An Election Manifesto for Education

Its time for the next General Elections in India, and I think it is also about time that citizens put together an education manifesto for all parties, given that they have been notoriously lax in laying down a concerted vision for the education system in their manifestos!

India is an amazingly diverse country and its strength is literally its people. An election manifesto that democratizes education in India, is the need of the hour.

Let me explain. I call the current systems of education educracies – basically a combination of the terms education and bureaucracy. Our systems are educratic – top down, hierarchical, role based and asymmetrically organized. As a social system, they exhibit feudal behaviour, rigidity, discrimination, nepotism and many other ills. But, as a mode of organization, at scale, they likely have no “design” parallel (insofar as mass organization and adaptation cannot just be designed, it emerges based on consensus of certain principles).

Our educracies need democratization of thought, leadership and action. In thought, we have to focus on research, knowledge and innovation, an area where we are gloriously under-served. With 10 million teachers in India serving just school and higher education, and just a handful of researchers and innovators across fields such as pedagogy and education technology, we do not have the design power that a country of this scale needs. Investing in these areas, is the foremost priority. If, without scientific R&D, there cannot be economic development, then, without R&D in our educracies, we cannot leverage the demographic dividend. This is evident from our failures to implement play, discovery, new age assessments and so many other scalable practices.

Our educracies need infrastructural transformation. The only way India can apply large scale effective practices in its educracies, is to build enabling infrastructure – whether physical (like connectivity and computing) or intellectual (like in knowledge stores and training). We need this infrastructure, just like we need electricity, because there is no way to achieve rapid transformation and growth, unless we can effectively propagate content and enable communications for learning and managing in an agile manner. Keep in mind that this transformation is not only for our schools and colleges, but also for centers of educational research and training and our boards of education.

Our educracies need to reinvent themselves to adopt new models of teaching and learning, governance and credentialing. At the very basic levels, our educracies are rotocracies – education practices and curricula based on rote teaching and rote learning. They still treat technology with grave suspicion. They are still trying to scale uniformly, rather than by decentralizing and empowering. These require re-invention at a very basic level in policy as well as systems of education. Perhaps we need to begin anew – maybe create and empower district level boards of education rather than national or state level boards, build a large cadre of change agents, re-scale and re-skill our teacher educators and administrators to face different compelling realities, influence social perceptions of other ways of education and consistently restructure our learning pathways for lifelong learning.

These changes are here and now changes we can make to our educracies to reap long term impact. If we can enable knowledge, infrastructure and new age practices, our educracies can transform and reinvent our collective futures. This is a national emergency, an imperative for political parties and a call to action for all of us. Step up! Write your manifesto for the next government today.

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Rough Book and 3 Idiots

Here is a story you shouldn’t miss. Rough Book is a movie built somewhat parallel to the theme of the movie 3 Idiots and has some common reflections on commercialization with the Nana Patekar movie, Paathshaala.

Rough Book is a muted drama focused on the teacher and her friends in a K12 setting – preparation for the board exams and the foremost engineering entrance exam, the IIT Entrance exam, in India. It details the trials of a teacher unwilling to go with the rest, to put learning in front of rote, life in front of learning. It tells the stories of students willing to accept the risks of being non-traditional, to allow themselves to be inspired by great educators.

While 3 Idiots was focused on a student’s life in an engineering school, and Paathshaala was focused on telling the story from the eyes of a school principal, beleaguered by  owners greed, Rough Book tells the story from the perspective of the teacher.

The common theme is that the love and joy for learning and teaching can create triumphs in even the existing system. That it can happen at our scale is the holy grail many of us aspire towards.

But the anomaly in all these narratives is the veneration of the existing system. The currency of the current system becomes the benchmark for performance on which the students and teachers in the system still stay judged. In fact, Rough Book ends with a respectful statement about the IITs, perhaps rightly so.

It is quite alright to suggest that if the ideology changes, the means and ends must also change. It may also not be incorrect to state that when ideology changes, existing systems no longer remain relevant or appropriate. But to state that ideological changes can be brought about from within a system, is to stretch it a bit. A system is only as good as the ideology that underpins it.

This has powerful implications on how we look at our systems. A shift from rote to participative learning, from tests to a thousand learning plateaus, from degrees to competencies and from the restricted spaces of the traditional curriculum to open and experiential learning and teaching spaces, marks a shift in ideology. Schools aren’t really built to navigate this shift, which is why people all around the world have engineered different environments to reflect this shift.

This leads us to the question of transformation of the education system, or more appropriately its disruption to make way for new structures of teaching, learning and evaluation, for new currencies in education and new goal posts for the future. The narrative isn’t that the education system is broken (no system can be represented in black and white), it is rather that a new system is needed to supplant it.

