The EDGEX 2012 Conference has been carefully and collaboratively constructed to bring cutting edge educational research to participants. There are two major themes – Learning X.O and Simulations & Serious Games. The Learning X.O theme essentially tries to synthesize the fairly amazing and disruptive research and experimentation around Connectivism, Informal Learning and Communities of Practice.

For something that I joined up in 2008 (with the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge [CCKO8] “course” led by George Siemens,Stephen Downes and Dave Cormier, featuring a unique open-ended format called the Massive Open Online Course – MOOC) to co-experiment with over 2000 people across the world, to have advanced so much and to have directly or indirectly inspired systems thinking on education (witness the Stanford AI “course” experiment and the recent announcement – MITx – by MIT) by traditional brick and mortar institutions, is no mean achievement over such a short period of time.

What makes Connectivism and all the associated themes so disruptive is just that – its potential to arm an entirely new generation of theorists, researchers and practitioners with the thought paradigm and tools to comprehend the impacts of disruptive technology, over abundant knowledge, demographic pressures and changing social relations among other important trends. Underlying it, in my own interpretation, is the tremendous principle of democratization - of education to be by, for and of the people. Though it is heavily steeped in technology, the essence of it is like “the principles behind the steam engine” as Stephen would say.

George and Stephen continue to raise the bar. Their continued work, and that of able partners and fellow researchers like Dave Cormier and Alec Couros, not only on the CCK MOOCs, but on various others, like the Critical Literacies MOOC, the EdFutures MOOC, Alec’s EC&I 831, the Change11 MOOC, the Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference, Stephen’s technology development and many other initiatives, are inspiring thousands of educators worldwide.

Etienne Wenger, with his disruptive work on Communities of Practice, is one speaker who we shall miss terribly on this platform. We did not get his availability on the dates for the conference, and would have loved to have him, so as to, at least in my mind, complete the conversation. But I am fairly sure, his intellectual presence will be felt strongly through the themes of the conference.

Quick switch to Corporate Learning and the one name that immediately comes to mind is the person responsible for really starting it all – Jay Cross. In his work with the Internet Time Alliance, Jay, along with Clark Quinn (who we are honoured to host at the conference), Jane Hart, Harold Jarche, Charles Jennings and Paul Simbeck-Hampson, are redefining the boundaries of what learning can be. Their work on Learnscapes as learning ecosystems that promote complexity instead of eradicating it, is path breaking because it offers another way for us to think about how workplace learning can be transformed.

Even as this disruptive research and experimentation impacts our conception of how learning will be and how learning systems will be, the work of three of the expert researchers at EDGEX2012 - Grainne Conole, Jon Dron and Martin Weller – is of crucial significance. Grainne is researching ways in which new pedagogies and approaches to design can harness the potential of social and participatory media. Martin is investigating the implications of scholarship in a digital world. Jon is looking at learning environment design and investigating the “shapes of online socially enhanced dwellings that are most likely to lead to enhanced knowledge and, in the process, uncover some of the nature of technologies and our intimately connected cyborg relationships with them”.

Meanwhile, the other theme, Simulations and Serious Games, is really a veiled approach to unravelling how rich digital media and delivery platforms can combine to produce rich digital learning experiences. The work of Clark Quinn and Alicia Sanchez, and other speakers such as Sid Bannerjee and Jatinder Singh will lay the foundation for rethinking digital media. Clark, of course, brings in a much wider perspective – he is rethinking our conception of learning and systems for learning and is investigating models such as spaced practice, social learning, meta-learning, and distributed cognition.

Les Foltos brings in focus to teacher education and how educator communities can use peer coaching as a technique to continuously learn and evolve. Shanath Kumar, Satish Sukumar, Rajeev Menon, Manish Upadhyay and Amruth B R bring in yet more perspectives on design, content, new age assessments, semantic web, mobility and technology, thus rounding off this theme.

And this is not limited to Higher Education alone. The principles and precepts are fairly universal, although the practice and implementation will definitely vary between contexts. K12 educators will find a plethora of disruptive opportunities in the conference.

The conference has one other dimension worth noting. We are inviting startups and entrepreneurs who believe that they are contributing disruptive innovation to education. You will see some of these entrepreneurs showcase their ideas at the conference.

I am hoping this conference acts as the melting pot for disruptive research and practice and marks the start of new level of collaboration between participants.

In my mind, all this research is connected by one common theme – we are looking the ways to change the dominant paradigm, because the dominant paradigm will fail (and indeed, is failing) to achieve a vision of a meaningful and capable system of education in the face of the challenges we face today.

Particularly for countries like India, the timing of these disruptions could not be more apt. And this is where we hope your vision and expertise at the conference and around it, will pave the way for open and concerted dialogue on how we can embrace change in our society.

The website for the conference is up at http://www.edgex.in. The website features speaker bios and a set of resources to get started on the many topics that will be covered in this conference. You can also connect with us  prior to the conference through email or the links below.

• Conference Google Group  (send us an invitation request)
• Follow us on Twitter

Please do feel free to drop me a line at edgex2012@edgex.in if you are interested and I will get right back to you! We look forward to hearing from you!

Let’s disrupt!!

The norms of Indian Council for Agricultural Research (faculties of agricultural and veterinary sciences), Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (medicine, dentistry, nursing and AYUSH), National Council of Teacher Education (faculty of education), All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE, Engineering and Technology, Pharmacy and Management) and the Rehabilitation Council of India (rehabilitation and special education) will supersede these regulations. Of these, the most striking exceptions are for education and those under the AICTE (which excludes perhaps 30% of the HE institutions in the country).

Essentially then, these regulations are majorly for Arts, Humanities, Sciences, Social Sciences, Commerce, Education, Languages, Law, Journalism and Mass Communication programs across HE in India, not really affecting professional education in most part.

The selection process include advertising at a national level and a Selection Committee that is formed on the basis of the guidelines laid down by the UGC (typically university nominees, college principal and governing body member, a couple of subject experts, college Head of Department and so on).

For the direct qualification at a Professor level, the requirements include 10 years of high quality work, atleast 10 publications, atleast 10 years of teaching/research experience including guiding doctoral candidates, (surprise) contribution to educational innovation (read innovation, design of new curricula and courses, and technology mediated learning process) and a minimum score in the Performance Based Assessment System (PBAS) indicator called Academic Performance Indicator (API)  [must read: Pratiksha Baxi on Kafila : The UGC Dictates]. A Professor could also be directly recuited if her credentials prove that she is an outstanding professional with established reputation in the given field, having made significant contributions.

A college principal, on a side note, is expected to have 55% score in her Masters Degree, a PhD, must have been an Associate or Full Professor for 15 years and must have a minimum API.

An Associate Professor must have 55% score in her Masters Degree, a PhD, atleast 5 publications, atleast 8 years of teaching/research experience with evidence of having guided doctoral students, significant contribution to educational innovation  and must have a minimum API.

Norms in the 2010 UGC regulations also vary slightly in other disciplines such as Music and Performing Arts. Regulations in professional programs like Management/Business Administration at the institution level include a focus on past work experience and credibility in the industry, but let go of the more rigorous requirement of being an educational innovator.

Which brings me to the subject of this post. What does it take to teach vs. what does it take to become a teacher?

I strongly believe that domain expertise is really crucial, but coupled with that must be some amount of knowledge/skill/passion for teaching. The regulations sort of assume that you are born a good teacher or that you have become one through experience. The regulations attempt to quantify in the PBAS what constitutes quality in research or innovation in education (but fail miserably, IMHO). For example, educational innovation is thought to be:

Participatory and Innovative T/L Process with materials for problem based learning, case studies and group discussions etc., with points given for interactive courses (5 points), participatory learning modules (5 points) and case studies (5 points). If the teacher uses ICT (Powerpoint/Multimedia/Simulation/Software) in addition to chalk and board, she is entitled to 5 more points.

The PBAS provides a maximum score of 20 for “use of participatory and innovative teaching learning methodologies, updating of subject content, course improvement etc.” in an overall score of maximum 125 and a minimum required of 125.

Similarly, if you look at Paper 01 of the National Eligibility Test, called General Paper on Teaching Aptitude and Research [samples here], there is some attempt to gauge whether the test taker is a good teacher or not (atleast in the limited manner of a multiple choice question diagnostic test). The test covers analytical reason, math, english, data interpretation, general knowledge, basic IT knowledge, and a bit of knowledge around education and our education system. I am guessing some intrepid test preparation institutes would have a good amount of printed course material and question banks already around these to help students get past this death-defying assessment.

And in typical style, someone in the bureaucracy decided they want a review and have posted an undated questionnaire online which seeks to “elicit the views of a cross-section of the society regarding utility, effectiveness and continuity of UGC-NET”. The questionnaire (and you will miss it if you don’t click on the link to the MS Word quiz labelled “questionnaire” in the last paragraph) is a multiple choice quiz of 4 survey (Yes/No) questions. There is no mention of the results so far though the NET has been running since 1989.

There are perhaps better ways to elicit views.

Directly impacting these issues is really the availability of technology (hardware, software) and content at the institutional level given the scale and diversity of the Indian HE challenge (now 33000 institutions, 600+ universities and about 20+ mn students). I am hoping that over time, these conditions will evolve and improve – the existing resources being Sakshat-NMEICT, InfLibNet, Journals access etc. – to embrace OERs and low cost hardware riding on the National Knowledge Network itself which is being now extended to private institutions as well. Infrastructure is required in order for a teacher to teach.

Other direct impacts are can be derived through focus on areas such as

• providing an ecosystem (and infrastructure) at the institutional (or group) level that encourages innovative practices,
• the building up of a community of teachers, facilitating their interactions through techniques such as peer coaching, peer conferences, awards and recognition
• devising a program for teacher educators for HE,
• devising programs for pre-service and in-service teachers that are embedded, not in the traditional system, but in precisely the new age education systems that they will seek to further
• embedding appropriate andragogical and heutagogical techniques in the curriculum and building teacher skills to adopt these in their own learning
• investing in open and distance learning at the institutional levels
• providing a more rigorous system of assessment and evaluation for teachers at the entry level without acting as a bottleneck

So what is the UGC doing in the area of HE teacher education and training. According to the UGC website, it has established 66 Academic Staff Colleges. It is interesting to read through the Refresher Course rules and regulations. They lay down career progression linkages through the Career Advancement Scheme which stipulates the number of refresher courses that must be taken in order to considered for the next higher level. At this point, it seems that they have to attend at least one orientation and 1-2 refresher courses.

