters), the testing part should be left to the employer who can look for right aptitude, knowledge and competencies in the candidates. Let’s move from the age of “same question-same answers’ to “same question-different answers” in the examinations, to source more ideas to support and spread the culture of innovation- as a way forward to a self-reliant India!

***

Author is an Adviser with All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) on deputation from Technology Information, Forecasting & Assessment Council (TIFAC).

Views are personal and readers may find them biased towards Science & Engineering Education.

Feedback/ comments are appreciated and can be given in the comment box below. Thanks!

Other blogs

Dismantling Macaulay's Schools with 'Online'  Support 

Disruptive Technologies in Education and Challenges in its Governance 

Synallagmatic Industry- Academia Linkages

TECHNOLOGY ROADMAP FOR EDUCATION 2035 BY TIFAC (Highlights)

Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connection
or reload the browserDisable in this text fieldEditEdit in GingerEdit in Ginger×Enable GingerCannot connect to Ginger Check your internet connection
or reload the browserDisable in this text fieldEditEdit in GingerEdit in Ginger×

DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES IN EDUCATION AND CHALLENGES IN ITS GOVERNANCE

Education 2047 #Blog01 (22 Mar 2020)

Close your eyes, think of these random words and relate them to the environment closest you can imagine:  batch, attendance, time-table, delivery, instructions, test, pass, inspection, examination, result, grade, fail, reject, quality, promotion, detention. A factory is built in your imagination, as these words rattle your head. Right? A stark irony that our education institutions too use similar, if not the same terms.  Yes, our academic institutions are factories that grade humans and pass or fail them. Alas! We humans, the most intelligent organisms on the planet have created a system for education, which sees, admits and processes humans as products or commodity. The content canned in books is pumped into the head of each student as instructions, to be learnt at a pace of the rest of the class. S/he is prompted to regurgitate the same, for being tested against what is there in the books and stamped fit or otherwise for upward mobility on the academic/ professional ladder. Human beings put in rat-race!

With the system in place testing a learner in what he knows (in a handful of subjects that a school and its teachers know) and not recognizing his strengths what he knows no wonder the quality of education is sliding down across the board. The students and their parents agree with it, as do the teachers, administrators and the policy makers. The faculty in the top-notch institutions agree with the deterioration and the same gets echoed by teachers in remote primary schools. If the quality is sinking all across, then something is wrong the way we look at the quality and also why we focus on it. The paradigms have changed in the knowledge era that we are in, yet we use the same lens to check the quality.  The technology is disrupting and in fact, has disrupted education and  rendered the factory model completely out of sync with the times.  But, when did it all begin in India?

Anachronistic Model of Education

On 2 February 1835, Thomas Babington Macaulay enunciated his Minute on Education aimed to reform secondary education on utilitarian lines. The objective was to create “a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”. What came about was imposing English as the medium of instruction in secondary education, from the sixth year of schooling onwards, in place of Sanskrit or Persian till then used in the educational institutions supported by the British East India Company. This British policy had a determining the impact two aspects: (i) the content and methodology of what has been and is being taught in Indian educational institutions, and (ii) the medium of instruction through which these have been and continue to be taught. What started almost two centuries ago has perpetuated- to produce armies of drones – starting with clerks, then managers and now coders; all spawned from the instructivist or conformist mould of learning, that split schooling and education into two!

The things remained unchanged largely because there was no technological breakthrough since the printing press in the 15th century that enabled the mass production of books and the rapid dissemination of knowledge. The books came handy in the industrial age, in the form of manuals- basically a prescription to be followed religiously- by workers. The books also came handy to the teachers as repository of knowledge, content for delivery to students, to prepare questions for examinations, and to evaluate the performance of students against the book. Sage-on-the-stage with books, addressing the needs of an industrial society, has been the defining characteristic of the factory model of education.   

Schools in the 20th century were largely supply-driven institutions, primarily to cater to prepare the workforce for the factories and governments. For reasons of large number of education seekers and cost control, schooling remained impersonal, seldom tailored to the needs and skills of each child; in short, there were leashes in the education system. But in recent years, technological breakthroughs have allowed monitoring of each child’s progress individually and to use his/her data of past performance to modify and customize what follows. Yes, the polar-shift has started happening towards a learner-centric system, comes as it with an opportunity and means to unleash the full potential of every child, for the first time in human history.

