The Hindu Business Line : Technology-enabled learning for capacity building

What is needed is investment in e-infrastructure. Well-prepared instructional content that is Internet/CD-accessible can double capacity without any demand for physical infrastructure.

During the recent debates on reservations, the Government tried to appease the open category by promising capacity augmentation in institutions of higher education. Even if the quota issue had not surfaced, increasing the numbers in higher education is a need projected by agencies such as Nasscom. There is a view that capacity expansion cannot be done overnight because physical infrastructure has to be built and faculty is to be found. But when we apply out-of-the-box thinking, this is not as insurmountable a problem as it is made out to be. We cannot solve problems with the same mindset that in the first place created them.

DNA of a high-quality institution

The difference between a high-quality institution and the rest does not lie in acreage of real-estate or equipment; there are "non-elite" institutes with larger real-estate and better infrastructure compared to the IITs and the IIMs.

The overall quality is at best a weak function of the calibre of students admitted. Those who could not get admission to the elite institutes have fared equally, if not better, well in their chosen professions.

The student/teacher ratio is immaterial in the context of present generation of learners. Even where specified ratios are maintained, there is no evidence of quality interaction taking place. The teachers make it a one-way communication and frown on any "interference". Faculty at Harvard, MIT and Stanford handle classes of 500-600.

The real difference lies in the learning pedagogy and ambience that supports self-motivated learning.

The capacity can be instantaneously doubled without any augmentation of physical infrastructure if the students are required to attend campus for only three days a week. Learning in a partly self-induced mode demands confidence and a mindset to stand on one's own feet. In this mode, "learning" is not synonymous with listening to hoursof lectures.

The critical factor in capacity augmentation is easy access to well-prepared instructional content. With personal computers becoming affordable, technology should be used to solve conventional problems. Institutes need only a few highly motivating "gurus" who would lecture on the "whys" of topics. They will link knowledge with real-world applications thus providing a purpose for learning.

The mechanistic part of knowledge (the "what" and "how") is left to the self-study mode. Self-study coupled with e-chat with experts and peers leads to more effective learning. Several courses at IIT Chennai are conducted in this manner. When a student posts a doubt, invariably another student answers it, according to a professor of IIT Chennai. Students are more comfortable with peer-to-peer learning, which has been empirically proven to be very effective. While the conventional mode of learning is a one-teacher-many students model, the technology-enabled learning offers one-student-many teachers model.

National repository of knowledge

The Ministry of HRD has launched a laudable scheme called NPTEL (National Program of Technology Enabled Learning). NPTEL seeks to harness the experience of teachers from IITs and the IISc to create e-learning contents that can be accessed at the click of a mouse anytime, anywhere and any number of times.

The project aims to bring to every student's desktop high quality content with text, animation and video lectures by eminent specialists. It is understood that 300-400 lessons in various engineering topics have already been prepared, the content being Internet-based (wherever connectivity and bandwidth is not a constraint) and on CDs. The project needs to be accelerated by requisitioning the services of eminent retired teachers.

The "impersonal" mode encourages even shy learners to freely post their doubts. Technology-enabled learning encourages slow learners to learn at their own pace.

At the other extreme, it also poses challenging inter-disciplinary problems to the more intelligent students. Obsolescence of the content is not an issue because the purpose of formal academic education is to impart knowledge of permanent value and not fleeting skills.

Paradigm shifts in knowledge do not happen too often.

Teaching to be made lucrative

Colleges will require a different cadre of faculty to facilitate and mentor students. They do not require a Ph.D.; there is no empirical evidence linking a Ph.D. degree with effective teaching. A Master's degree or even a good Bachelor's degree in the relevant subject would suffice as a requirement for facilitators. In the olden days, colleges used to have "tutors" in the humanities departments and "demonstrators" in the science departments. Such a cadre must be revived. The remuneration levels have to be fixed so as to make "learning facilitation" an attractive career option. A country such as Morocco, for example, has fixed the salary level of teachers commensurate with private sector executives.

This has resulted in attracting highly qualified people to the teaching career. The institutes should also encourage the faculty to take up industry consultancy and allow them to retain the consulting fees. Ultimately, we may move towards "teacherless" learning institutions. This may sound weird but considering that the restaurant industry has moved to "self-service" mode, confronted with paucity of quality staff, this does not seem too far-fetched.

Thus, what is needed is investment in e-infrastructure and not huge real-estates.

Knowledge industry (read IT), which depends on human resource as the major raw material, can be expected to invest part ofits wealth in developing the e-infrastructure. The benefit accrues to it in the form of an augmented supply chain. Does not the manufacturing industry, after all, pay for its raw material?

(The author is Advisor, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. The views are personal. He can be contacted at r.narayanan@tcs.com)