The curriculum coverage is as follows:

The content of the Refresher course will have essential percentage of the core material in the subject discipline along with required percentage of areas of emergence and priority, (both national and global), essential laboratory and practical component, computer application and I.T. Contents, if required with relevant advancement to the subject discipline.

The Orientation Programme provides opportunities for newly appointed teachers as well as for in-service teachers to make them familiar with the use of tools (software) and “Internet Literate” as Orientation Programme has I.T. based contents and about one week time will be devoted to I.T. based contents and training.

The curriculum for the Academic Staff Orientation Course may have the five components with 144 contact hours, i.e., 6 hours daily for 4 week programmes and 3 week Refresher Courses may have a minimum of 108 hours as already communicated to the UGCASC/ RCC. In addition, computer awareness and application of computers in teaching and research in different areas as relevant for the subject disciplines. All UGC-ASCs and UGC – RCCs have been requested to take steps to implement the programmes/courses accordingly.

If you take a look at the responsibilities of the ASCs, the overwhelming focus seems to be on subject and (assuming very basic) IT skills. Teacher participation is all paid for by the government. The detailed list of Orientation programs in 2009-10 gives very little reason to cheer. Organizations like JNTU, Hyderabad and MANUU, Hyderabad are actually talking workshops on effective teaching and open source software in education, but the vast majority are definitely not. One thing that may be good is that I see a lot of focus on principals and administrators based workshops.

Of course, none of these are in any way open or visible. Like much of Indian education. Which is not to say that innovation does not exist, that  there are not people with cutting edge thinking in education and that the future is grim – just that those dark corners need to be illuminated soon.

In school teacher education, however, the situation is richer with the National Council for Teacher Education (which has been although recently superseded by the government for 6 months on account of malpractice). NCTE has come up with many publications and I would suggest that they are worth a look, particularly the National Curricular Framework which has good ideas such as the Teacher Learning Centre. They have also got a Teacher Education Institute evaluation and accreditation mechanism.

It also has developed a Central Teacher Eligibility Test to select teachers fit to teach in schools for Classes 1-8 (essentially for BEd students). Please do look at the curriculum and sample tests – it will be an interesting exercise for teacher educators around the world to contribute and critique these.

Of related interested is how organizations like the Distance Education Council address the problems of faculty development and certification for blended programs and those offering academic (tutor) support online. This is something that is quite important to address as well.

In summary, it remains a challenge for us to figure out a more effective system for teacher education in HE today. The existing mechanisms need to be reviewed and the hidden dialogues around this issues needs to emerge.

It was an interesting conference from many perspectives. Pavan Agarwal from the Planning Commission, which is in the final stages of formulating the strategy on Education in the 12th five year plan, made some important points. He talked about the need to align the economic structure and imperatives of the country with the educational strategy by putting focus on the main components – agriculture (which accounts for 50%), industry and the services sector. It is important because economic growth vision and educational strategy has to work hand in hand. The new figures for HE sector that are being finalized indicate that our GER is now close to 18% and total HE campus enrolment is set to reach 30 mn students by 2017 (with about 4 mn students currently in distance education over and above the campus estimates). It seems we now have 32,000 colleges and over 600 universities (200 of them in the private sector). While making the case that there can be alternative educational models and systems that will emerge (case in point is Sam Pitroda’s concept of a meta university which is really very close to what we have been discussing worldwide and especially in the MOOCs) in a pluralistic manner, his focus in the 12th plan was in the details. The principle thought was that while the 11th plan focus on strategy, the 12th plan will focus on the details.

Other interesting comments included revisiting the National Mission on Education using ICT which is being re-evaluated and re-budgeted in the 12th plan with many elements of focus – ensuring that the National Knowledge Network reaches even into private institutions, making sure that the 30% of the 32,000 colleges that do not even have a computer are equipped with the necessary infrastructure (Aakash tablets also to be provided), virtual LABs (as an offshoot of the NMEICT-IIT pilots over the last 2 years or so), the need to drum up inexpensive models for high quality content generation, leveraging technology to enhance instruction, creating our own variants of community colleges for short lifecycle education needs and establishing more communication channels including DTH (Direct to Home).

Of these, the most important in my mind was the thought, at least, that we need to attack scale with scale. Pavan talked about shorter lifecycle, affordable new generation colleges that go local – i.e. serve the needs of the local community, while hopefully being globally and nationally aligned. I think this is an encouraging shift to what I call as distributed educational systems that leverage scale to meet scale. The consensus is, however, echoed repeatedly through the conferences I have been to – it is alright to question the dominant paradigm, but don’t think it will be replaced.

There were many examples of best practices (and revolt against the ideas of best practices) bringing me to perceive a newer wave of more articulate ideation. The problems that exist in India are well known and poorly documented (also from lack of accurate data), but people have pieced together their interpretation through these debates and are proposing some interesting solutions There is definitely greater awareness, not only of what technology can do, but also of the options in educational systems that we can leverage. This is indeed heartening.

Of special interest was also Nandita Abraham (from Pearl Academy of Fashion, Delhi) who presented a working implementation of what technology can do (ePortfolio, wiki, blogs, collaborative projects/networks) in a nicely done presentation. When I questioned the scalability of the model, she was candid enough to admit there could be distortions at larger scales. Which is a problem we absolutely need to address, because traditional eLearning and non-eLearning systems have indeed suffered from lack of scalability and extensibility.

Another point. Existing assessment and training providers don’t seem to have envisioned an alternate future yet – it is more of the same focus on LMS, clickers in the classroom, smartboards and ICT. No one is yet talking about Learning Analytics, Semantic Web, virtual worlds, augmented reality, location awareness, connectivism and many of the things that are being discussed. There is very little thought about what happens when we start giving importance to the network beyond simply casting it as “leveraging technology/ICT” – alas, not a phenomenon restricted to the Indian mindset. There are no answers, for example, if one asks them “what’s next?”

What also emerges very clearly (and I will write my experience with the National Board of Accreditation shortly) is that these confabulations are personality driven, honours driven, position driven and not open and distributed. There are false calls to open-ness, but these are reactive rather than proactive.

It has become fashionable to say we want your opinion, but to either not respond to opinion or make summary judgements on opinions that emerge. There is almost a very visible effort to appear open, but no visible effort to create a network proactively. Education system confabulations happen behind closed opaque doors of bureaucracy and academia, both fairly well insulated from mere mortals like you and me.

Unless that changes, education in India will be undemocratic.

The two main themes of the conference are:

1. Learning X.O - marking the significant and ongoing developments in learning and teaching, particularly in informal learning, connectivism & connective knowledge, the MOOC, Learning Analytics & BIG data, Digital Scholarship, Peer Coaching and Open Distributed Design.
2. Simulations & Serious Games - A focus on scale and both the philosophy and practice behind simulations, virtual worlds and serious games, clearly one of the most articulate and cogent responses to skill development and joyful learning in the recent times.

What makes the conference unique is the sheer intellectual capital that will be leading the conference. These speakers certainly do not need an introduction:

• Jay Cross, Internet Time Alliance
• George Siemens, University of Athabasca, Canada
• Stephen Downes, National Research Council, Canada
• Dave Cormier, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada
• Alec Couros, University of Regina, Canada
• Jon Dron, University of Athabasca, Canada
• Grainne Conole, University of Leicester, UK
• Martin Weller, Open University, UK
• Clark Quinn, Quinnovation, USA
• Alicia Sanchez, Defense Acquisition University, USA
• Les Foltos, Peer-Ed, USA

This conference is part of the EDGE Forum which is a group of leading educational institutions from public and private sector committed to promoting highest standards of education, value systems and governance in the field of higher education.

The EDGE conference, an anual event, addresses questions of improving the quality of education in several dimensions like education governance, human resource management, cutting-edge technologies, holistic approach to education infrastructure and above all adoption of best practices. It serves as an analytical and authoritative source for policy recommendations on higher education. The conference is well represented by reputed educationists, Higher Education administrators, teachers and high level policy makers, apart from representations from industry.

The EDGEX2012 conference site will shortly be live but if you are interested in attending, please do let me know through comments to this post.

The session on Internationalization led by Anand Sudarshan from Manipal, was interesting because it took a good look at the major issues surrounding greater integration of Indian HE with the rest of the world. Understanding why we want to achieve this integration (enlightened self interest) is an important step in this direction. There also needs to be a focus on policies and support infrastructure (Rahul Choudaha and Kavita Sharma) that provides a cohesive and articulate framework for internationalization.

Deepak Pental, ex VC Delhi University, chaired the next session on Learning in Higher Education. Petra Wend from Queen Margaret University, Scotland made the distinction between teacher and learner centered education. Prof. Lakhotia talked about decompartmentalization and greater mobility between disciplines. In view of the scale of the problems in India, he asked if we really need a 3 or 4 year degree? He also focused on teaching quality. SS Mantha from AICTE harped on building upon the strengths of the existing system. I think what he is saying is that the systems are good and robust, but people have failed. He does acknowledge that scale poses a problem to existing pedagogy. He also said we need a focus on students who did not make it to college after grade 12. I am not sure what he was really saying though.

Nitin Khanna talked about the realities of the kind of students that come in to college and the kind of graduates that emerge – there being some fantastic diversity. To teach such people, Nitin started experimented with games, activities, storytelling, outside classroom activities etc. But these strategies were not scalable. Then he realized that education given is not education taken. So he is looking at a shift towards learner centered consciousness and greater bent towards what students want. Deepak Pental made the important point that structural changes are equally important to help some of these things come into effect. He also exhorted industry to come in and offer domain knowledge for courseware development.

Some action towards the end. Pental and Mantha expressed their disillusionment about industry participation and FICCI executives went to some pains to explain that there was a lot being done.

Dinesh Singh started in an iconoclastic way by demolishing the need to prescribe a research environment, citing examples in history who had no research environment or support (Bodhayan, 800 years BC devised a proof for the Pythagorous Theorem, Newton, Faraday etc.) and also to explode the myth that research should be exclusive of any formal teaching work. Seyed Hasnain was quick to retort and quote the need for people like Venky Raman and Gobind Khurana to leave India and move to environments that supported research. Seyed focuses on qualitative expansion that he considers more important. At the University of Hyderabad, he focused on this not to the exclusion of the social equity goal, and talked about the way the University has transformed itself, thanks to a large funding support. He also talked about how Cambridge has partnered in order to peer review and publish Hyderabad University’s research. Pretty impressive stuff!