What does this imply for policy? It implies that policy makers have to start diverting funds, energy and focus into building new systems – even building migration paths for appropriate existing components, rather than continuously trying to reinvent from within. Practically, this means that new Central and State (and even district level) Boards of education, with new mandates, technology, curricula and training, must start being set up, with the existing ones notified of their end of life term.

Since this preparation will take time, it is likely going to be a generational change. But if envisaged now, at the brink of a new education policy, it will provide a lasting change model for our system.

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Crying Woolf

A group of academics hailing from top universities have decided to create the world’s first ever blockchain university called the Woolf University. They have released a rather illuminating whitepaper on the concept.

Essentially, the University will disintermediate the traditional university structure and leverage ‘trust’ through an alternate federated structure powered by a non-profit trust and democratic principles. All financial and student-teacher transactions in this structure shall be governed using the blockchain, and the currency will be called the ‘Woolf’.

We believe that Woolf University, as the first blockchain university, will increase the efficiency of student-teacher coordination by removing intermediaries, thereby narrowing spreads between hourly tuition costs and academic wages, thus distributing money more transparently, democratically, and justly.

This move will cut administrative overheads through the use of smart contracts. It will lower student tuition costs while at the same time increase the salaries academics are paid. Learning will be high quality because the delivery model will be based on one on one & one-to-two, direct and personal interactions between student and teachers, with the best teachers.

They place this move in context of the current situation in Higher Education. High overheads, lack of tenured jobs, uncertainty of work opportunities & underemployment, high cost of tuition and lack of access to high quality education for all (who can afford it). They draw parallels with Airbnb, seeking to make better use of our academic resources the same way as Airbnb made better use of real estate. They hope that traditional universities will also adopt Woolf, and reduce their administrative overheads.

Credentials will be sought to be legitimized using the traditional legal methods at first (and associated with mainstream options like student financial aid), but ultimately would want to set up a global standard in degree credentials, powered by the best academics in the world.

Academics can, provided they meet the guidelines of a certain common framework of the University, start their own colleges and offer differentiated offerings directly to students. By doing so, they can gain more control over their own futures, rather than remain subservient to the system for their needs. They can be true to their profession, rather than subjugate their beliefs and practices to the pecuniary and administrative goals of the universities.

Woolf University does not compete with for-profits like Udacity and Udemy. They don’t claim to be an online university at all – just a medium that is agnostic, democratic and decentralized. Woolf is also distinguished from enterprise level software like Airbnb or Uber by their claim:

Woolf creates new economic and social relations within the framework of a blockchain. We believe this is essential because we believe that the values to be encoded in the Woolf blockchain – humane, democratic, and ultimately non-profit values – are crucial to the future of the university.

Woolf is not so very different in intent from teachers collectives and cooperatives, which have a fairly long tradition. Both respect autonomy of teachers & democracy in education, promote quality education, drive costs down and promise an alternate way to structure ‘school’. Research in new wave teaching and learning structures, cMOOCs and distributed educational systems are important tools to understand this development. I called these Distributed Educational systems.

By Distributed Educational Systems (DES), I mean the ability of the educational system to distribute itself over its elements – students, teachers, content, technology, certification and placement. Brown and Duguid discuss forces will enable DES. Their 6D notion has demassification, decentralization, denationalization, despacialization, disintermediation and disaggregation as forces that “will break society down into its fundamental constituents, principally individuals and information.” They suggest the formation of “degree granting bodies”, small administrative units with the autonomy to take on students and faculty, and performing the function of providing credentials (read “degrees”). They recommend that “[i]n this way, a distributed system might allow much greater flexibility for local sites of professional excellence.”

The concept is not new and disruptive, but it has always had the potential to be so. Woolf falls short of re-envisioning the formal system because of its dependence upon the same vocabularies as those used on formal education (degrees, tutorials and so on). Traditional online course providers like Coursera and Udacity have also been unable to make the break, but they have come up with options that suit professional learning more than higher education (although the online degree ‘market’ is still something they cherish).

Interestingly, there is already a multi-billion dollar worldwide coaching and tuition market that is largely unorganized and has been supporting the education systems of most countries for decades. India is itself a $40 bn market. I would argue that just that market serves affordably the needs of millions of students and augments the incomes of teachers as well. It is a parallel and incestuous education system that works at a mass scale, helping students achieve outcomes whilst at the same time bearing the sneer of the formalists. If we formally invested in this system, perhaps it would be a more useful non-profit approach?

At a time, when these MOOC providers provide real access to revenue-generating opportunities for good teachers, the problem shifts to how we can generate more academic opportunities for teaching as a profession – perhaps by diversifying teacher skills to suit new areas of techonology enabled learning or other specialist areas.

