It is important to realize that education at all stages is inherently a political process but much more so at higher education stage, where values and ideas are discussed and debated, and the very choice of a course, a research problem or how these are chosen, framed and delivered, is reflective of these ideas and values.
In broad strokes, online education teaches what you could learn from a book, without any of the subtlety involved in learning. It imparts knowledge, but not a way of thinking. It does not readily permit the formation of learning communities, ones that can critique and prevent people from going way off course. The face-to-face generational transmission of experience and learning is also not the focus of this model – this was what was valued in India as the guru-kula system.
… we are possibly going to have to move entirely online in many cases—at least in the short term. In public universities, this has multiple implications. What we might gain in sterile efficiency, we will lose in the rich messiness of exposure that our campuses provide….. in moving online, we lose that space of social, political and cultural discovery.
COVID-19 is here to stay. Even after an effective vaccine is found, it will continue to be with us. It has affected all aspects of our lives, and the education sector is no exception. The current situation has forced us into a revolution in the education sector, the widespread adoption of digital technology that can not only cater to the current pandemic, but it is also important when aiming to provide quality training to a country of 1.35 billion people. Although we are not completely trained and equipped to do so just now – this is the alpha version – this is just the beginning. If this opportunity is properly used, the future will be an era of technology-driven higher education in India.
Bertolt Brecht said “Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon”. Unfortunately, it is often poverty that separates men and women from their books. So what we really have is a forced transition to a virtual platform in the middle of an economic meltdown. The dispossession of education, especially higher education, will be severe. That is where we have to think about the moral choice underlying this transition.
Covid-19 decimated supply chains, economic systems, and close social interactions. It also had crippling effects on educational institutions and systems worldwide. For an education-driven economy like India’s that produces the highest number of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) graduates worldwide, the situation is particularly dire. One of the fundamental components of these courses is laboratory experiments, which may become difficult, if not impossible to conduct safely in absence of a vaccine for Covid-19. In this article we outline a number of free, open-source, curated, verified, physics-based simulation resources that can be used to design virtual lab courses for introductory or advanced undergraduate physics curricula.
Although many think so, classroom teaching cannot be replicated in online teaching – the virtual classroom is entirely different. A virtual classroom makes it difficult to assess and measure the teaching learning process and its efficiency. Maintaining a good teacher-student relation (or any relationship!) is a challenge as well. A student while in college, learns not just the subject – it opens to them a new world of experiences.
Examinations need to be decentralized, with teachers given autonomy to frame syllabi that would be based on their experiences with the student body of their institutions, independent of the University Grants Commission (UGC). It is time the UGC realized that a centralized system of education cannot work, especially in the middle of a global crisis.
Shifting online is more than converting class-notes into PDFs or a collection of video lectures and e-books. Digitized learning content has to be contextualized and ‘byte-sized’ to make it crisp, engaging and understandable. Although there is no replacement of the field trips, social and cultural interactions during academic exchanges it may be possible to make the e-learning more user friendly through customization.
As it is, our young urban population has screen-addiction that contributes to many of them lacking in social skills. Now we are asking them to observe social distancing and to communicate online and this can only encourage screen-addiction! I am afraid that this will diminish real communication and social skills further, reducing tolerance in general.
Series of articles on Higher Education post the pandemic