Wendy Cuiker took a different focus by looking at research and innovation. So this is essentially looking at a different purpose for research – that which drives and is driven by community needs. Innovation and opportunities for research for young students is very important. This is an important look at research capability building and ties in nicely with initiatives many universities are undertaking in building up Entrepreneurship Development cells. She had an interesting video to back this story up. Pete Downes from Dundee talks about social impact in the biotech area that has directly resulted in employment and the growth of industry. There was no strategy, but really driven by opportunities and people. That is not to say that the culture is not important - it is critical.

Couldn’t stay much longer, but it has been a very interesting day! Thanks, FICCI for getting so many good sessions together!

All talks so far have focused on the core challenges of an ordered traditional education system. There are the challenge of scale, attendant challenges of resourcing, financing, quality and innovation & research. It was also clear, from the international participation, that India is being taken extremely seriously as a higher education market and research venue.

The discussions on ranking (as also the overall discussions) ranged from people who cautioned against the use of ranking as a tool because of some very valid issues (accuracy, coverage, limitations of a single index) to others who questioned the concept of a “world class” university to yet others who have spent a significant part of their working lives trying to devise ranking methodologies.

Prof. Shailendra Mehta presented his study on how alumni were perhaps the most important determinant of an institution’s success. Dr. Nikhil Sinha, VC, Shiv Nadar University, provoked much needed thought by suggesting we focus on an institution’s curricular and pedagogical prowess as an important determinant of student choice rather than just placements and rankings. This, I believe, is extremely important because students’ choices in Higher Ed today are not really a function of pedagogy. To this end, Dr. Sinha pushed for curricular liberalization, something that institutions struggle with in India.

The discussion around the ambitious National Knowledge Functional Hubs, a parallel initiative by FICCI led by Dr. Barun Chakrabarti (JGM & Head (R&D), L&T) and Dr Rajan Saxena (Co-Chair FICCI Higher Education Committee and VC, NMIMS), was interesting. I think it will have great impact if the team is able to identify metrics that will allow it to assess performance and progress. The initiative essentially envisages setting up hubs that will be responsible for many things – including the upgradation of teaching skills, academic-industry linkages, documentation, learning material creation etc. The apparent overlap with the National Skill Development Council has been resolved by a split in focus – NKFH will focus on ”degree” education and NSDC on the vocational stream. Of course, sector skills councils of NSDC will work closely with NKFH.

I missed the parallel session on the Unfair Practices Bill’s implementation challenges. The Indian education system is being massaged for change in terms of the regulatory frameworks and there are many such Bills that perhaps will see a transition to Law if approved by Parliament this year.

The next session was an open house on the 12th Five Year Plan approach. Dr. MK Sridhar (Karnataka Knowledge Commission) came up with an interesting analysis of student enrolment data. His major finding was that we are focusing on the wrong problem – it is not so much the rise in GER due to attracting more students than a problem of retaining students (high dropout rate triggered by financial (male), marriage (female) and career guidance reasons). This is an interesting, but predictable problem. The focus on the 12th plan seems to be on infrastructure, open content, capacity building and employment & entrepreneurship. The four pillars of the approach are:

1. leading growth through higher demand for skills
2. focus on unrepresented and under-represented sections of society
3. significant focus on open and distance education
4. focus on increased private HEI participation

The intention is to focus on not just expansion in terms of capacity, but also to think about equality in access and importantly, excellence. In fact, Montek pointed out that excellence perhaps needs to move beyond just improving quality to really creating high end research centres. Lokesh Mehra, Director, Education Advocacy, Microsoft talked about the A-G of education – Attract private sector, Balance liberal and professional focus, C – build a credit transfer mechanism, engender competitive funding across public and private sectors, build clusters of excellence; Distance Education focus, Efficiency, Faculty development focus and GDP alignment.

Nothing significantly different in terms of the shop talk. There is the same lack of research in education in general and the corresponding lack of influence/impact it can have on policy. As almost always, I am the lone tweeter (tag: #FICCIHES2011) and blogger which is never a comfortable thought because it shows the absence of an awareness in the education circles in India that there may be alternatives that may address the problems we face more adequately than simply replicating external experiences.

Let us look at the top challenges/needs that are being addressed by this serious interest.

Technology

Web 2.0/Web 3.0, Cloud computing, HTML5, Tablets and Smartphones have really evolved during the past year or so, with a lot of new products and platforms emerging that have a direct relevance to how content and collaboration can happen in the education context. Even as the world over people are predicting the death of the LMS as we have known it, the major objections to the shortcomings have been addressed by the LMS vendors.

Features such as the ability to integrate with social networks and media, the ability to use informal learning pedagogy within the structured confines of the traditional environment, the ability to apply traditional business analytics to the learning process, the ability to work with mobile devices for content delivery and interaction and the ability to be open and adaptive to learning needs, are now surfacing in products. One needs only to look at the change in platforms and products for companies such as Blackboard, SABA and Mzinga to witness the transition. Somewhere education companies are signalling their intent to provide, as George Siemens says, platforms for education.

Pedagogy

While net pedagogy has made a tremendous mark with the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), there are other initiatives like the Khan Academy (which perhaps does demonstrate the power of a good instructional technique, but that is about as far as it goes), traditional open universities and the OER movement seem still to be lagging behind the change.

The struggle within traditional systems to embrace the newer and perhaps more relevant pedagogical modes will be shaped by the availability of tools and techniques that are simple to adopt and implement. That is, one of the important factors will be the availability of an institution-mindset compliant technology replacement for the LMS.

Assessments

Assessment remains a sticking point – particularly for informal network based modes – that has not been fully resolved. Part of the reason why it is (and promises to remain) an unsolved challenge is the contradiction in terms with an entire process of accreditation and certification that is the foundation of the traditional system. Network based assessment places far greater responsibility of demonstrating and assessing competencies on the main protagonists – the learner and the employer (/task).

In the traditional scheme of things, however, I do see some interesting moves towards new assessment techniques. One is the evolution of standard forms to more complex forms of assessment – task based and even collaborative. The other is the use of immersive simulation platforms  and serious games, not just for learning but also for assessments.

Standards

There has been sufficient movement around standards as well. With TinCan and LETSI, there are some interesting ways of looking at the learning experience. IMS is also evolving new specifications that accommodate the newer realities (Learning Tools Interoperability, Learning Information Services and Common Cartridge). There is hope that standards will support a shift to easier and more efficient creation of new learning experiences, assessment modes and administration support.

Scale/Reach/Economics

There is also the realization that costs must be contained/reduced (especially in developed countries) and this is placing great pressure on the traditional players in businesses such as educational publishing. And we see them responding to the challenge in a variety of ways – all digital. I think people do realize that these solutions may perhaps be one set of the solutions for the developing countries (over the next 10-20 years) and perhaps the only solutions for the countries that are going to contribute the bulk of our learners worldwide by 2050 – the less developed countries of today. But somewhere, I have felt that policy has been too slow to respond to these change trends and this is a missed opportunity.

In Summary

I believe that we have crossed an inflection point over the past year and now it is a period of growth and consolidation. The contours of the next generation learning experiences are clear in intent, although there will be numerous successes and failures on the way. It is going to be an interesting time for entrepreneurs, because new ideas will find a playing ground.

While SJ epitomised creativity and innovation in technology, JS did the same with Music. While SJ brought personal computing on its own, JS brought life to the dying art of the ghazal. Two people who were never formal teachers. Nonetheless, what we learnt from them is priceless and will continue to inspire us and future generations to come. And they were connected too. The ghazals that JS sang adorn many an iPhone or iPAD.

Since I am irreversibly Connectivist, I can’t help thinking that they were informal educators, teachers who taught without teaching, motivated with their words and actions, who could not be formal educators because perhaps the world was too big to fit in their class, and from who generations will continue to learn.

And there are many like them. Some resting in peace, some visibly our guides and some hidden somewhere off our networks. The skill we must imbibe is how to connect with them, learn from them, despite them not teaching us in an explicit classroom. The world then becomes our classroom, substituting formal teaching with guided collaboration and self-service. That learning is different from time bound, formally assessed mechanisms in ways that are fundamentally incomparable. It is chaotic, non-deterministic and complex and led by our own desires and skills.

The puzzle is in figuring if this is a new kind of education system. Not system, in the traditional closed loop sense, but a complex, distributed one with many cores – many distributed and disaggregated centres of learning and assessment. The puzzle is in the emergence not the making, because it can’t really be “made”. The puzzle is whether it will result in superior outcomes – better citizens, more informed decision makers, more democratic nations and more competent professionals.

It is a puzzle I love and hate to think and talk about. Hate because it involves letting go of structure, intermediation and control. Love because it is free and open, and perhaps has the best chance of helping our children emerge from the abyss of learning they are in today. It needs more people to experiment, play in local contexts, stay globally connected to an ever-expanding network of practice. It is a movement rather than a policy decision, a personal decision to play ball, rather than an imposed directive, an urge to change rather than a push to reform.

SJ and JS. Full circle. Rest in peace.

Epistemic games are computer games that can help players learn to think like engineers, urban planners, journalists, lawyers, and other innovative professionals, giving them the tools they need for a changing world. In epistemic games, players see what it is like to live in the world of adults. They learn ways of thinking that matter in the digital age, and have a chance to imagine the kind of person they might someday become.

David has an interesting presentation from the Design Education Seminar in Paris, France (June 2011) [slides, video, interview]. The first point he makes is about the Epistemic Frame. The Epistemic Frame comprises of:

• Identity (the who)
• Skills (the how)
• Knowledge (the what)
• Values (the why)

(italics added)

He also illustrates an important aspect of games – games as cultures and as environments for growth of innovation cultures. He also connects two “theories” – learning by knowing and learning by connecting.

It is an interesting level of detail for the commonly used word immersion. There is an epistemological and ontological base that designers can use to inform the design of the games they invent. Against the backdrop of the two theories and the epistemic frame, game design becomes a tool for mapping inter-relationships within the epistemic frame – literally describing a state of competence through conversation, game-play and learning. The epistemic frame poses the Values dimension, to me a critical aspect of immersion. In doing so, it focuses on a culture of thinking and innovation that is overwhelmingly important today.

In Use of a professional practice simulation in a first year Introduction to Engineering course, the authors state:

Importantly, engineering knowledge and skills are not required to complete the two design-build-test cycles in the simulation; instead the emphasis is on managing conflicting client requirements, making trade-offs in selecting a final design and justifying design choices….Prior work has also shown that epistemic games—learning environments where students gameplay to develop the epistemic frame of a profession—increase students’ understanding of and interest in the profession.