Woolf’s strategy of taking only the top teachers (“The first 5 colleges of Woolf University require 80% of the faculty members to hold research doctorates issued by the top 200 universities in The Times Higher Education, ‘World University Rankings 2017’.”) will hardly address the claims of mass-scale underemployment of teachers worldwide, nor does it acknowledge the role of universities in providing credibility, infrastructure and research opportunities at an international scale to teachers.

Woolf looks more to be a new disruptive education startup story in search of a business model. They may be non-profit, but they are not free. They will charge for teaching, not offer models that espouse free content and paid assessments or certification. They seek to introduce economies of scale, increase choice and teacher self-reliance, rather than disrupting pedagogy. They emphasize the personal, as opposed to the robotic (which I take includes the whole AI revolution in one sweep).

I suspect that if a traditional university had taken this concept up as an innovation or as a way of generating more revenue, it would have been more successful. All a good university would need to do is establish an army of such virtual adjuncts and endorse them through university credibility, and in that manner acquire far larger customer (student) bases.

Still, the blockchain technology hype and the pedigree of great academics, combined with the fall of grace of MOOCs in the Higher Ed space, among other factors, might be what investors queue up for in this non-profit.I have always held, though, that technology is enabling, not core to an education proposition. Similarly, if only great ‘branded’ academics were the only cure to our problems at scale, then we would really have to reconcile to another elite system.

What is needed is not another populist solution for academics in penury, but strategies for solving global challenges of poverty, health, energy, environment and other crucial areas at an unprecedented scale for mankind. This can only be accomplished if we deeply reflect on our state of preparedness to build the human resources to address such challenges.

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India’s syllabus haircut

The HRD Minister is advocating a syllabus haircut for India. Following on the heels of the initiative by the Delhi AAP government in 2015 (“Delhi’s Syllabus Haircut“), which apparently went nowhere, the BJP government has tried to give it a populist national character by inciting NCERT to trim the syllabus by 50%. Subsequently NCERT, the apex education council that designs and manages the curriculum for the nation, has issued a public appeal for suggestions. The tenor is the same as that espoused by the Delhi government – the move towards more sports, life and experience learning and away from “bookish learning and writing mugged up answers for the examination”. They want to remove the “curricular burden” and to encourage all-round development. They also make textbooks thinner, interpreting the “burden” very literally as the physical weight of the textbooks.

Obviously, there have been vociferous arguments on either side. Those supporting the change make arguments like:

• Textbooks are heavy to carry
• 100% syllabus is not really negotiated anyway
• An overweight syllabus encourages rote learning
• Most of the syllabus cannot be applied, will not be retained or isn’t going to be useful later in life
• Rote precludes experiential learning and the building of 21st century skills in students
• Supporting assessment systems are not geared to judge true abilities of children and place undue stress on them
• Rote learning has a flip side – rote teaching – and that must also be transformed
• Ethics, values and life skills are really important to emphasize

Those against worry that:

• It will be pretty difficult to implement, at scale, and may end up diluting the academic rigor, setting us back in terms of national and international competitiveness even further. This, in a time when we have the largest young population, could have disastrous consequences on the well-being of future generations.
• It may take too much time to roll out. Aren’t there here and now, simple measures we can take?
• Are our teachers really equipped to handle this shift?
• Do we have the necessary infrastructure?
• How do we really decide what is “superfluous” and can be cut?
• Conversely, how do we decide what is important to be included? Are we going to use this as a ideological weapon for mass education using non-secular and subjective interpretations of knowledge?
• This initiative is populist – demagoguery has no role in education systems – and we should steer clear of it.
• Is this an experiment? Like CCE or ABL and other initiatives, will this be conceived imperfectly, implemented even more badly and then removed from public consciousness one fine day?
• How will this affect other downstream educational options – vocational, higher and further education? How will this affect competitive exams, admissions to foreign institutions, career choices, policies for standardized exam setting and result moderation and virtually every aspect of the system?
• What is really the “burden”? Aren’t there other smarter ways to mitigate it, if it really exists?
• Are we confusing “syllabus” with “curriculum”? The two are different things altogether.
• How are we sure that making textbooks thinner, cutting syllabi and promoting experiential learning will really make a difference to learning outcomes and help children achieve grade level proficiency and our nation achieve leadership in research and development?
• Aren’t there other models we could use? After all, it is a fairly non-unique problem and other countries have perhaps far more experience in these ideas and a closer look at their histories could reveal pitfalls.
• Is this concept really very new? Even Indian curriculum designers, in the National Curriculum Framework (2005) document and earlier as well, recognize the “burden” and have been taking steps to resolve it.

