Gargi Gohil
Umiya Arts and Commerce College ,Sola, Ahmedabad.
Abstract. India has world’s largest youth population about 500 million in the age bracket of 5-24 years, and also a country with the world’s largest higher education system. Rising trends and the demand in the higher education sector in the country, it has witnessed a phenomenal growth in student enrolment, from 25.2 per cent in 2017 it now stands at 25.8 percent this year. Moreover, the Government of India’s target Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) of 30 percent for higher education by 2020 is expected to regenerate enthusiasm in this domain, along with this capacity building will have to go hand-in-hand with quality, inclusion and a whole new way of thinking.
As the world stands on the brink of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, powered by a wide range of new technology breakthroughs such as AI and ML .The ability to think well, and think fast, will assume greater significance than it has thus far. Our young graduates will have to live and work in a steadily more automated and disruptive world.
The desired skill sets of most occupations are likely to comprise of skills that are not yet considered crucial to the job today. As per certain estimates Cognitive Abilities, Systems skills, Complex Problem Solving, Content skills, and Social skills are … likely to be a growing part of the core skills requirements for many industries.”
This move away from silos in education and towards more collaborative and innovative learning is being reflected in the slowly growing engagement with the Liberal Arts in India. India had a tradition of liberal arts education, with internationally respected centres of learning at Takshashila and Nalanda. The curriculum at these grand institutions of the ancient world included grammar, philosophy, ayurveda, surgery, politics, warfare, astronomy, commerce, music, dance and much more. The success of such educational institutions was evident in their graduates – Takshashila’s alumni included the philosopher and economist, Chanakya; the father of Sanskrit grammar, Panini;
and the Chinese traveler and Buddhist scholar, Hiuen Tsang.
Efforts are on to incorporate the best of content, courses and knowledge that India has to offer and unite it with the best in contemporary pedagogy in terms of experiential learning, use of technology, grass-roots immersion and mentorship. As more and more students seek international exposure, many Indian universities and colleges have entered into joint venture agreements with international universities.
This interweaving of disciplines and blending learning between the sciences and arts has also resulted
in better prospects for students. This year, the employability score has taken a big leap as compared to the last, reaching a new level of 45.60% which has a sharp hike of 5.16% over the previous year’s employability score as per the India Skills Report 2018.
All of this indicates that while debates may ensue about the costs and relevance of such an education for the real world, Indian institutions are showing an innovative path forward.
Introduction
India today stands at the crossroads where it can either become the growth engine of the world, leveraging its demographic dividend, or lose out on the opportunity. The level of excellence in higher education will be a key factor in determining the role that India will play, globally, in the immediate future.
Nostalgia must have a shelf life and any discussion on the state of Indian higher education systems cannot be relegated to the memory of the sub-continent’s ancient world-class universities of Nalanda and Taxila.
The President of India has recently remarked—India cannot aspire to become a sustainable superpower without becoming a knowledge superpower. India cannot fuel its imagination of becoming an industrial power-house, if it is dependent on borrowed ideas of innovation and entrepreneurship. Within the next decade it needs to produce educated/skilled people and new ideas.
Universities through their teaching efforts improve the quality of human stock; their research efforts expand the known boundaries of human knowledge and, if commercially harnessed, could lay the seeds for new companies. Scientific ideas that led to the invention of the simple electronic calculator, optic fiber, or supercomputing, in turn led to the development of entire industries of electronics, telecom or computers respectively; all of these innovations were incubated in universities (University of Pennsylvania, MIT and Illinois, respectively).
Companies, like Google, Yahoo and Cisco, literally began from the university campus of Stanford. Indian universities have to lead the economy’s progress by fuelling it with innovative ideas that can become commercial assets for the benefit of future generations.
However, statistics do not look promising. For instance, as per the 2016 Global Competitiveness Index, although India has improved its overall ranking, being ranked at 55 among 140 nations, in the sub-criteria of quality of higher education and training, India ranks 90 among 140 nations. In technological readiness it ranks 120 among 140 nations and, as per the index, remains one of the least digitally connected countries in the world. Official records of the Indian Patent Office regularly display that only a minority of patents filed are by Indian applicants.