They explain the methodology behind the game, called Nephrotex, and include a blend of virtual with physical mentoring – something that they believe is critical to the simulation process. It also is a practitioner experience, giving what students will face in real life. In Collaborating in a Virtual Engineering Internship, the authors state that:

epistemic games are designed based on the epistemic frame hypothesis, a theory of learning that analyzes thinking in terms of connections among frame elements: skills, knowledge, values, and justification or decision-making (otherwise known as epistemology) of a STEM profession.

…Nephrotex is grounded in the epistemic frame hypothesis, which suggests that any professional community has a culture (Rohde & Shaffer, 2004; Shaffer, 2004a, 2005, 2006) and that culture has a grammar: a structure composed of skills (the things that members of the community do), knowledge (the understandings that members of the community share), values (the beliefs that members of the community hold), identity (the way that members of the community see themselves), and epistemology (the warrants that justify actions or claims as legitimate within the community). This collection of skills, knowledge, values, identity, and epistemology forms the epistemic frame of the community. The epistemic frame hypothesis suggests that (a) an epistemic frame binds together the skills, knowledge, values, identity, and epistemology that an individual takes on as a member of a community of practice; (b) such a frame is internalized through the training and induction processes by which an individual becomes a member of the community; and (c) once internalized, the epistemic frame of a community is used when an individual approaches a situation from the point of view (or in the role) of a member of the community (Shaffer, 2004a, 2005).

…Put in more concrete terms, engineers act like engineers, identify themselves as engineers, are interested in engineering, and know about physics, electricity, mechanics, chemistry, and other technical fields. These skills, affiliations, habits, and understandings are made possible by looking at the world in a particular way: by thinking like an engineer. The same is true for biologists but for different ways of thinking—and for mathematicians, computer scientists, science journalists, and so on, each with a different epistemic frame.

In David Hatfield’s dissertation, The right kind of telling: an analysis of feedback and learning in a journalism epistemic game, he states:

Epistemic frame theory (Shaffer, 2006, 2007) argues that expertise, such as the kind involved in complex thinking and problem solving, fundamentally involves diverse and dynamic connections between different forms of knowing (Broudy, 1977) and acting, guided by the norms and principles of a particular community….More than simply a collection of different elements, though, epistemic frame theory focuses on the ways in which specific frame elements are used together during complex thinking and problem solving (Shaffer, 2010).

The Critical Literacies MOOC focussed on just this kind of research a year ago from the point of analysis of thinking. Where it starts getting really interesting is here:

Epistemic frame theory thus argues that expertise can be modeled as a network of connections between specific understandings, techniques, values, identities and epistemologies, all of which are articulated through discourse. Assessing the development of such expertise, however, is a significant challenge.

I would add that fidelity of the simulation environment (level of immersion) becomes a significant challenge because it is itself a dynamic network of object and non-object states. In a lot of situations, as in regular eLearning, the struggle is between fidelity and scale (time to develop, cost, effort, complexity). At low scales, all experiences can have a high level of fidelity designed (witness the physical blend in Nephrotex). This can invert very quickly as we add additional variables and behaviors in the mix.

Be that as it may, this work is very useful because it leads us to the next question – how can these elements and their relationships be modeled to increase fidelity while at the same time lessen the impact of the scale of the challenge. Treating the elements of the epistemic frame as categories or clusters of child elements and then building networked relationships and “knowledge” out of these connections, is one part; modeling the dynamism is the much larger other.

In part (see Connectivist Simulations), I have always likened this to the challenge of sense-making and wayfinding in learning and knowledge (networks)  in Connectivism.

But what really got me excited is the possibility that all these ideas could probably merge if we started looking at simulations on a wider scale – connective simulations that could provide a way to abstract from the richness and complexity of our learning  process in a meaningful manner – allowing us to not only gain better insight about learning, but also to be able to guide our efforts to architect/enable observation based assessments.

The challenge, in my opinion, is also to prove that the new forms of assessment are scalable and accurate. That is, a large number of people can reliably be observed (or can demonstrate) “being” or “doing” in a manner that is reliable, accurate and consistent. The accuracy problem is important because simulations can only do so much in abstracting from a complex real-world.

If we had that method, and it was proved superior to traditional methods, then we would have buy-in. After all, the problem confronting us at this moment really is that we still end up trying to observe and assess people’s performance afresh whenever they start on a job, despite qualifications and proof from reliable assessments.

I just came across a load of search links to Connectionist Simulations, which is where all this is ultimately headed and should, at some point, capture my undivided attention. But this is wonderful work and I will follow it closely.

The puzzle that has confronted me has been that although there seems to be no dearth of good thinking around how curriculum should be designed and textbooks created, why did I feel challenged by the material and techniques that I see around me.

Case in point. The Grade 6 Civics textbook (they now call the subject - Social and Political Life) has for each chapter the following instructional strategy:

1. Start the chapter with an interesting question or activity. Pose some questions; investigate with the help of more activities. Build conjectures, advise on what is coming ahead, raise curiosity.
2. Share a fictional story that brings out an aspect of the topic. Frame questions and discussions around it.
3. Seed a discussion in the classroom with an interesting question or throw a question for self-reflection, use of creativity and imagination. They call it in-text questions and exercises aimed at assessing understanding as well as contextualization by the child to her own experiences
4. Build real-life contextual examples to explain concepts
5. Provide interesting additional information & photographs about people, places and things; provide tables and figures illustrating and comparing facts
6. Pose questions and suggest activities at the end of the chapter – recall, compare and contrast, reflect, imagine, visually identify
7. Provide external references that children can refer to

If you were to look at the Grade 6 Textbook (or from NCERT), it is a fact that it is really a lot to learn. There are just too many facts to recall, too many aspects to understand and too little time available to students in the course of the curriculum. It is almost as if, despite saying that they do not want to encourage rote learning, they are leaving our children with no real choice in the matter. I don’t feel too confident I would survive too well an annual exam on the subject! Most definitely not even 10 years down the line, when the Grade 7 course material will shift downwards in large chunks into the Grade 6 course book.

Given the gravity of what is being taught, the basis of good citizenship, this is way too much of a sacrifice. This is the same for the other subjects too.

The foreword for the textbook owe allegiance to the NCF 2005 and discourage rote learning. They raise the bar by stating that they want to discourage “maintenance of sharp boundaries between different subject areas” – in itself a fairly vast enterprise that seems to permeate the shop talk of curriculum designers and policy makers currently (let’s create new knowledge!).

But this puzzle, the fact that “design” seems to have captured the NCF brief reasonably well, but has resulted in something that still will not serve its spirit (or for that matter, serve mine), seems to clear, more than partially, when I read the foreword of the textbook. It states:

The success of this effort depends on the steps school principals and teachers will take to encourage children to reflect on their own learning and to pursue imaginative activities and questions. We must recognize that by giving space, time and freedom, children generate new knowledge by engaging with the information passed to them by adults. …. These aims imply considerable change in school routines and mode of functioning. Flexibility in the time-table is as necessary as rigour in implementing the annual calendar so that the required number of teaching days is actually devoted to teaching. The methods used for teaching and evaluation will also determine how effective this textbook proves for making children’s life at school a happy experience, rather than a source of stress or boredom.

This commentary, in my mind, presents many consequent thoughts:

• There is a great chasm between what the curriculum designers design and what educational systems are. In fact, as the NCF Reviewer committee minutes show (an excellent set of critiques on the NCF which should have been made public in a big way), there is early debate on the framework’s implementability and whether it acts as a rule or merely as guidance. In my opinion, the designers passed the buck.
• As the committee minutes show, there is no dearth of good thinking and good questioning. Is it then more a matter of coherence and further debate? Can these questions be thrown open to a wider audience, in a more participatory manner? After all, we don’t have many unique problems. The dialogue exists, but is invisible, private, exalted and non-participatory.
• Did the NCF 2005, over the past 6 years, make a difference in teacher’s skills and attitudes, in functioning of schools and in reducing stress and boredom. If it did not, what did we achieve through it? If it did, what are the great examples and evidence?
• Most of all, did the curriculum designer and developer even know of these discussions, were they trained on the NCF, do they understand that every word they write in a textbook potentially spells agony for our children?

What I see around me, every day, is this great sea of platitudes, lip service of a disaffected and disenchanted class of educators to technology, pedagogy, systems and our problems of inequality. It is a self-serving mission, beaten by the same system into submission and conformance to mediocrity. Unfortunate, but true. And it has to change.

Firstly, are simulations (and/or serious games) more suited for assessing performance than traditional paper/pencil or online tests? If yes, does this apply uniformly across all subjects/domains or are these particularly suited for certain types of assessments?

Secondly, what are the essential attributes of such simulation or game based assessments? What are the criteria upon which a simulation or game may be said to reliably, accurately and efficiently assess a student’s performance?

Thirdly, what are the more accessible ways in which such simulations or games can be developed? Learning implements like Multiple Choice or Drag and Drop questions are fairly quick and easy to design and develop, and there are a host of tools around that make the development process fairly rapid. But assessments based on simulations and games may take up too much time and the effort to develop them rises exponentially as the number of variables increase.

Fourthly, what kind of features in a simulation are required in order for the simulation to be more effective as compared to traditional alternatives? Are there techniques, like perhaps adaptive testing, that can be applied to simulation based assessments?

Fifthly, what evidence can be reliably obtained to show that simulations can indeed assess performance reliably?

I may be missing other questions, but the intent is to try to understand how simulation based assessments can be brought into the mainstream education, if indeed they can be proven a reliable and accessible alternative to traditional techniques. It will bring the fun back into taking exams for millions of schoolchildren. That itself should be motivation enough for us to research the space!

The traditional system has a short memory. Histories of student conversations, their trials and tribulations as they navigated unfamiliar terrain, are transmogrified into common mistakes pointed out by the teacher, FAQs built by experts and so on – themselves shortcuts to navigate the longer path taken by the experts to arrive at their conception of the domain. In the process, experts make some reasoned choices about what to leave out. It is important to learn and apply the Pythagorous theorem in a secular manner – never relating to Pythagorous himself or the cultural, social and political context in which he invented the theorem.

These choices are made for the learner. And in this manner, she is condemned to not “know” many learning histories. And therefore, not be able to construct many new forms of learning or adapt histories into new futures. This is typical of a system where temporality is key – competence is generated (or not) out of a structured time-space of an institution.

However, this is simply not the way competence is employed and grown at work or in life. Knowledge management is key to successful enterprises and initiatives, where processes become as important as competence. A hallmark of this competence is that it is based on non-linearity of paths taken to perform based on extensive networks of resources available for self-use.

The core issue is that our systems need several proofs of competence as entry criteria to a variety of different spaces. And they need these proofs to be socially acknowledged, presumably because they shift the burden of proving them to experts. As it happens, the provers and the system are often at odds with each other because they believe in different notions of competence and how to engender it.