I think we are about to create a mass national disaster – not because the intent of promoting experiential learning is bad – but because we are really ill-equipped to deal with changes of this sort – both from a design and implementation perspective. There aren’t enough experiments on the ground that have scaled well (look at Activity based learning methods) and there is too much diversity to flatten with one-size-fits-all solutions. My worry is that we are clueless as to the real implications of what our demagoguery or abject opposition to this change can be. There are core systemic improvements, committed to in a stage-wise manner, that shall radically transform the country’s education system. If I were to choose the top 3 pillars of that transformation, they would be:

1. Infrastructure & education Technology: At the very basic level, required equipment and resources need to be made available. This means that the resources necessary for transforming the classroom have to be somehow made available. I suggested local and rural entrepreneurship, aside from state provision of these materials and the encouragement to use locally available indigenous materials, as a possible solution. An important component is going to be basic electricity provision to classrooms and technology enablement.
2. Empowering Teacher and Education Leaders: Side by side with infrastructure, the greatest asset we have is our teachers and the administrators of the institutions. We have to purposely design a system that incentivizes change to new methods (and I am not talking salary increases). New certifications and links to career progression, tracing a more direct link between new teaching & administration methods and outcomes  and systematic changes in curricula at all levels, are really important to institute.
3. Community participation: The weight of nation-building by education, similar to other areas like health, cannot be borne or be the prerogative of a handful of agencies. Rather a more democratic and concerted effort by citizens has to underpin the transformation.

The great news is that India is a treasure trove of great ideas, gifted educationists and concerned citizens. We have diversity at a rich scale that leaves the world gasping. But we are choking on our own potential.

Perhaps we will leverage this opportunity to arise, awake and stop not!

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Nationalizing Indian EdTech

Indian edTech has always been a tough battleground. It is getting tougher and more inexplicable by the day, and unless we, in edTech, take a stand, it will get far worse.

Here are some of the major forces shaping the industry.

The government has always had the lion’s share. They maintain the right of exclusion and maintain the right to make frequently silly decisions for the sector. Policy makers have not exhibited much understanding of edTech either, but have spent huge taxpayer money and time in demonstrating their deficiencies.

For the remaining, the private players are organized in an oligopolistic manner  with the largest shares among private schools business being served by a handful of companies that are deeply entrenched. Large players have also indulged, in general, in several practices of corruption that accompany the oligopoly.

There are a large number of small players serving the market for a variety of needs. Very few of them have scaled. Those that have, are unable to scale further without knocking at the doors of the large traditional players.

There is also a pecking order in the schools themselves, starting with a small number of elite players and a vast majority of tier 2 and 3 schools. They have shown far greater acceptance and ability to experiment than the rest of the ecosystem, but large and prestigious schools are concerned more with their own progress than with developing the system itself.

For the longest time, control in the private school market has been wielded by regulatory bodies such as the educational boards. The direct control of the Central and State governments are always in evidence. There is a deep and abiding mistrust between public and private players, perhaps rightly so, because they have mostly conflicting ideals.

Whereas the B2B (and B2B2C) route is mostly preferred, the B2C market has not really taken off in a sustained manner. This is because those that could afford have already been sucked to the bone by the existing school system itself by way of fees and other allied expenses.

Venture capital in this scenario is weak, chasing exits with little domain expertise – at least in general. Everybody is floored by the prospect of scale, and very few understand that what the sector needs is sustained investment. A look at 2016 investments tell the story with one investment in an outdated model and very uncertain future getting the most traction.

And then government signals are very conflicting. The movement to common core type of curriculum, proposals for a single national board of education, quasi mandates on public textbooks, reversing the most important curricular innovation of this century and the last, cultural re-invention through books & media, focus on assessments across the grades in the name of minimum levels of learning, mandating SWAYAM as the learning exchange and the latest, setting up of a national teachers portal – all colored by a lens that can best be described as “nationalization” of education. The new buzzword seems to be to treat the education system as a nationalized public enterprise supported by well meaning technocrats.

But little do we realize that Indian edTech industry is now on the verge of extinction through these measures. Rather than building a pluralized & balanced ecosystem in which public and private initiatives are aligned, the government is over-reaching its role by imposing its own brands of content, pedagogy and technology. Even if it was to focus this only on it’s own schools and colleges, it will fail in its arrogance as the only thought leader in these areas – the only ones who really know how to create high quality digital content, innovate on pedagogical techniques and deliver technology for the millions.

Not having a diverse ecosystem with checks and balances will result in the death of innovation and creativity. Education will truly become a government department supported by large enterprises.

