Category: Practical advice

The future of learning: Five trends that could change the face of Indian education

30th January 2017

The education system in India is in trouble and everybody knows it, not least of whom is the Government, whose inputs to the National Education Policy 2016 — currently in draft form — do not shirk away from the scale of the problem. In this preliminary document it is acknowledged that learners are disengaged, teachers are untrained and unmotivated, school leadership is lacking, and infrastructure is poor; factors which contribute to learning outcomes that fall a long way short of those required if India — soon to have the largest working population in the world — is to fully exploit its demographic dividend.

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How to promote digital literacies among faculty

7th May 2013

In the recently published NMC Horizon Project Regional Analysis, Technology Outlook for Australian Tertiary Education 2013-18, it stated (p.3) that (shock, horror) there is a need for more faculty training to improve digital media literacy ‘before being asked to teach, and for more professional development opportunities once in the profession’. More significantly, though, the report points out that:

While a lack of adequate training opportunities is a part of the challenge, ultimately a change in the mind sets of disciplines and individual faculty will be required, along with cultural shifts within institutions, before emerging tools and technologies are routinely adopted and implemented as a matter of course.

 

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The Five Minute University

11th April 2012

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c00GPvns31U]
This classic clip from a Father Guido Sarducci stand up routine was shown a couple of times as a conference I attended recently. Unfortunately, this caricature of the extent and depth of learning at university is not too far from the truth. Ideally, learning experience should translate into competence, but so long as assessments focus on testing memories rather than skills, the probability of this happening remains low.

This problem has become particularly acute in recent times as the gap between university curricula and the knowledge and skills required in a digital age has widened. It has been a hot topic in India for a while now, but as a quick Google search demonstrates, it is a global problem.

The solution? Well, Father Sarducci may have the right formula. Start by asking what a graduate should be able to do once they finish.

Hopefully, this should take longer than five minutes.

The new price of online textbooks is free

8th April 2011

[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/sWCB4PZcAg]

Thanks to Francois Therin for the reference to Flat World Knowledge. I certainly expect other online startups to follow their lead given the demographics of the target market. The majority of these individuals would probably prefer access the text electronically anyway but — at $0 — the incentive is even stronger. The business model also makes sense. Even if a tiny percentage take up the printed version option, given the large numbers, there is still money to be made. In India alone, there are probably a few hundred million individuals who would likely jump at the chance of access to a free text and there will be plenty of educators who will be willing to prescribe them.

The linguistic genius of babies

17th February 2011


Compelling evidence for bilingual language immersion. More interesting, from my point of view, is how bilingual learners fair in later life given their brains will develop differently to monolingual learners. Does exposure to different language before the age of 7 years make them better problem-solvers, for example?

India’s chalk and talk problem

21st October 2010


Image source: sidedish.dmagazine.com

There was an interesting piece in the The Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this month entitled India’s Company Classrooms Challenge ‘Chalk and Talk’ Colleges. The reason it is interesting, is that I’m not entirely sure the corporate universities are challenging the didactic pedagogy so commonplace in Indian institutions of higher education. In the Infosys case cited, the key difference, it would seem, is that PowerPoint is preferred to the chalkboard. The fact the wifi is turned off during class time would seem to indicate that Web 2.0 approaches to learning are yet to be readily accepted.

The Indian corporate sector has been complaining loudly about the inability of the higher education system to produce ‘job ready’ graduates for some time, some estimating that only one in four graduates possess the requisites skills. As a consequence, a new market player has emerged that is rather quaintly referred to as ‘finishing school’. This is not somewhere in Switzerland where the British aristocracy send their daughters to learn deportment, it’s a modest looking facility in the outskirts of an India metro where recent graduates learn the soft skills to enable them to participate as fully fledged members of the global workforce.

There is every chance that this segment of the Indian education industry will continue to expand for some time yet because success in education and success in the business world is chalk and cheese [pun intended]. Indian students will continue to ‘mug up for exams’ — a phrase in common parlance in the UK in the 1950s — because very little has changed within the Indian university sector since the 1950s. The focus is on teaching not learning, and testing memories not problem-solving skills. Industry, meanwhile, requires life-long learners and problem solvers.

Apologists for the system will no doubt point out that at every top university and leading corporate in the world you will find well-educated Indians. This, of course, is a product of the law of large numbers. These people have succeeded in spite of the system. Imagine what could be achieved if there were widespread acceptance of a learner-centric, technology-enhanced, participatory pedagogy with authentic assessment. To date, there has been very little incentive for institutions of higher education to change. With the opening up of the Indian education system to foreign competition, domestic institutions may be forced to reflect on their outdated practices.

Education needs pull not push

4th August 2010


A very persuasive presentation from Charles Leadbeater on how social entrepreneurs are setting up schools in slum areas around the world that have pulling power because there is some extrinsic motivation to attend, namely an immediate pay-off in terms of productive outcomes. There is no national curriculum or standardised testing, but one theme that is common is that these schools reach the people they most need to serve in a personalised manner. The impersonal mass education systems that students are pushed into in many wealthier communities around the world might take heed. These systems are failing because learners are starved of opportunities for creativity. How perverse would it be if, with economic and social progress, these poor communities ‘developed’ to the point where children start enrolling for GCSEs, to become part of the ‘sausage factory’ education systems characteristic of ‘advanced’ countries.

Ban textbook torture

8th April 2009


Image source: flickr.com/photos/augustallen/

‘Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings’, so said Heinrich Heine.  Mike Elgan, writing in Computerworld last week, would likely disagree. In a provocative piece that clearly rattled a few readers, judging by some of the comments, Elgan leads with the title: Education reform: Let’s start by burning all the textbooks. Having written a couple of texts myself, I might also have taken umbrage at his suggestion. The fact is, he has a point. I stopped prescribing texts a long time ago, and simply make use of what’s freely available on the web, not just text resources, of course, but all the rich media that textbooks cannot provide. I’d never burn books — and I don’t think Elgan would either — but the $200 500-page marketing book I’ve just had to buy my daughter does not exactly send the pulse racing. The chances of her using it again after this semester are pretty slim, and the resale value will be low given a new edition is likely to be used next year.

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