EDUCATION HAS FOR long been considered the hardest sector to reboot. Covid-19 changed that in one fell stroke. It pushed students and teachers into the future of education. A future that had long been talked of but largely disregarded.
But, though the pandemic forced educational institutions to rush to digital platforms and enter the virtual classroom, there was minimal familiarity in its use. The result was the transfer of the ongoing teaching routine to the virtual space. What followed was a string of montages, snap shots of written notes, doodles and derivations, PowerPoint presentations, old and new, and collation of information from web resources. However, even as interactive learning and personal connect was fragmented, frugal innovation and effective transition to the virtual mode was commendable. More importantly, perhaps, the strongest critics of online education discovered its power, picked up digital skills and developed new competencies.
The pandemic highlighted the value of open distance learning and open educational resources. Large populations of students, faculty, and public at large have benefitted from the state-of-the-art course materials made freely available by diverse entities. The virtual academic landscape is now abuzz with a broad range of webinars with global outreach, master classes, engaging extramural events, and social and cultural festivals.
The fast-evolving virtual digital forums have enlivened professional conferences replete with exceptional speakers, plenaries and breakout sessions; immersive workshops; poster and exhibition stalls and interactive lounge experiences for the personal digital avatar. This has helped academia envision the innovative power of immersive technologies. It has also brought into mainstream general education the discourse about technology-enhanced learning and the need for creating, adopting and adapting high quality instructional material for online delivery.
Building effective educational institutions is a complex task. Reinventing well established institutions and dislodging old practices is all the more difficult. The experience of the past few months has lowered attitudinal barriers and provided the necessary impetus to usher in the much-needed systemic change. As institutions brace for the new academic session, they will have to strengthen resilience and the capacity to embrace disruption and ask fundamentally challenging questions.
Academic leaders will have to redefine the periphery of their outreach. Perforce, they will have to invest in digital infrastructure for enabling learning anytime, anywhere on the campus and beyond. They will have to learn to straddle the physical and virtual spaces with equal ease to create the hybrid campus. Furthermore, faculty will have to strategise a novel quality framework for teaching-learning.
Time is opportune to re-evaluate the extant structure of the degree programme with its content-laden curriculum, rigid teaching schedules, and graduate outcomes determined by an end of the year examination. It is time to review all processes, experiment, innovate, redesign and recreate appropriate alternatives. Students need to be informed of the changes and helped to reset personal goals and expectations. They need strong mentoring and hand-holding as they negotiate new terrains of learning.
It is yet uncertain if and when students will be able to return to the campus. However, it is easy to predict that there is no going back to the old ways. As educational institutions reboot to a new reality, they will have to envisage much more than safe usage of physical spaces, heightened personal hygiene, testing for the infective, enhanced health care, secure residential accommodation, and a robust scaffolding for mental health and wellness.
For some time now, over admission has been rampant, and colleges have been struggling to manage the expansion-equity-excellence triad creditably. Merely breaking the class into smaller sections will not suffice. With the overarching paradigm of active self-paced learning, novel hybrid models of teaching will have to be created and fine-tuned to address specific course dependent needs. A plausible approach is to have online lectures for large groups augmented by frequent face-to-face interactive engagement—the so-called tutorials for smaller groups. The latter can also quickly go online in case of a sudden campus shutdown. Science disciplines will have the additional challenge of innovatively integrating hands-on activities and laboratory work.
Institutions will have to garner expertise in educational technology and instructional design. Development of online content will entail sustained capacity building of faculty to engender a nuanced understanding of how meaningful teaching-learning requires not just domain knowledge but also knowledge about pedagogy and technological skills. In-house resources will be best co-developed in collaborative faculty teams with complementary skills. Institutions will gain by proactively contributing to national consortiums building repositories of massive open online courses and virtual labs. To stay relevant, this experience is crucial for the faculty.
The next wave of disruption will come from data analytics, adaptive and immersive learning technologies that will bring personalised education to students’ devices. Students now are digital natives. Socially networked, they have manifestly new ways of garnering knowledge, learning and sharing. For them, the current crisis has been disruptive, but not necessarily detrimental. Peer networks have been highly resilient. They have engineered novel ways of disseminating learning resources, overcoming digital access through mobile communication apps. Increasingly, students are deciding their own learning trajectory, exploring best available resources and supplementing the degree programme with a portfolio enriched by online courses, skill-based micro credentials and nano-degrees. Facilitating experiential learning are service providers offering early internships and placements. This trend will increase exponentially. Mechanisms have to be created for formally recognising these student achievements.
Institutions will be known for agile crisis management; how seamless, comprehensive and cogent their curricular delivery is; the quality of student experience and how astutely they position students for the workplace. Liberal education has many elements that are not vicarious. It integrates experimentation, work in the labs, field trips and early research that interface with the real world.
Holistic education is about face to face interactions, peer learning, collaborations, teamwork, networking with outside agencies and community service. It is about nurturing talent and building soft skills. In campuses, the noisy corridors, brimming cafeterias, lively discussions, debates and discourse, the sports competitions and the vibrant cultural landscape provide opportunities for personal growth and developing an identity, for humanism and citizenship. The real challenge will be to create an immersive hybrid campus life which epitomises such open-ended learning that continues to be hands on, minds on and hearts on.
Jolly is former principal, Miranda House, University of Delhi, and academic consultant, National Assessment and Accreditation Council.