That is not who we are, the folks in edTech. We have an undying passion and commitment to education and yes, sustainable business practices – with complete integrity. We are people who have dedicated their lives to the mission of improving edTech in this country and continue to cherish the dream of a developed ecosystem for education where our children, teachers and administrators reap the rewards of edTech at scale. We are people not afraid to fail, to make mistakes – all to make sure we live in a better country. Our efforts are no less than that of the other stakeholders in the system.

And if certain myopic policies and biases serve against these goals, we have to speak out and be heard. Ours is not to remain silent. Not now.

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National Education & Destiny

What is National Education?

Following a session of the Indian National Congress, H V Dugvekar, in 1917, came out with a compilation of essays by prominent freedom movement leaders including Bipin Chandra Pal, Gopal Krishan Gokhale, Annie Besant and Lala Lajpat Rai. A speech from Bipin Chandra Pal, founder of the Brahmo Samaj and part of the triumvirate Lal-Bal-Pal (for Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin himself), grabbed my attention.

National Education has been defined by a resolution of the last National Indian Congress as education conducted along national lines and under national control. I would, however, amend this definition a little by adding a clause towards the end. Education may be conducted along more or less national lines and may be more or less under national control and yet it may not be National Education.

He suggests that we may adopt practices on a large scale in pedagogy, set the medium of instruction and establish a public mode of ownership, but this

may not be National Education, because the object of this education, though conducted to a certain extent along national lines and though worked practically under national control, may not aim at the realisation of the destiny of the nation, and an education that does not direct its efforts towards the realisation of the national destiny, even if it be conducted along national lines, more or less, and even if it be ‘under national control’, apparently, to some extent, yet it would not be national education in the fullest and truest sense of the term…A nation is not a mere collection of individuals, it is an organism…The nationality that constitutes a nation is the individuality of a nation.

That should make us think – what is the National Destiny that is sought to be realized through our system of national education? What is the individuality of our nation that we should strive on creating?

In the sense that the education system is fundamentally, or should be, a reflection of the needs of the nation, this question is closely linked to how we define the education system itself. That definition is usually  some expansion of the idea of a holistic development of the individual, with the hope that the mature, intellectually developed, disciplined and enculturated citizens that are produced/engendered by the education system, will in some way be able to shape the national destiny. But how do schools respond to alternate and changing national destinies? Can they articulate them effectively and adapt? Can they create national destinies?

Or is Indian Education karmic and we are not to think of our destinies because they are already pre-decided; we can but only perform our duties honorably without worrying about the fruits?

“कर्मणये वाधिकारस्ते मां फलेषु कदाचन । मां कर्मफलहेतुर्भू: मांते संङगोस्त्वकर्मणि” ।।
(Bhagwat Gita: Chapter Two verse 47)

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Totalitarian Educracies

In education systems that have an oligarchic organization, with a small number of large private and/or public players, educracies acquire a kind of totalitarian rather than an egalitarian expression.

From a current example in India, the government is flexing educratic muscles on a set of private affiliated (to a national education board) schools that comprise around 1% of  all schools in India, but a much larger segment and visible segment within all private schools (about 25% of the total, as of 2014). These schools are affiliated to the CBSE and in fact gain their credibility itself from the affiliation, and are large autonomous in their practices and governance. Some of these schools have gained tremendous national and international visibility for their alumni, quality and hard work. However, the extent of profiteering has been largely governed by the extent of their own missions and conscience.

So it does happen that when excessive profiteering occurs (and what is excessive is largely subjective), the school becomes a place for commercial exploitation of parents. Often times, the exploitation increases without any corresponding increase in quality or outcomes. In fact, it becomes a rule that the more you have, the more you get. Monies appropriated within one school foundation cycle (average breakeven is 5-7 years), provide room for expansion and often viral growth of branches and franchisees.

At some point, some governments feel compelled to reign in these practices – when it becomes politically expedient or populist, or when other twisted motives of control and cultural or ideological influence emerge – not necessarily at the point that systems need change, but even after years of ignoring these problems.

When this happens, as it is happening in this instance in India, questions of quality and growth are rarely asked or answered. It is fairly easy to regulate, but difficult to state that it will solve the core problems of quality. By fixing fees, removing profiteering at schools, abolishing black money, increasing control over school affairs to extend from mere affiliation to more control and regulation over school internal and hitherto autonomous ways of working, the system of control and coordination is being extended.

This will have many benefits, predominantly in the region of reducing exploitation by private schools. In that respect, no parent will find fault with the inherent populist and necessary nature of the regulation. Some things do need to be kept in mind though, particularly from an edTech ecosystem perspective.

