Chennai, July 23: IT boom did many things, and one significant effect was the shift in the conversation from only ‘employment’ to ‘employability’ and ‘scale,’ observes Vaidya Nathan, Founder and CEO, Classle Knowledge Pvt Ltd, Chennai (www.classle.net).
The speed at which it hit the education system, India’s most ‘regulated’ sector, caught everybody unawares, he continues, during a lunch-hour interaction in Business Line, on June 8. “With solutions being looked at every level starting from policy and governance downwards, can the wonderful capabilities of IT (information technology) solve education’s woes? Innovative start-up Companies like Classle, EduComp, Everonn, say ‘Yes’.”
On a positive note, again, is a ‘breaking news’ story in www.philly.com, at the time of writing this; it is about Microsoft founder Bill Gates calling for the revolutionising of the US public education with the Government stimulus funds, in the course of a speech on July 21.
The $100 billion in economic recovery funds earmarked for improving education should be used for creating more effective charter schools, holding teachers accountable for student performance, enforcing strong common standards, spreading knowledge through online learning, and developing better assessment tools to evaluate individual schools, pupils and teachers, Gates argues.
Ask Nathan, and he would say that with factors such as size, scope, variations, velocity, cost, and accessibility characterising the education problem, the solutions have to be innovative and at the same time be easy to adopt.
Excerpts from the interview.
What are the innovations that can help in education?
Many of the concepts and technologies used in the Internet services share the attributes of our problem. The newer and popular phenomena such as ‘social media’ (Wikipedia, YouTube, Podcast, and so on), ‘social networking’ (Facebook, Orkut, LinkedIn), ‘social bookmarking’ (del.ico.us, digg, etc.), and micro-blogging (twitter), handle large size, wider audience, are viral, and very accessible, and also free.
So far, they have been looked at and also used from an informational and entertainment perspective. But as a capability, they are very potent and have the required attributes to solve the concerns of education.
Thankfully, the newer companies in education see this capability and combine them with other insights and innovations and directly address the issues of education. Even the principle of ‘social enterprise’ is available as a business model.
What more, from an adoption point of view, the youth, who are the consumers of this, take to these concepts and technologies quite naturally. Communication and sharing are very common and natural behaviour for them. They don’t think in terms of ‘What’s in it for me?’ They just share.
Also of relevance are technologies such as the cloud computing environment, and Open Source software, apart from the increased availability of connectivity, mobile platforms, and the abundant material on the Web. All these pieces have individually, and in combination, demonstrated their potency and effectiveness with solutions.
We have the pieces, so what do we do next?
All the pieces are available to address the different aspects of the education issue. What are required are the ‘system integration’ principles, which are very common in IT. Interestingly, most of these tools are available at a level which is extremely economical.
We are really looking at a scenario where IT-driven innovation can dramatically alter the academic and professional quality of education, especially higher-education and research.
While all technology can come about and set the stage, the actual actors have to enact the play. That is, in solving the problems in education with these technologies, all hands have to join to make it happen. Let us not forget that all the tools which form a part of the solution are ‘social’ in nature. This will succeed only when the ‘society’ is involved and engaged in the exercise.
That is, everybody, including the academic institutions, instruction staff, industry, students and even parents, all have to be a part of the solution. The good news now is that the technologies make the effort involved in participating in the solution very small. All that is required is making that behavioural change.
How do you see IT impacting research?
Research is also another area where there are serious imbalances. Low preference towards research is only a symptom. Actually, the students who prefer to do research go out to other countries.
There are many structural and policy changes which are required to improve the condition. Some of the issues are the time taken for research degree process, relevance of problem statements, and availability of collaborators, referees and mentors.
If the transparency, reach and collaboration, which come easily with IT, are factored in, and the process redesigned accordingly, that would be a necessary first step to give a boost to research.
Our research should be able to make technology more democratic, more localised, a lot more sustainable and definitely more people-friendly. IT, by bridging the islands of academia, industry and society, can certainly bring about a positive change.
–Agencies