A Roadmap for Education

“Realizing the full potential of every Indian” goes the vision in the roadmap of Education, that Technology Information, Forecasting & Assessment Council (TIFAC) has laid down. First-ever foresight for Education, ever attempted in India!  This emerged out of the long-term technology perspective plan for the country drawn by TIFAC, Technology Vision 2035 (TV 2035) as a response to the challenges thrown by surging Information Technology across all sectors of socio-economic importance. The time horizon for the Technology Vision 2035 exercise was chosen because it was coinciding with 200 years of Macaulay's Minutes on Education! Naturally, then the exercise would not have been complete without a document on education. More so because "quality education, livelihood and creative opportunities" was identified as one of the prerogatives that the government must assure its citizens. Also throwing weight behind the roadmap, were 11 sectors covered under TV2035- hugely technology centred and verticals by themselves. The growth of technologies in these sectors, their deployment and adoption, would not be effective unless backed by strong, modernized and responsive educational system and hence, a roadmap for education was imperative.

Education is possibly the only sector which leads to new technology and at the same time, gets impacted by new technology. Also, it is the one which faces maximum resistance when it comes to the implementation of technologies and ironically from the teachers who are responsible for producing the change-makers! Therefore, the roadmap from TIFAC looks at education in a much more comprehensive manner not only by focusing on future technologies but also looking at the changes which are getting induced in human behaviours attitudes and inclinations and reasons for learning.  Let’s see the technologies shaping and disrupting education space.

Technologies impacting education in future

All technologies are basically assistive in nature, they augment the capabilities of humans and tremendously expand the resources. When harnessed properly, technologies can significantly improve human lives and make them better citizens of the world. The internet and mobile telephony have disrupted education and rendered it- globalized, democratized, inclusive and affordable.  The books allowed a learner to proceed linearly- forward or backward and thus imposed a restriction. In contrast, each web-page with hyperlinks embedded in it, allows a learner to dive into a new world just like a free roving human mind. The technology thus allows access to what a learner wants instead of books which have been dictating the learners. Let’s catch a glimpse of technologies in the offing, in not such a distant future.   

The ingress of hand-held devices like tablets, mobile phones into the education system is already visible but has to spread to actually unleash the potential of flipped-classrooms and blended-learning in a big way in India. The versatility of tablets will increase further with mobile apps become popular for providing access to educational content, facilitating testing and assessment, supporting management functions, financial transactions- over the internet. The wearable technology will further add to the capabilities of the tablets through wired/ wireless interfaces. Several MOOC providers have already developed their own apps for tablets to allow access to their material on-the-go. This personalization gets further advanced as these hand-held devices allow tracking one’s own performance and improve on learning objectives through learning analytics. Also, gaming and gamification are being supported by these tablets, taking care of the needs of learners in a wholesome manner.   

 

A lot more changes are expected if we push our time-frame by a decade or so. Developments in Artificial Intelligence will allow Natural Language Interpretation and Machine Translation to advance further and reduce the linguistic barriers at least in the written text.  The advances in Internet technologies like Cloud computing, 4G& 5G communications and Mesh Networking, will transform the classrooms on the one hand and make the virtual learning environments less virtual on the other. Modular computers, with flexible screens and context-aware, will make every other panel learner’s desk- smart and almost weightless; access to educational material and performance of educational transactions will be without the use of papers, through haptic interfaces and gestures. The sensation of depth in virtual and tactile experiences for experiential learning will be addressed by volumetric screens and Internet of things. All these technologies will liquidate ‘distance’ in distance education on the one hand, and take conventional education to distant places on the other. Thus, the shift from real classrooms to virtual classrooms, availability of language-neutral books, more engaging game-based experiential learning and highly personalized self-directed education would become common.  With these progressions, MOOCs and remote-labs would get integrated and also mainstreamed as will be game-based learning. Adaptive learning and testing will emerge as a defining characteristic of personalized or learner-directed education that appears to be the future.           

In a slightly distant future but not beyond our horizons, new experiences in education can be foreseen. Real-time translation would liquidate all linguistic barriers and learning would start becoming language neutral. It will be possible to join courses and classes with the medium of instruction losing meaning. Synchronous teaching-learning in any language would be possible. With advances in photonics, computational photography, holography etc. and the emergence of quantum computing, the virtual spaces would start becoming immersive and offer near-real experiences. This would take experiential learning to new heights. In short, all spatio-temporal-lingual concerns in education will be taken care of. As such, it will be possible to enrich the experience by creating virtual artefacts, tools, learning points/ spaces and integrating them in learning processes.  MOOCs will no longer be taken by learners but will emerge at built around a learner’s need and capacity, packed with an immersive experience. Educational walk-throughs allowing learners to have immersive experiences of historical events, remote locations, hostile settings, physical/ chemical/ biological changes etc. will become common. Reputation metrics as a substitute for institutional certifications or degrees may emerge, as education would become A4- “anyone, anytime, anywhere & any language”.