1. The fledgling ecosystem of edTech companies  are already battling problems of customer acquisition and scale. With pressure on fees, most schools will not be able to pass on marked up edTech costs (like of smartclasses) to students and will therefore have no incentives to deploy the additional services (except to do a me-too marketing spiel).
2. Existing service providers or digital and allied forms of courseware will be under increased stress to operate in uncertain investment environments and venture capital will cease and desist until the situation improves. This will impact growth of the sector negatively.
3. The government ecosystem for edTech is very primitive yet and there are few capabilities within the system to create and employ edTech. This constraint is not going away anywhere soon. There must be a solution to this for the long term, with a key component being research.

The next questions that need to be answered with equal vigor are around quality, not  just of these 1% schools, but of all the school system itself.

Will mandating courseware developed by a state sponsored institution necessarily improve quality and do we need such uniformity in materials?

Will elimination of or deep negative impact on edTech procurement by these schools be desirable and can the gap be filled?

Does this still allow high quality schools to operate with the flexibility they need and maintain their ability to hire more expensive teachers and infrastructure?

Do we need uniform learning indicators for all our schools?

Do we need differentiated and pluralistic strategies towards edTech?

Do we need to foster an edTech sector at all or can government take that responsibility?

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Educracy

Recently at a conference, someone asked me about the future of publishing. Remarking that it was a interesting question the answer to which I really did not know, which evoked much mirth, I ventured further to assert that the publishing and edTech are both a product and a function of the underlying system of education (and research). Viewed in such a manner, the future of publishing and edTech then naturally becomes a question of the future of the system of education itself. And that was something that was really complex to venture an opinion on.

However, I feel I must give it a shot. Our system of education is an educracy. Not that there is such a word yet to describe the bureaucratic system of education that we have (though there is the combination of education and bureaucrat – educrat – that merits an entry into the Oxford dictionary). The educracy is inspired by similar applications of bureaucratic models in organization theory in other fields. It is today the only way that we understand how to govern education.

Max Weber, a German sociologist, studied bureaucracy closely. He believed that conditions for its emergence included scale, complexity and the existence of a monetary system. For him, bureaucracy meant:

• a hierarchical organization
• delineated lines of authority with fixed areas of activity
• action taken on the basis of, and recorded in, written rules
• bureaucratic officials with expert training
• rules implemented by neutral officials
• and career advancement depending on technical qualifications judged by organization, not individuals

Source: Boundless. “Weber’s Model for Bureaucracy.” Boundless Sociology Boundless, 20 Dec. 2016. Retrieved 25 Feb. 2017 from https://www.boundless.com/sociology/textbooks/boundless-sociology-textbook/social-groups-and-organization-6/bureaucracy-56/weber-s-model-for-bureaucracy-352-10202/

Weber believed that bureaucracies are most efficient and effective mechanisms for the public governance. There is a clear administrative class hired to maintain the system and perform managerial roles, a hierarchy of information dissemination & control, a clear division of labour, processes & rules, clear record of activities and a fair degree of rationality & impersonal behaviour through the system.

While this was an “ideal type”, Weber believed that democracy and bureaucracy (read “large scale organization”) were incompatible. Weber’s friend, George Michels, called this the Iron Law of Oligarchy –  “effective functioning of an organization therefore requires the concentration of much power in the hands of a few people”. As John Dalberg-Acton famously said, ” “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

As the Wiki article puts succinctly,

Bureaucracy by design leads to centralization of power by the leaders. Leaders also have control over sanctions and rewards. They tend to promote those who share their opinions, which inevitably leads to self-perpetuating oligarchy. People achieve leadership positions because they have above-average political skill (see charismatic authority). As they advance in their careers, their power and prestige increases. Leaders control the information that flows down the channels of communication, censoring what they do not want the rank-and-file to know. Leaders will also dedicate significant resources to persuade the rank-and-file of the rightness of their views. This is compatible with most societies: people are taught to obey those in positions of authority. Therefore, the rank and file show little initiative, and wait for the leaders to exercise their judgment and issue directives to follow.

Systemically, therefore, the bureaucratic mode of organization that is in evidence in our education system, is really an oligarchy. And therefore, a change in the education system really involves a change in the power relations within the educracy itself.

Unless the order is changed, the system will not change, and neither will ancillaries like publishing and edTech. In fact, the order will keep consuming new innovation, especially those that, though revolutionary, do not gain critical mass.

The old order will view innovation from the old order’s lens. For example, someone else asked me about the huge dropout phenomenon in MOOCs. That was from an old order lens which assumed that if it was a course, then it must be completed and certified.

Instead, I asked, why don’t you consider that such a huge number actually “dropped IN” to learn something, to take away something without being directed to, to explore new knowledge and modes of learning, and the ones that actually completed these “courses” took responsibility to convert those learning experiences into something more formal probably just because the old order wouldn’t recognize anything alternative.

