Address the technological disruption in the education sector

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One of the most significant disruptions caused by the pandemic is in the field of education. Both teachers and students were jolted out of their diurnal certainties and forced to adapt to the new circumstances at short notice.

Since schools and colleges were shut due to lockdown, classroom teaching shifted to the online mode — and the extent of the digital divide in India immediately became apparent. This divide is multi-layered: rural-urban, rich-poor, old generation-new generation, and geographic.

Moreover, challenges are not only about having a computer/mobile device or Internet. Online education requires smartphones and broadband Internet connection — something which majority of the people cannot afford for their children. This poses the single greatest problem for post-COVID-19 education in India. A lot of children from the poor and marginalised sections of the society are being left out of the learning process.

Teachers too, are facing the pain of the transition. First, is the unfamiliarity of the older generation with the digital world. A vast majority of the teachers in schools and colleges in the small towns and villages still do not have proper access to digital technologies. Nor are they provided with any substantial support by their institutions.

Even the premier colleges of central universities in metropolitan cities did not provide essential devices such as digital boards to the faculty citing the issues of the fund. The education system is still not prepared to cope with the post-COVID-19 world, where online learning and digital technology will play a significant role.

Attendance in classes is suffering, and the task of the internal assessment and final examination has become a formality. Lack of capacity is making it difficult as most colleges do not even provide the facility of plagiarism check, and expect faculty to spend a fortune on expensive software. This has aggravated the problem of inflated and fake marks, which has been wreaking havoc in the education system.

Nowhere its impact can be seen better than in the Delhi University where cut-offs are touching 100 percent! School boards are giving 100 percent marks in subjects such as political science, languages, and philosophy. Students from non-Hindi states have 90-100 percent marks in Hindi, even though they can hardly speak or write in Hindi.

However, now even colleges are suffering from this affliction of grade inflation. The root cause of grade inflation at the schools is because college admission is based on school results. Now graduation marks are becoming one of the criteria even in the post-graduate courses, and colleges are under severe pressure to inflate grades. This problem is aggravated today as even standard checks and balances have suffered a blow, and no alternative mechanism has been put in place. Online Open Book Examination is an illustrative case study in this regard.

Another defining feature of the times is the rise of educational tech companies. These start-ups have shaken the massive coaching industry for competitive exams and are already making inroads into the regular courses. However, there are no clear rules and regulations when it comes to such courses, or even a policy vision on leveraging them by integrating them into the formal education framework — like recognising their course for credit or maybe recognising the certificates granted by them for specific courses.

Ever since the pandemic, the government has been working on expanding access to remote learning with education channels across the length and breadth of the country on a 24X7 basis. But they are still run with a bureaucratic approach of a government scheme, and the content and quality leave much to be desired.

Several projects to assist teachers, scholars, and students, such as the DIKSHA platform, Swayam Prabha TV Channel, Online MOOC courses, On AIR – Shiksha Vani, DAISY by NIOS for differently-abled, e-PathShala, the National Repository of Open Educational Resources (NROER) to develop e-content and energised books, telecast through TV channels, e-Learning portals, webinars, chat groups, distribution of books and other digital initiatives have been initiated by the Ministry of Education along with state/UT governments.

In the year ahead, in 2021, as vaccines will accelerate the return to pre-COVID-19 ways, some of the learnings from 2020 are here to stay — most of the above mentioned changes in the education sector are here to stay. Sadly we are yet not prepared to address these pedagogical and learning challenges in a satisfactory manner.

Despite all these efforts, what is still lacking is a comprehensive policy that recognises that the pandemic has fast-forwarded the technological disruption in the education sector, which requires a massive infusion of resources for capacity building and increasing access. It is here that greater public-private partnerships can play a critical role in resource mobilisation, innovation and implementation.

Abhinav Prakash Singh is assistant professor, Shri Ram College of Commerce, University of Delhi, Delhi. Views are personal.