Therefore, there is a need to infuse entrepreneurial objectives as a mission for universities besides their traditional roles of teaching and research. Universities need to adopt policies that integrate economic development of research as an academic function itself. Federal and state education departments and regulatory bodies involved with university governance need to recognise the potential of making universities as agents for “capitalisation of knowledge”, making them an economic actor in their own right. This will enhance the ability of universities to collaborate with industry—through technology transfer, patent licensing and faculty spin- offs of university developed and patented technology. A stable and predictable IP environment
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will be critical for this.
When it comes to research funding, China spends almost five-times more than India. While China spends 2.1% of its GDP in R&D, India spends 0.85%, which is even lower than Brazil and Russia. This becomes more significant because close to 75% of India’s R&D costs are government sponsored. Further, where China attracts 17.5% of the global R&D spend, India receives a mere 2.7% of such funds.
Not only does the government need to beef-up its public sector R&D budget, it also needs to incentivise collaboration of business and public sector research. Given that studies have shown the complementary relationship between business and public sector R&D, policies like tax incentives and direct subsidies can be useful tools to sync the research objectives of public and private sector R&D, including better collaboration of public and private research infrastructure.
How then might we foster a culture of creativity and innovation that makes us want to “think in India?” For a start, we should overhaul our educational focus and philosophy. A sorry reality of today’s education is that students find college uninteresting. “Why am I learning what I am learning?” and, “I don’t remember anything I learned in college” are cheerless statements that one frequently hears in interactions with students. No wonder millions of children drop out ,forever keeping their innate creativity under lock and key. Attending classes is just not that compelling or interesting.
In The Innovator’s DNA, authors Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen, state that “Innovators treat the world as a question mark.” They identify the five key characteristics common to great innovative entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley:
1)Questioning 2) Observation 3) Experimentation 4) Association, i.e. connecting of dots and 5) Networking
Now the question is whether these characteristics can be learned or imbibed ?, the answer to this is affirmative when education environment changes dramatically from a rote system to a learner-centric, active and interactive practice. New teaching-learning methods need to be introduced and instilled to trigger important shifts in thinking and behavior which can be described as following:
Learners must be encouraged to be curious and ask questions. Wemust learn to evaluate learners from not only what they write in exams but also by what questions do they ask?
Keen observation is also a key to many breakthroughs in science and medicine and in the social and business worlds. Learners must be taught and encouraged to observe deeply, to look beyond the obvious , read between the lines and find new meanings and interpretations.
Experiential learning should be initiated to engage the learners senses which extremely effective in helping to grasp, explain and retain otherwise difficult concepts.
In the era of ML and AI various knowledge sources are easily accessible ,it corrupts the mind not to reason for themselves. Model-making workshops, audio-visual presentations, internship activities and exploring the physical world will help in participative learning in a more interesting and effective manner.
One of the major goal of ay education is to instill a sense of confidence. When education encourages curiosity and creativity, wenot only train them to become independent, thinking
individuals who discover and solve problems on their own,but better citizens and strong future for our country. Peer-to-peer teaching is one of the powerful way tool in this practice.
The good news is that none of the above requires an expensive lab or a huge infrastructural changes or demands. Much of the aforementioned desired shifts in thinking and behaviour can be achieved through low-cost everyday materials. Indeed, the lack of resources is one of the greatest spurs to creativity. How much money do you need to observe and learn from nature, the source of many breakthroughs in science and technology? You are creative not because you have everything at your disposal but because you don’t!