Scale entrenches these vulnerable and shifting contracts deeper. With scale (numbers, diversity, globalization, technology), it becomes even more difficult to remember or place learning histories within the context of engendering competence. Someone I know told me about how one of his unofficial mentors spent forty years of his life sifting through Ramanujan’s discoveries, trying to decipher how exactly Ramanujan made his phenomenal discoveries – an anachronistic, obscure but inspiring endeavor in these times.

Learning histories are important. They are important for us to spark innovation, to facilitate the next Ramanujan in his discoveries, to place our learning in local and global contexts within which we exist today. And possibly the way we need to retain these learning histories to record the conversations, curate them, enable connections to them, and celebrate the paths that learners before us took to both fail and succeed. And hope that these inform and help develop new ways of addressing our problems today and for the future.

Anna Hazare, after today, can never underestimate his own importance to India. A repeat of the 1990 Mandal Commission days greeted Delhi today and promises not to die a silent death. The government, not unlike the British colonial government of the past India, is being felicitated with wild cries of a Second Struggle for Freedom. Gone is dialogue and meaningful governance in the face of, what is arguably, a shining example of the “satyagraha”, long practiced by the man credited to be one of the greatest leaders of the same political party that governs the nation today. Indeed, it is that same political entity that seems to be caught into a tangled web – damned if they do and damned if they do not.

But today is not 1930, when Gandhi had to travel 300 kilometres, visit 40 towns and villages across 25 days, for the famed Dandi March. The government is not colonial, but democratic. Anna Hazare is no Gandhi – there is no parallel.  And today is not 1990, when Mandal was demonized. Today, we face a greater challenge – a weak government and an idolized impostor.

I watched on as a group of young boys drove a fast car, frenzied, singing Vande Mataram. Busloads of young pople and old, being taken to a temporary detention area. The man himself, Anna, proclaiming a second freedom struggle before he was summarily arrested. And now, his release and repeated intention to proceed with his satyagraha, the reason for his arrest in the first place.

Sure. Corruption is wrong. The government is wrong as well for obstructing a movement. The media is wrong for its instantaneous but selectively well crafted coverage. And wrong, is Anna too for being so important. We shall just have to watch as people suffer these wrongs in the next few days.

Which is why Anna Hazare needs to know his own importance to India. He and his supporters have brought an issue to the forefront effectively in a democracy most known for its apathy – of, by and for the people. But he has the support of mindless, super-excited mobs, who like in the Mandal days, knew just one thing – that they were right. He needs to educate them, make them realize that they are every bit responsible for corruption or breaking the laws as the other side is. And with this sobering thought, help transform their behaviour and thought.

Anna Hazare needs to know his own importance to India.

The point Stephen is making is definitely not just academic. The term DIY (do-it-yourself) affords primacy to the individual and is application based. Over time sites like eHow and companies like Home Depot, realizing different needs (cost saving, interests, job compulsions), put together a set of material (books, online guides, community trouble-shooting and advice etc.) to put structure to “learning” specific things with the objective of being able to apply them in a specific context.

This took the form of learning packages, not unlike our monogamous WBTs (web based training) formats. Now these are being extended by the affordances of the networked digital economy like open access, social search, social networking and location awareness. This is very akin to the way our LMSs have evolved. They started with learning packages (which evolved into standards based packaging like SCORM), and then as the network surfaced, they added the “social” to it and called them the next version / next generation social collaborative learning management systems. That is also why these vendors cannot seem to position the Edupunk version as the alternative and have ended up creating a “me-too” add-on feature set for “informal learning”.

There is a deeper malaise, one that Stephen also points to. We are thinking inside the box (very un-Edupunk), when we do try to map an existing system with a new alternative way of doing things keeping the existing system as the base reference. Edupunks (I am hoping) will not look at taking the affordances of an educational system and propose an alterative that will map to its “benefits” or affordances. Rather, they will stand outside the box and raise questions about whether the box really is what we need (why not look at the sphere next to it or why look at all at a closed bounded object). This is similar to combating the oft-heard argument or stance – “technology cannot replace the classroom”. Stephen is right to remark – “It’s establishment thinking combined with a good dose of offloading costs.”

A direct consequence of thinking like that is the “objectification” of learning and the learning process. The approach is to “objectify” or treat learning as a structured process with pre-identified participants, an approach which tries to build a marketplace and commodifies learning. Teachstreet, for example, has the tag line – “Learn Something New” – exhorting us to “find great classes and courses”. Similar to how Anya talks about “content and skills”.

The MOOC Edupunks have demonstrated the way to think outside the box – of becoming rather than doing or getting, of being able to measure your performance. And in doing so, they have exposed core principles of how learning happens (at least their perspective). There is great learning happening as well, as the MOOCs & accompanying deliberations evolve. No one claims to have the final recipe (maybe because none is needed or even possible), which is also why DIY is perhaps a bit presumptuous. But the focus on thinking outside the box rather than inside it is the biggest contribution being made to start with.

What is required is greater investigation into “design” of connected environments, into techniques/patterns that underlie the conversation itself, into technologies and designs that support these connections – in a way that does not translate into “design” of learning, like in the traditional system.

With Telepresence being one part of this phenomenon, in my mind there is more than the cost dimension to this technology that promises to make it an important part of how we learn and collaborate in the future. I can immediately think of simulations or even real world impacts from local settings. For example, think of operating (robotically controlled) real equipment from across the world in an immersive manner, or operating upon virtaul objects in a multi-user collaborative environment. The possibilities are real and worth investigating from a learning perspective – maybe the advent of Web 4.0?

The problem is that, in general (and I want to generalize based on the proportion of students affected), this conception of student choice is independent of student choice in the classroom. In fact, two things here – one, that student determination of an academic institution is largely independent of the considerations of the learning process (which is more determined by the prevailing educational systems), and two, that decisions to join a particular course/program/institution are fairly independent of learning methodology and pedagogy itself. This may not be true in specialized conditions – conditions where sufficient choice exists AND students have an opinion on how they should learn.

So it is only very natural that marketing functions should depend upon institutional brand, star faculty, a very agnostic feature-differentiator led approach to technology (and mobility etc.), certification value, alumni credentials and employability/placement potentials. I am fairly certain that nobody compares the levels of educational technology or pedagogic superiority (which gets subsumed under quality of star teachers).

For example, companies that buy off-the-shelf elearning from vendors for their employees do discern between levels of interactivity, multimedia and other factors, but employees don’t have that choice to make. Similarly, parents make decisions based on employability and brand, rather than on how well their children will learn at school. These decisions are, obviously, threatened when the outcomes are not as expected. That is when stakeholders start probing a little deeper, sometimes trying to make more informed decisions around choice in pedagogy.

There is partial student choice in select segments. Retailers in education are in the race for credentials and whatever adds to a market differentiation, helps student acquisition. But these choices are not generally (in large proportions) borne out of a need to use educational technology to its maximum.

This extends from students equally to teachers and researchers – two other consumers in the education space. But here the choices are more refined and the stakeholders generally more informed and discerning. Which is also why nobody overtly talks about teacher acquisition marketing campaigns (that’s just the internal referral, brand and networking).

This is disturbing for me. I want students to be more informed about the choices they have when they go to learn and to be responsible and skilled for creating choices for themselves in constrained environments. Unless this happens, there will really be no pressure on institutions to evolve pedagogy & technology in a concerted manner. Whatever pressure that exists comes from passionate teachers, students and administrators, who feel that they have a responsibility to learners once they enter the doors of the institution. Which is really the brand.

Clearly, this is an important area of focus. ADL, the keepers of SCORM, have developed an architecture called the High Level Architecture (HLA). Their research:

focuses on developing instructional paradigms, training-specific data structures and communication methods between a simulation, Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)-based instructional content, and a Learning Management System (LMS), to facilitate using simulation as an environment where an individual or a team can practice a skill (instruction) or demonstrate their level of performing the skill (performance assessment).

Of particular interest is the intersection between S1000D and SCORM. S1000D provides a mechanism to define complex systems having multiple inter-related components, and to define various allied information items thereof (like defining a plane or a ship or even a bicycle).

But of particular interest is the advancement of simulations for learning through research on adaptive simulations, social simulations (utilizing the power of the network – maybe to run alternate reality games) and other ways to raise the bar on what simulations can actually achieve. Let me know your thoughts!

However, my thinking has changed past that phase, based on a few key considerations.

This is not a machine. There isn’t a definitive set of factors I could use, there is probably not a definitive way of measuring and categorizing profiles and perhaps not a definitive way of mapping enumerated elements of the learning experience to profile information. I am not saying it may not be accurate, or adaptively so, useful, but that it is misdirected. It depends on thinking of students and teachers as finitely defined entities on a production line, programmable and predictable in the face of input.

We are trying to extrapolate from small instances to large scale systems using technology. That is not correct. eLearning as such does not scale well. The quality breaks with scale of any sort. Scale must leverage scale – have a large number of small learning clusters/networks rather than a small number of very large paradigms.

Research, especially around Connectionism (and more specifically Connectivism) indicates that we would be better off looking at focusing on capabilities/literacies rather than on learning styles, on networked behavior rather than individual unrelated atomic conceptions.  Competency frameworks, career progression, and talent management as a whole, need to be re-evaluated in this context

How this emergent ecology will result in competencies bookmarked to real life skills is not altogether unknown. But it still requires structure and method that practitioners, who are currently trying to fit these new ideas inside dominant frames of reference (inside the box), can leverage. It has the promise to scale, much beyond the confines of current eLearning.

These thoughts pretty much redefine the state of art from when I wrote the initial draft for LearnOS and bear on me to remember that technology cannot play God, as someone in a recent conversation, tried to impress upon me.

At Rishi Valley School and Doon School, many teachers have been working for a long time without a Bachelor’s degree in education, though some have a Master’s and some even a Ph D from elite institutions such as the IITs in India and Harvard abroad. Now the government has asked these teachers to enroll in a distance learning programme, such as those offered by IGNOU, and get a Bachelor’s degree a diploma in education. With the government firm that a teacher’s qualification must be standardised under the RTE Act, bigger “alternative schools” have fallen in line with the NCTE’s prescription while the smaller ones are looking at the prospect of closing down.

This is quite ironic. Why make sweeping generalization that wilfully result in situations like these? Teacher education is an important issue involving not just the state of teacher qualifications like the Bachelor of Education degree, but also the working conditions, incentives, support, motivation and skill development of teachers in general. Not to miss the sorry conditions of para-teachers in India.