The emergence of technologies like Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), Real-time Translation (RT), 3-D Printing and Block-chain (BC) and their combinations are posed to several unthinkable possibilities. Literacy will have to be completely redefined and understood as how noted futurist Alvin Toffler puts it “he illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn”. With complete control over what is to be learnt by a learner to AI, language barriers liquidated by RT, the learning material and content presented in the form of IVR, assessments powered by BCI, hands-on experience enhanced by 3-D printers experiential and a cover of trust provided by BC, all of them just around a learner- the changes are unimaginable. 

 

The end of teachers, as we know them today is a distinct possibility, at least in higher education, repositioning them as pathfinders, navigators, counsellors and confidants in the service to learners. The books are set to become vestigial for the education system, accelerated by the climate change concerns and this trend also signals the end of reading, writing already threatened by texting! BCI may also hit hard on reading and of course, bypass listening/ speaking. Instant translation of text and speech will end linguistic barriers. Further, “adaptive” systems which will become less and less expensive and more and more widely available, are a pointer to end of grades/ classes, each learner has to struggle through, competing with peers. With all these technologies and of course, an enabling eco-system and policies, education is all set for a complete changeover, with the focus shifting from improving quality (of a product) to unleashing the full potential (of a human). With some technologies on exponential trajectory rather than linear, education is set to be under tremendous pressure and in a state of flux, this, in turn, opens up challenges for governance. 

Future Challenges in Governance 

Education is not just about the intellectual transactions that happen in academic institutions but it has a range of other processes, systems and institutions in its ambit. For this reason, administration, management and governance of systems and institutions in the education sector become extremely important. Administration is essentially about procedures and is therefore important in all public institutions. Unfortunately, the system now in place for administration were designed for an industrial age with layers of bureaucracy to ensure compliances. Owing to the emphasis on normality and routine that tend to maintain the status quo, the systems are bereft of novelty and innovation. Technologies like mobile telephony, cloud, RFID, apps, block-chain etc. can immensely accelerate the pace of administrative actions and make them transparent.

Management of education is the process of planning, organizing, directing and controlling the activities of academic institutions. This is achieved by utilizing human and material resources in a manner so as to effectively and efficiently accomplish the functions of teaching, research, training and extension work. A great deal of management functions is being done using technology, aided and accelerated by the internet. Communicating, sharing, archiving and retrieval of information has become so fast and dependable that most management functions are prone to automation promising speed, fairness and transparency.

Block-chain technology that is taking the financial sector by storm is already tipped to take away the offices of Registrar and their equivalents in schools and colleges.   If the internet transformed the way we shared information and connected, the block-chain will redefine we exchange value and whom we trust. This is all the more important when much of the education will happen online, also lifelong and life-wide (learning and personal development in real contexts and authentic settings), naturally learners yearning for learning in a trustful environment. With this technology not only the educational transactions will become trustworthy, but also setting up digital lockers holding students' credentials will become faster, with student reports automatically getting uploaded with validation processes in place.

Governance reflects in the quality of administration and management. It translates into putting in place- standards, information on performance, incentives for good performance, and also accountability. Technologies that can lead to quality governance in the education sector include cloud computing, mobile apps, digital identity, RFID, real-time translation, data analytics and block-chain. Advancements in these technologies can ensure us- safe, secure and authentic database vaults, digitization and storage of personal and public records, advanced forensics, advanced biometrics for digital identity and human independent decision support systems- promising to make governance in education more transparent, speedy and effective.

Technology for revamping education

For education, as we have just seen, technology has the potential to touch almost every aspect of it- slaying the traditional bottlenecks of inclusivity, infrastructure, economics and geography. The education systems hitherto, were designed to provide the information already available, to equip the students to grapple with similar situations in future. However, with democratization and easy access to education, and the rapid changes across sectors, induced by technologies, some galloping at the exponential rate, the system has to empower learners to shape the unpredictable future. Thus, education of the future will all be about how to learn and not what to learn and, scales tilted more in favour of innovation than invention. This paradigm shift would mean a radical change in the role of teachers who are considered the cornerstone, dwindling of the rigidity in academic institutions, and revisiting the structures and policies in governance. 

* * * * * * * * * * * ** * * * * ** * * * * ** * * * * ** * * * * ** * * * * ** * * * * ** * * * * *

The author is a Scientist with Technology Information, Forecasting & Assessment Council (TIFAC), currently on deputation to All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE)

(The views are personal)
nrjsaxena@gmail.com