Thus the challenge at present is not in knowing what we need to do, but in knowing how, and how quickly, we can do it. Experience suggests that the intrinsic power of engagement of active, hands-on methods of learning can help to rapidly communicate and convert thousands of teachers and students to the new paradigm. Towards this end, many organisations are helping to create a unique, deeper and more meaningful educational experience — to spark curiosity, nurture creativity and instil confidences. Innovations such as mobile science labs, lab on bikes, engaging village night school programmes and ‘constructivist’ hands- on, experiential teacher training programs, all have made huge contributions in nurturing innovation in education in India. To bring about a new national education consciousness such ideas and methods, which are rooted in curiosity and creativity, need to scale, spread and infuse their magic across millions of classrooms.
The Lab-On-A-Bike (LOB) in India is one such popular example. As the name suggests, the Lab-On-A-Bike initiative involves a bike that carries a set of 10 Lab-In-Boxes that have low-cost tools and equipment to conduct experiments that make science concepts come alive in the classroom. They engage both the teacher and the student in collaborative learning at school level, its purpose is to get students to wonder, observe, question, think, feel, experiment -all the “characteristics” or skills that are essential to success as inventors, creators and problem-solvers. By seeing and doing, and pro-actively interacting with the teacher and peers, the child learns science concepts more comprehensively than from a boring chalk- and-talk lecture. Importantly, the indelible memory of a hands-on experience with the LOB helps her to retain this knowledge.
To keep pace with the latest developments in world education and in a bid to promote affordable education, Human Resource Development Ministery of Government of India aims to offer about 2,000 online courses within one year through ‘SWAYAM’ - an ingenuously developed platform.
Under SWAYAM or Study Webs of Active –Learning for Young Aspiring Minds programme professors and faculties of centrally funded institutions like IITs, IIMs, central universities will offer online courses to citizens of India.
SWAYAM is an instrument for self-actualisation which provides opportunities for a life- long learning. On this portal ,learner can choose from hundreds of courses , basically all the courses that are offered at the university or college and these shall be offered by best of the teachers or subject experts in India and elsewhere. Moreover, any student is studying in any college, can transfer the credits earned by taking these courses into their academic record .Thus, SWAYAM presents a unique educational opportunity to expand the horizons of knowledge for anyone who wants to learn something.
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At present various courses are offered through this platform and in future Government plans to offer 2,000 courses in one year. About 60,000 students have already completed their courses through this affordable platform launched last year. It makes knowledge available anytime anywhere , it can be termed ‘ATL - Anytime Learning’.
SWAYAM is is programme initiated by Government of India and designed to achieve the three cardinal principles of Education Policy viz., access, equity and quality. The objective of this effort is to take the best teaching learning resources to all, including the most marginalize and disadvantaged. SWAYAM seeks to bridge the digital divide for students who have remained untouched by the digital revolution and have not been able to join the mainstream of the knowledge economy.
This is done through an indigenous developed IT platform that facilitates hosting courses, taught in classrooms from 9th class till post-graduation to be accessed by anyone, anywhere at any time. All the courses are interactive, free of cost to all the residents in India. More than 1,000 specially chosen faculty and teachers from across the Country have participated in preparing these courses.
The courses hosted on SWAYAM are in 4 quadrants – (1) video lecture, (2) specially prepared reading material that can be downloaded/printed (3) self-assessment tests through tests and quizzes and (4) an online discussion forum for clearing the doubts. Steps have been taken to enrich the learning experience by using audio-video and multi-media and state of the art pedagogy / technology. In order to ensure best quality content are produced and delivered, nine National Coordinators have been appointed: They are AICTE for self-paced and international courses, NPTEL for engineering, UGC for non technical post-graduation education, CEC for under-graduate education, IIMB for management studies and NITTTR for Teacher Training programme.
Education in India is no longer just a teacher talking to a bunch of students in a classroom,with more than 370 million internet users. It is the third largest online market for education in the world. This enables people to take better advantage of the resources available online.
We have more than 1 million registered schools and 18,000 higher education institutions, so its fair enough to say that India has become leader in Innovative and inclusive Higher Education.
“Possibilities and Probabilities in Higher Education of Asia”
ISBN 978-623-91211-3-6