I have often said that we are making a mistake by arguing against the current exam focussed educational system, while at the same time putting our own teachers and future educational administrators through the same process. There is also the question of the relevance of the current curriculum itself. Interestingly, the Faculty of Education at Delhi University does not even have the syllabus online for its various courses! At some point, we will encounter the argument for more vocational based certifications for teaching given the large scale we face.

I think this is a format that is extremely well suited for collaborative educational research. I am sure people will be worried about the quality of connections that are generated by a machine algorithm, but this can get better over time and actually allow curation as well. But the idea that structured and unstructured sources of information can come together in a Powerset, the erstwhile Twine and Zoetrope manner, is brilliant for the learning process.

The ability for a learner to be able to get such views of information in a curated manner is going to be really important. The information largely exists on the web, but really in as many bits and parts, rendering it unusable or very inefficient from a learning perspective. Our current mode is to do the search and use intelligence to sift through many dead-ends and irrelevant information to actually get what we need in the way we need it. There simply has to be a way to accomplish the latter, at least to a large extent. It is only then that the online learning process will become efficient enough for more people to use.

There are both champions and detractors of para-teacher schemes in India. Champions claim that these schemes reduce pupil-teacher ratios (PTRs), eliminate single teacher schools, lower the cost of providing elementary education and may increase teacher accountability to local panchayats. Detractors, on the other hand, rue the lower professional training and allegedly lower educational qualifications of para-teachers (compared to regular teachers), and they also dislike the dual salary structure whereby para-teachers are paid much lower salaries than regular teachers within the same schools.

This snippet, taken from Geeta Gandhi Kingdon and Vandana Sipahimalani-Rao’s article titled Para-Teachers in India: Status and Impact, from the Economic and Political Weekly (Mar 20, 2010, Vol XLV No. 2) intrigued me immediately as a debate that needs to happen more strongly.

The fact that we need para-teachers (defined variously, but broadly as non-full time teachers) as a possible quick solution to the immense teacher shortage in India (1.2 mn required or more based on other reports), which could grow exponentially if you were to start improving the student-teacher ratios, is undisputed. So is the fact that we need them dispersed over a large geography. The equally important fact is that these educators need to be brought into the mainstream over a period of time as well, reducing or eliminating some of the more obvious disparities with their full-time colleagues.

The skill and talent exist – within existing teachers, para-teachers, and very importantly the competitive tuition or coaching private marketplace – but the economics is skewed and inclusive utilization of these resources is a challenge.

As always there are multiple parts to the problem:

1. Teacher Education itself needs to concentrate on investigating ways to upskill and make supporting infrastructure, including technology, available; while at the same time making sure that existing teachers are set higher standards and given the right kind of training environment
2. Educational providers and education technology companies must make a concerted effort to enable teachers to transcend distance through the use of technology and innovation in pedagogy (an important piece of which, in my opinion, is going to be portability with network access)
3. Policy makers must concentrate on providing an easy to implement career progression for para-teachers – sort of a vocational strategy for the educators profession strand
4. Students need to be more exposed to using technology and participating in distance education initiatives. The state of educational data mining or learning analytics in even the largest distance education providers is abysmal, to say the least.

The challenges can be met, but require strong leadership at local levels supported by policy changes at the top. And as I said, there needs to be more broad-based research, especially around effectiveness and productivity.

Some of the advantages of tLearning include:

• Ubiquitous learning, portability and ease of use
• Sufficient screen estate to accomplish learning tasks when compared to the mobile
• The current spate of innovation is making a host of tools available that are suitable for the medium & hardware
• Closer to chalk and talk or traditional pen and paper teaching and learning through features such as pen (stylus) based collaboration

There are a spate of offerings & initiatives now on the ground to leverage the power of tLearning. Here are a few interesting ones.

1. Kineo Brainchild
2. iProf
3. Prazas
4. Kno
5. Nook
6. iPAD
7. India’s 35$ tablet
8. Notion Ink’s Adam
9. Marvel / OLPC XO 3.0

As a result, a lot of companies are getting into or promoting tLearning. From my perspective, tLearning offers a fresh new field for instructional designers, technologists, graphics people and eLearning solution designers where research and innovation is required to leverage the new collaborative features of the medium. For example, Prazas combines online tutoring/collaboration with an “upload any content” feature, which makes it easy to access, share and co-annotate learning material.

This is an exciting time to be in the industry. Hopefully researchers will take a strong look at tLearning and start contributing to learning solutions design thinking for this medium.

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As always, would love to hear your comments!

Linda paints a grim picture:

The United States now has a far higher poverty rate for children than any other industrialized country (25 percent, nearly double what it was thirty years ago); a more tattered safety net—more who are homeless, without healthcare and without food security; a more segregated and inequitable system of public education (a 10:1 ratio in spending across the country); a larger and more costly system of incarceration than any country in the world, including China (5 percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its inmates), one that is now directly cutting into the money we should be spending on education; a defense budget larger than that of the next twenty countries combined; and greater disparities in wealth than any other leading country (the wealthiest 1 percent of individuals control 25 percent of the resources in the country; in New York City, the wealthiest 1 percent control 46 percent of the wealth and are taxed at a lower level than in the last sixty years). Our leaders do not talk about these things. They simply say of poor children, “Let them eat tests.”

And goes on to state:

But public education has a secret weapon—a Trojan horse, if you will: the members of the profession like yourselves who have mastered a strong body of professional knowledge, who hold a strong ethic of care and who are determined to transmit this knowledge and this commitment to others throughout the education system.

I would love to be inspired like that!

Much of her rant against “scientific managers”, whose application of industrial models of business to education is leading to severe consequences, is valid and global is nature. And she understands that teacher education is one such weapon that can bring change within the system. She has worked enough at national policy level to perhaps believe that policy or the mitigation of the adverse effects of policy are equally important; as is equity.

However, I don’t think that the problem lies with the scientific management. That will happen as a consequence of scale and lack of educational leadership/vision to investigate alternatives to orderly systems.  I think one of the major problem is that education system itself is un-democratic. By that I don’t just  mean that education is imposed, but also that education imposition is accepted widely.

And that is because, though we may rail about the “badness” in the system, there isn’t sufficient motivation in the democracy to take action. Democratizing education means helping make education by, for and of the people. The people are an inseparable part of the system of democracy. And they are every bit as accountable as the governments they help elect.

That is why, choice needs to be in the hands of the recipient and the giver both; equitably. And governments should ensure that they have mechanisms to fund and facilitate that exchange.

Since the educational system is, like Healthcare or even the government itself, primarily driven by the expert capability of human resources, there is even more pressure if we use the same systems to train/educate future human resources. Even with the promise of tools such as eLearning, intelligent tutors or e-tutoring that help reduce load on critical teaching resources, which is really a mode to reduce the adversity of scale, this primary capability is paramount.

I find this in my research over USA-India educational systems. The startling insight is that while there may be operational differences (learning autonomy is higher in the USA, teaching system is more transparent/accountable), fundamentally both countries are facing the same challenges (employability, access, equity, infrastructure, pressure on government funding, thrust on vocational training) despite there being a multiple of 4 in enrolments at school and projected multiple of 2 in HE enrolment (by 2020), if one was to compare the student population statistics (India has 4X school and will have 2X HE students as compared to the USA). We have 6 times the number of colleges. And so on.

In fact, the census (I am using this as a proxy for enrolment data which I have to find), shows that Finland, Denmark & New Zealand have a 05-24 years age group population of less than 1.5 mn people; and Australia has 5.5 mn in the same age group. But UK and USA have 15 mn and 85 mn respectively; while India has 451 mn! Finland, Denmark, New Zealand and Australia are the highest performing nations.

The UN Education Index gives these smaller countries the highest ranking in the world! Finland, Denmark, New Zealand, Cuba and Australia shared the top rank, USA is at rank 20, UK at rank 30 and India at rank 145. Not too surprisingly, the GDP per capita index by the IMF (2010) pegs the USA at rank 7, UK at 21, Australia at 10, Denmark at 17, Finland at 22, New Zealand at 32, India at 129. This showcases that despite having lower per capita GDP, all 4 top ranked countries have a better ranking. This is despite the general high correlation between the two indicators of nearly 0.81 (I took 169 countries and compared them), as would normally be expected.

This sort of questions positions like in this post, How does Finland’s Education become the Best in the World?, which tries to take what is good in the Finnish context and tries to apply it in the USA context, something I advise against for the most part.

From the Huffington Post comes another reiteration of do what works well elsewhere, Lessons from Finland’s Educational System. There is an interesting insight into the way the Finns think from what Dr. Pasi Sahlberg says:

Finns don’t believe you can reliably measure the essence of learning. You know, one big difference in thinking about education and the whole discourse is that in the United States it’s based on a belief in competition. In my country, we are in education because we believe in cooperation and sharing. Cooperation is a core starting point for growth. 

Zaidlearn points to some interesting comparisons between the Finnish and Singaporean Educational Systems in The Finnish Education System rocks!. What is interesting here that Finland GDP per capita lags behind Singapore’s, but Singapore is 52 on the Education Index rankings.

I am basically trying to make the argument that traditional educational systems are unlike traditional industrial systems and cannot scale. In which case, international lessons could be learnt for micro-strategy or operational considerations, but perhaps not for macro, policy level changes.

More importantly, this is one piece that contributes to the thinking on alternate systems of education or to change discussions.

Read more at FutureLearn!

First, some background. Coaching is an inclusive term defining academic interaction on commercial terms outside the formal school and college/university system. The Coaching industry is a parallel universe. Some formal system teachers teach less in the formal classroom, and more in this informal classroom; many times it is the same students that are being taught inside and outside. Tutors include not just professionals from education, but students, graduates, housewives with a degree etc. I would include non-academic coaching (formal and informal) within the ambit of this term. This includes sports, performing & fine arts etc. at all levels starting from children of age 2. As Aradhana says, “no stream is sacred, no area untouched”.

The marketplace is as big as the marketplace for textbooks in terms of the number of consumers. Coaching is associated with performance, accountability and adaptability. Parents are paying additional sums of money to tutors, who come home for individual attention or are located close by (for groups), because of many reasons – school educational system is less rigorous, there is peer pressure, parents have increasing less time and ability to coach their own children, teachers in school are ill-equipped or incompetent, personal attention/accountability in coaching etc.

The marketplace is, by nature, fragmented. For the more visible publicly competitive exams like the IIT, MBBS, UPSC, MBA, Law and CA entrance exams, the preference would be large established players - Career Launcher, Aakaash, FIITJEE, Rau’s - who are at the top of the pyramid and gross over INR 100 cr or USD 25 mn annually, with a pan India presence. The second level of players are also few in number, another 10-odd who gross between USD 2.5-25 mn annually.