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Education Systems: Flawed Design?

In the traditional system of education, there are many fundamental incongruities. For example, let us take certification of progress or advancement.

The output of an academic level (degree, year) is a certification of progression. This certification, awarded by the institution, indicates the achieved levels of learning and performance. The value perception of that certification is either implicitly understood through common sense or popular conception of what that level should be (“She is an engineer!”), or explicated through rubrics codified in standards or through formalized benchmark tests (“She max-ed the SAT!”). This certification is agreed and generally understood to signify a common understanding about the underlying competency.

As a consequence, what is also assumed is that the education system is organized (within the constraints of policy) such that the general meaning of the certification remains the same. That is, it self-organizes in a way as to promote a fixed correlation between certification of progress and competence.

On closer scrutiny, this can hardly be an exact or specific relationship. No two institutions may share the same everything. It is a really complex environment. There are many moving parts that contribute to the perception of competence or academic achievement, such as the specific curriculum, the quality of teaching or infrastructure, institutional brand, the ability of students and the level of rigor of assessments. An MBA program from Wharton could be very different from an MBA program offered by a local college in India. Treatment of a subject like school Science could vary between the common core in the US and the CBSE in India. Even two neighboring schools may be altogether different in how they conduct and certify the progression, even within a shared bureaucratic practice.

All we can say, and say in general, is that we could generally expect some competencies to be demonstrable at a specific level, and that that set of competencies would also vary by the observer’s own frame of reference. But we cannot specifically and objectively prove that there is a causality between the design of the education system and it’s putative outcomes.

This is what is predicated by design of our education systems today. Whether it is a higher level of education or a professional entry level certification, the system connives a certain trust, within and across institutions, and with external stakeholders, a system based literally on bias and subjective interpretation of competency or progress, an almost incestual behavior that feeds and reproduces from within.

This is achieved because of the nature of the system itself. Rules are codified in order to set the parameters of behavior and performance at institutional levels, and all stakeholders follow this way of being.

Similarly, the bureaucratic form of organization is followed to address scale.But scale destroys the ability of a bureaucracy to focus on what is being organized.

By expecting self-replication of practices at all levels, policies and processes get constrained by the needs and abilities of the lowest common denominators. In fact, the popular approach to change initiatives is through the language of the system itself, to create more institutions (and thereby more bureaucracy) to address those aspects. When these institutions are created, they inherit the same shortcomings thereby reducing their ability to apply innovation, however brilliant, at scale. Order begets more Order.

This is an untenable system of education, because it is by design reductionist and deeply hypocritical. It tries to eliminate complexity, and in the process gives rise to incongruous and undesirable outcomes.

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Courage, Craft and Character

There are three things I believe are necessary for success in product development, and perhaps in other endeavors in Life as well.

Courage. You need the courage to dream on a very wide canvas, the courage to fail and make mistakes, the courage to acknowledge what can defeat you and persist in your efforts to resolve it. You need the courage of commitment to stay the course despite what others may have to say or how detractors may perform their dance of distractions. You need the courage to be able to listen, shed your prior biases and conviction. You need the courage to trust your team and play an important part in keeping them challenged, ever growing as people.

Craft. Your craft – the skills you bring to meet the challenge – is really critical. It is not all about what you know already. It is more about what you can learn and teach and share. It is about how open you can be to ideas and thoughts – and how respectful you can be towards the contributions of others, small or large. It is the craft that distinguishes the weak from the strong, the doers from the doomsayers. If you don’t grow while making your product, it is never going to grow either.

Character. A product without character and a team without a conscience are bound to fail. It is the moral intent behind the product that helps it transcend the domains of the merely useful. To be transformational, there must be a soul to the product and its own consciousness and integrity. This is very important to realize and practice – which aspect of your product promotes or has the potential to promote greater social good, and which part is only purely parochial and transient, driven by greed rather than compassion or ingenuity.

Courage. Craft. Character. Three things that are perhaps extremely relevant in many areas – including edTech. Education, though, needs much more emphasis on Character than before. Large players with the ability to disseminate and scale the product, need to shoulder the responsibility for operating with professional, social and financial integrity. And if this happens, the sky is indeed no limit.

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The Digital Isolation of Classrooms

Our classrooms are digitally isolated by their very design. It is a distortion of our bureaucratic education systems wherein, on the one hand, grade levels are broken down into separate groups/classrooms, insulated from each other, while each group is encouraged (or mostly not) to independently interact with the outside world.

As a result, students learning the same concepts (from perhaps the same teachers), cannot break the confines of their own classroom group, to celebrate their own local diversity, far less the diversity offered by classrooms worldwide doing almost exactly the same thing, separated by time and space.