The vast majority of coaches, however, are the ones operating in the neighbourhood (just imagine how many neighbourhoods exist in India), supplementing their main source of income or carving out spare time from other chores. Their income could range from 0-20 lakh INR or 0-50K USD annually. Not only that, there is fierce competition for students as well in a particular neighbourhood. An important aspect is the rising standard of living, which makes the coaching profession a viable and lucrative one given the poor conditions of pay in the traditional system.

This is a high level of fragmentation which should inform and impact any thinking or action in this area. I am not sure what the rural-urban spread is, but that is another really important factor.

The industry is estimated to be between 10-20,000 cr (I think this is a gross understatement) or USD 2.5-5 bn annually. We spend about USD 10 bn on the public school system annually, so these estimates are really not insignificant. The players are very adaptive – they respond quickly to changes in the formal school/college system – and know enough to adopt techniques to bring about better reliability in terms of results.

That’s one thing I would ask Aradhana to change – her conception of this universe as parallel and as shadowy/murky. It is really neither. It is a service that fulfils a need within the educational system and the teachers are no less competent than their counterparts (in fact, in many instances, they are shared resources which is an obvious conflict of interest – but that is another story).

But it cannot be parallel, since there a singular accepted assessment and certification systems in the school boards, entrance exams and university assessment frameworks. It cannot be shadowy because it does not operate under the hood – it is an accepted service, whose value is fairly well established.

Aradhana points out that this marketplace is not regulated. This has many consequences: the benefits of good regulation in terms of quality, redressal, financial schemes, quality of learning environment etc. are lost, and, there is no structured way to reach out to the coaches and help them innovate. I would add to this the loss to the government in tax revenues which could be staggering and the issues with equitable access in the coaching marketplace.

By structuring this sector, we could well eliminate our teacher shortage problem. By incorporating best practices or providing some way of merging the two operations – we could gain standardization, make existing educational system more relevant – basically improve the aspects lacking in both types of operations. For example, allowing coaches to utilize school infrastructure would improve access to students for coaches while at the same time allow better learning infrastructure/conditions for students.

There must be a way to integrate in an industry that is so large and obviously needs regulation or at least some sort of organized mentoring. The same industry could be then grown to do online tutoring for foreign students, filling in for absentee teachers, providing academic support to students, research and so many other things.

Capability

For educational systems, this is the ability to, systemically, foster a society where educational needs of its citizens are adequately met. These needs themselves exist in the wider social, economic, political and cultural context. And insofar as this context is dynamic and evolutionary by nature, the ability needs be dynamic and evolutionary in its genesis.

This capability is built on the edifice of free, open and democratic conversation and builds on experience and wisdom of countless failed experiments. It requires an ecology of innovation and a high degree of flexibility in the face of change. It requires patience, tolerance, reason, judgment and perseverance to build.

Capacity

This is the power of the system to fulfil it’s mandate. Capacity includes the availability and sufficiency of stakeholders and resources that will serve to build capability. While the physicality of  capacity is very obvious, by definition it also constrains the very capabilities it aims to build/foster – whether they are processes, environments, tools or techniques. Physical capacity then must be preceded by intellectual capacity – the wisdom to plan and use resources effectively and efficiently.

Conscience

Without conscience, there can be no educational system. This conscience is used, not just in the sense of justice and equity, but also to include passion and commitment. It is the single most important catalytic agent for change to continuously happen. And systems must have both the capability and the capacity to foster conscience.

There may be a host of other C’s of Education, some positive (like Collaboration) and some negative (like Corruption) in their import. But my belief is that these three are extremely important.

Looking at the educational system in India, I am most convinced that the quality and quantity of open, online debate is extremely insufficient, for a democracy like ours. And equally apologetic, to remind us what the architect of our democracy, Gandhi, stood for.  

Not balancing the 3 Cs can only create more problems. Capability without the capacity has led to a skew in intellectual (and other) capital. The biggest examples are islands of excellence such as the IITs and IIMs. Capacity without the capability has evidenced itself through the massive under-utilization of existing infrastructure and programs. Both without conscience has resulted in inequitable access and an unwillingness to change.

On the other hand, competent focus on the 3Cs can ensure successful and equitable growth stories. We must change in order for that to happen.

At the outset, overall I really appreciated the rigor of the report. The data supports the arguments and there is a coherent case made for five game changers in Higher Education – Financial innovation, use of ICT/technology, focus on research, thrust on vocational education & training (VET) and changes to the regulatory framework. Here are some of the top data points and analyses of the reports.

In 2010, India had about 26,500 higher educational institutions compared to about 7,000 in the US and 4,000 in China. This is the largest in the world. Close to two-thirds of these are general education (Arts, Science and Commerce) colleges and these account for about 80% of the enrolments. Engineering is the most preferred professional course, followed by Pharmacy and Management courses. Despite the sheer number, barely 1-2 Indian institutions make it to top rankings such as the FT-Top 100 Global MBA Rankings.

Which is also perhaps the reason why there is a growing number of Indians who prefer education abroad. This market is growing at a 24.5% CAGR with close to a 160,000 students going abroad for studies in 2006. This import of education itself is valued at 0.46% (or USD 3.1 bn in 2005) of GDP or 80% of the government central current spend on higher education!

In the last 25 years, Higher Education enrolments have been growing at a CAGR of 6% with the current tally of 16 mn students expected to be 40 mn by 2020. Capacity utilization is a key concern and directly impacts the 33,000 new institutions target of an additional 24 mn students. We have 15-30% underutilized capacity. This is because of quality issues in HEIs which really arises from the shortage of faculty (we need about 45,000 PhDs and an equal number of M. Phils) and poor infrastructure. We have an extremely high student to teacher ratio (22:1) as compared to developed country averages of 11.4 students to a teacher.

The Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) is extremely low (12%) , even as compared with other BRIC countries (Brazil is at 34% and China at 23%), despite having the third highest number of students in the world. Not only that there are regional skews and the system is more or less an elite system of education. And the last 10 years show GER growing at a 3.09% CAGR as opposed to Brazil’s 13.39% and China’s 19.24% (2000-2007). India’s 2020 target is 30% GER.

Distance Education (DE) and VET have shown about 7% CAGR over the past 20-30 years with ITI/ITCs accounting for 43% while vocational education in senior schools accounting for 33% of capacity. Since India has a large young, independent population with a median age of 25 years, this demographic dividend (68% of population in 15-64 years segment by 2020) has to be capitalized upon using DE and VET. This can enable India to become a global source of manpower aided by the track record indicators such as a third of NASA being Indian. Globally, a shortage of 56 mn workers can be potentially met by the surplus of 47 mn workers from India.

VET (a potentially $4bn market in 2012, growing at a CAGR of 25%) has traditionally been a government led initiative, but now the private sector has started making inroads here. However key problems are that enrolment & utilization is low (51% levels as estimated by FICCI). We have about 7,000 ITIs/ITCs (Industrial Training Institutes/Centres) with a capacity of a million students. The kind of budgets being spent on creating quality capacity in the face of a huge enrolment potential we have, in my opinion are ridiculously low, in a country with the state of development that India is in. A look at the National Skills Development Council statistics would be enough to convince anyone of that.

The VET problems are essentially teacher quality (61% of teachers with less than 12 years of schooling), lack of effective funding and inadequate infrastructure. The worst finding seems to be that curricula are not consonant with market needs! Other problems include VET being unattractive as an option, poor placement track record and poor employer perception of certifications. The governance structures are also myriad and complex with two different ministries (labor and human resources) involved in VET and low autonomy in ITIs. There is low mobility between VET and mainstream Higher Education, which further adds to the problems. The result – today, less than 10% of our workforce undergo VET.

The sectoral growth is being pegged at 18% CAGR till 2020, from INR 46,000 cr (USD 10bn) to about USD 50 bn in 2020. However, universal higher education is still a distant dream with most states falling into the elite category as per the Martin Trow classification. Not only that, “the Indian higher Education system suffers from a large rural-urban divide in access, gender inequity, and large differences in GERs in various communities”.

Private sector spends are 2/3rds of the total spend on Higher Education. Government spends 0.6% (USD 4 bn, Central Government) of its budget on Higher Education which has the potential to grow compared to countries like Finland who allocate 1.6%. The largest allocation of this spend is General Education (about 38%). This share is growing (35%+ CAGR). But there are certain skews in the distributions of central and state funding across general and professional education.  For example, states spend the bulk of their budgets on general education while the Centre spends a large part of professional education. The Centre’s spend is also skewed towards a very few

Given that tuition fees are extremely low (accounting for only about 19% of total public plus private education expenditure, 2007; or less than 15% of expenditure of Indian Universities) and the fact that most of the State government spend is on operations rather than expansion, on general education rather than professional education, there is a problem with the sources, distribution and use of funds. Shockingly, scholarships account for only USD 10 mn, targeted at only 2% of the student population.

Student financing currently has problems like high interest costs, heavy documentation, high administrative cost and lack of provisions for economically weaker sections. HEIs also under-utilize other revenue streams like foreign students at differential fees and research and consultancy services. Fee regulation is an important issue, sufficient political in nature as well.

The current regulatory framework is a significant barrier for creation of new capacity (State leads the governance and infrastructure provision for education with legislative and policy barriers to entry). This is changing now with relaxation of these barriers on the cards.

The report makes the case that we must replicate the private sector higher education success story, given now that the private sector accounts for a large and growing proportion of the higher education segment (63.21% in 2006, with a predominance in professional education such as engineering and Pharmacy).

Technology emerges in the report as an important enabler. And within technology, network infrastructure, management software, content availability, research collaboration and distance education platforms garner a mention. Mobiles, Television and Radio are also mentioned as carrier channels for education. There need to be reforms led by the regulating authority, the Distance Education Council, to facilitate the growth and expansion of distance education in the country. Special Education Zones and Special Knowledge zones are being seen as a mechanism to allow greater autonomy and space for innovation for private players. We have to improve key ratios such as the number of students to a computer, which stands at 229:1 for the average Indian college as opposed to the 4:1 or 2:1 imposed by AICTE.

Technology infrastructure is also analyzed in the reports on the basis of indicators such as Internet penetration, PC ownership, computers per 100 (average number of computers per college is 6, according to the UGC survey in 2008) and other parameters. Unfortunately, the reports leave out mentioning the fact that the underlying infrastructure is also very weak – basic needs, electricity and telecommunications – in many areas of India, which need to be solved before we even start discussing computers per college. Local language content/interactions are also a huge challenge identified by the report. English is an understood medium for only 17% of the 368 mn rural literate Indians.

Interestingly, the reports have data indicating that there has been rather poor administration and implementation of technology led schemes like IGNOU’s radio/TV programmes – which is eminently believable. It is perhaps here more so in any other part of the reports that I find the core problems being addressed directly.

On the Research aspect, Higher Education spent 4% of it’s total budgets on R&D (much lower than other countries in India’s peer group such as China with 10%) in the context of an already low national expenditure of 1% of GDP. The number of researchers are also abysmally low with the HE sector contributing to only 14% of the research manpower in the country. Only 18% of the research manpower have PhDs, another shocking statistic. In terms of the number of research papers that are published, India is 13th in the world, 1/15th of the number in the US. What’s worse is that there is a huge skew with 10% of the institutions in India contributing to 80% of the research papers. The same grim picture holds true for patent filing.

The reasons for poor levels of research have to do with the quantity & quality of PhDs (less than 1% of total HE students complete a PhD and these numbers are declining), the existing quality of teacher-guides being an important factor along with the time spent on research activities. Grants for research are at a miserable USD 0.25 bn, about 5% of Harvard University’s spend on research in 2008! Specialized government interventions in research have virtually isolated themselves from Higher Education, adding to the malaise. Interestingly, private HE sector R&D is not performing too badly in comparison to public HE counterparts. Key issues are funding, system of rewards, IP frameworks, collaboration and raising the quantity & quality of manpower for research. 

On the aspect of governance, the reports make a strong case for streamlining the administration. It is a valid point, which is recognized by the Government and steps are being taken there to make the system more efficient. The key groups of stakeholders are Central Government, State Government, Regulatory bodies & professional councils and Accreditation bodies. There are too many of them, sometimes with conflicting or duplicate objectives and jurisdictions, some of which I have covered earlier in other posts. So far, this complex systems, which allows only not-for-profit entities (all others are unapproved), has been inimical to the balanced growth of the HE sector making them unattractive for high quality players  with high entry barriers. Obviously a politically charged arena, HE also suffers from lack of strong managers and low operating flexibility.

The three pillars to focus the growth on, according to the report, are Access, Equity and Quality.

Recommendations include:

• HEI Quality: Mandatory accreditation, better governance, branding & marketing, development of international centers of excellence
• Privatization: create special frameworks and conducive state policies, PPP arrangements, tax concessions for infrastructure providers, relaxation of Foreign Direct Investment restrictions to encourage foreign capital, legislative improvements for enablement, efficient governance and transparency.
• Innovation: Enhance use of technology, promote new distance delivery methods, encourage industry focused models such as education cities and innovation universities
• Financial: Increase capacity with a  focus on low GER areas, world-class infrastructure provision, enhanced student financial support, performance based funding component, rationalise tuition fee structure, monetize revenue through other sources (such as IP), attract higher fee paying foreign students, improve existing utilization/processing
• Technology: promote development and free delivery of quality tested localized educational content; improve infrastructure & IT systems; help create communities of practice (!); and provide a way to tap expert internal knowledge through indigenous eJournals
• Research and Development: reward research systematically, connect research centres to HE to industry for collaboration, build a conducive environment (time devoted to research, infrastructure, grants, resources, connections), improve quantity and quality through special measures 
• VET: Streamline administration & governance, build VET-HE bridges, make VET align to market needs, give public VETs more autonomy and improve infrastructure
• Regulations: Simplify and reduce, more transparency, promote autonomy and accountability, encourage foreign universities and correct structural flaws/skews.

These reports are not quite comprehensive insofar as they do not bring out certain systemic aspects of failure of the HE sector in India such as that of a heavy weight curricular structure, absence of basic livelihood infrastructure, deficiencies in teacher training, systemic shortcomings in educational planning, education management capability, innovation in learning technology, weak educational data collection and analysis and so on.

The malaise that threatens our educational futures is not manifested in just lack of innovation, financing models, R&D, VET and regulations, it goes deeper than that to a mindset – whether private or public – that is far more critical to change immediately. Once the mindset changes, it will be easier to design and implement a transformation strategy. This mindset is a chalta hai mindset (everything will do) and a reluctance to deal with the harder issues. In fact, if you really think about it, the answers have less to do with jobs that need to be done and more with doing correctly the jobs we have right now.

We need to work on the 3Cs of education – Capacity, Capability and Conscience. More on this later…

Another interesting report, which is as old as 2003 and created by All India Management Association, the Boston Consulting Group and Confederation of Indian Industry, is titled India’s New Opportunity – 2020. There must be many others.

The Parthenon report

It starts with the argument that Higher Tertiary Enrolments imply a more educated population. A more educated population implies a more productive workforce. A more productive workforce implies growth – higher GDP per capita.

It uses World Bank statistics to, however, show the reverse chain of logic. A higher GDP per capita is correlated with higher Gross Enrolment Ratios (steeper in countries like Brazil and India and flatter in the USA and UK).

With 8% CAGR economic growth  projected between 2010-2016 as the main driver, it projects that tertiary enrolment needs to increase capacity by 50% to 8.9 mn by 2016.

Next, the report looks at the distribution of income and the affordability threshold.

The Parthenon report draws a single vertical marker for household income showing that currently tertiary education is affordable for just the long tail on the right – the highest income households. This is an incorrect perception. The Bell curve in the report also seems to be incongruous for India – a more reasonable picture is painted by McKinsey.

To preserve the growth story, student financing has the ability to move the affordability threshold backwards, is what the Parthenon report says.

Neither the per capita expenditure on education nor the cost of providing education is uniform across the country. This Planning Commission report throws up some interesting facts. The per capita expenditure varies from income segment to income segment and as percentage of the expenditure, ranges from 1-10%. According to the report, the 1995-96 data suggests:

The differences by levels of education are more striking. On average, a household has to spend Rs.501 per child per annum for primary education. If the child goes to middle or upper primary education, it increases to Rs.901; it further increases to Rs.1577 in secondary schools and Rs.2923 in higher education.

Education on $10 to $60 a year (1995-96 levels) budgets is a vastly different problem. The Planning Commission report actually points out that households end up paying most of this budget for textbooks, uniforms and private coaching apart from fees; when these items are expected to be free and uniformly available at the right level of quality.

The Parthenon report compares costs of tertiary education between the USA and India and finds that it is more expensive in India for every income bracket. I paid a few hundred rupees for each year of college education and find this cost difference hard to believe from any perspective (even if were to consider reasonably expensive engineering undergraduate courses costing a 10,000 USD packet for 4 years of training).

The report describes the fact that broad financing options in the USA help get low income students access and paints a shocking picture of how advanced the USA is with multiples ranging from 5 to 45 times the number of students in higher education as compared to India. The subtext is, of course, that financing helped that miracle happen. The next slide states that the reason that many low income students cannot attend college is that they rely on precious family funds – if the family cannot afford it, they can’t go to college.

The solution, that the vast majority of India should take on private educational debt to move these budgets up, is a catastrophic suggestion, even if feasible at any level. But the Parthenon report goes ahead and does just that. It presents three options available to increase access to tertiary education in India.

1. Use capital markets to fund capacity expansion (through private investment…look Brazil opened its doors in 1996 through deregulation and tertiary enrolment increased three-fold!)
2. Subsidize institutions to increase affordability (nah…requires significant government expenditures)
3. Provide aid directly to students (you got it…potential effective option for India [in combination with private investment])

Now, having made the argument – growth requires increased tertiary enrolment which requires households to spend money, which they do not have; which means they need to bump up their funds; and what better than to let the market in – its time to substantiate how the tertiary enrolment in the USA actually grew out of student financing reform between 1955-75 (is that true?) which led to capacity expansion in the next twenty years and is now seeing a capacity utilization phase with enrolments growth rate (private sector contributing to the tune of 7 times the growth of public sector education) rising in excess of capacity growth.

To be fair, the report talks about two concerns of student financing – that institutions have increased real tuition levels based on demand and what they can get, and, the issue that private schools want to make money & are less worried about student outcomes. The panacea they specify is the role of oversight to be played by the state. 

Strange, bring in the market, get government to help it make money, let it make great money, then start rooting out the low hanging competition on quality grounds using state power?

And then comes the solution. There are significant problems today. We need to raise awareness, make the process simple, relax current terms (make institutions co-accountable as in the USA) and many other things we could do better and learn from the USA in handling loan processing – basically improve demand and supply factors to develop an efficient financing system.

Why am I being difficult? Obviously, we have to find funds to seed the system to meet the challenges, but how?

In a provocative post, titled US Student Debt Ticking Time Bomb?, from Sept 2010:

Federal student loan debt outstanding reached approximately $665 billion and private debt reached approximately $168 billion in June 2010, for a total student loan debt outstanding of $833 billion. Total debt is increasing at a rate of about $2,853.88 per second.

The amount of new debt has increased every year from 2001. In 2001 additional debt was 29 billion but by 2009 this had more than tripled to 99 billion.

Take a moment. Look the student loan debt clock and read this If you thought the housing bubble was bad.

My second problem is that India is not the USA. We are different, in case nobody noticed it yet. We cannot compare with what works in the USA or UK. The analysis and solution are all about that comparison. What works elsewhere may not work here.

My third challenge is that the report is about the end justifying the means. Everything is backward, leading from the conclusion that financing is good because it really makes money for those who have it. And the argument is not put together with care, even if that is the belief. For example, it makes the assumption that we are the most efficient spenders of government money on education. It makes the assumption, the really bad one, that we know nothing of student debt problems in the US. And many more such assumptions.

My fourth challenge is the numbers. Our scale is far bigger than what the USA faces. USA has 83% Gross Enrolment Ratio in Higher Ed with 18 mn students. We have a GER of 12% and we are at 16 mn students already. A drop here is an ocean elsewhere. We can create monsters many times the size of the housing bubble in the US or create a benign superpower by making some fairly simple decisions now.

My biggest challenge, though, is that most people will look at this and say it is probably the right solution. If government can’t pay and the vast number of students are suddenly able to pay for education that is obviously too expensive for government to bear the cost of, then the only solution must be to fund it in another way. Or they will hide behind other excuses, saying teachers are so underpaid (and in great shortage) and the infrastructure is so bad.

Its time we stood up and tackled our problems the hard way – and there is no other way to do this that is right. We have enough smart people and enough money to work our way through these issues. And we have many friends in countries all across the world that are dealing with similar problems and would love to help and be helped in the process.

Next post: A look at the E&Y reports. Game changers for Indian education.