This distortion is brought upon us by our approach to managing scale in the education system. Although at one end, developing nations like India still see a significant number of one-room schools (multi-grade single teacher classrooms; in India the figure is around 10%), the vast majority of our classrooms at any level of education stand singularly insulated.

Is this distortion healthy? It is not. In an inter-connected world, fast augmented by accessible technology, our research shows us that increased diversity in the classroom leads to more tolerance, better thinkers, stronger communities, more successful employees and happier lives. It improves the self-efficacy of learners so they become exponentially better performers for the long-term and not just at a particular grade level or assessment. By also co-operating and sharing, they increase their own capacity to learn – a skill that is severely under-rated by bureaucratic systems of education, leading to reflections such as Do Schools Kill Creativity. Clearly, group wise insulation implies a loss of shared experience, so vital for individual sense-making.

This distortion permeates other aspects as well – for example, teacher performance is measured group-wise and in isolation from teacher performance elsewhere. Even for teachers, there is this near-complete isolation between the classrooms she teaches and what others teach, in the same location or worldwide. Thus this impacts teacher self-efficacy as well – her ability to evolve and grow. The same could be said for school leaders.

In a system so shorn of collaboration, we cannot celebrate the benefits of diversity and connected-ness. The distortion in the system ensures greater isolation, thereby lower levels of efficiency for all stakeholders. So far, this distortion is likened to commonsense, with increased diversity desirable but deemed impractical at scale. As a result, very little, if at all, of our education system is geared towards connection-making (in the Connectivist sense) for teaching and learning.

It behoves us to step outside the frame. By looking at increasing connected-ness and diversity in and across our classrooms, we can generate more opportunities for achieving high levels of quality in our systems of education.

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edTech vs. ICT – New Education Policy

The New Education Policy, 2016, has to give mission level status and significance to education technology by:

1. Systematically building up our intellectual and institutional capabilities in edTech
2. Planning and implementing strategic edTech initiatives
3. Actively promoting edTech entrepreneurship and R&D

Mission Level Focus on edTech

The NEP draft places no mission level emphasis on education technologies (edTech).

A mission level emphasis on edTech is critical if India is to achieve the objectives of equity and excellence at our scale and align effectively with other government initiatives such as Digital India, Smart Cities and Make in India.

Although the policy mentions the term “ICT” at many places, “edTech” goes above and beyond “ICT” in many ways (more details in Appendix 1). It would be a mistake to conflate the two. ICT is more concerned about access, while edTech is concerned about effectiveness.

There are several, far-reaching benefits to treating edTech with a separate mission-level focus. When leveraged properly, edTech can:

1. Improve learning outcomes significantly in both online and offline modes
2. Increase the capability of teachers to not just teach better, but to actually achieve the goal of student centred learning that has for long been the aspiration of many a National Education Policy
3. Describe, with the help of data and analytics, student performance outcomes and proactively predict failures to meet outcomes.

Mission Objectives

The potential objectives or goals for this mission-level focus on edTech could be:

1. Build edTech capability and awareness in a systematic manner through edTech innovation centres, PhD and certificate programs and open-source community projects
2. Plan and execute national and state-level edTech blueprints for maximum impact on educational outcomes and effective access to education. The blueprints would span areas such as:
   1. Education programs for teachers and administrators
   2. Incubations & Entrepreneurship
   3. Platforms and Applications
   4. Digital Identity Management
   5. Digital Curriculum and Courseware including MOOCs
   6. Techniques including Adaptive learning, MOOCs, Gamification, Augmented Reality and others
   7. Metadata, Tracking and Learning Analytics
   8. Certificate depository/blockchain
   9. Implementation schemes & formats
   10. IT Infrastructure provision
3. Lower and remove barriers to adoption of edTech by all educational institutions by increasing choice, limiting regulation, infrastructure investment and sufficient funding

While there are many approaches to achieving this mission mode emphasis on edTech, some possible techniques are suggested below.

1. Set up a separate mission-mode edTech initiative, staff it with competent people with comprehensive state-level participation. Equip each state with a state mission secretariat which has sufficient authority to push not just infrastructural ICT initiatives but also work closely with state education departments to promote edTech and indoctrinate new edTech methods within institutions. Provide sufficient funding, autonomy & control to operate.
2. Set up a fund to enable 500 PhDs in edTech in the next 5 years. Participants should get international experience and then come back to work with the Centre and States. This could be managed by top class universities.
3. Actively identify, seed-fund, incubate and promote local and rural entrepreneurs including a special focus on women entrepreneurs
4. Create a Chief Learning Officer position for India. The CLO will be responsible for all mission-level outcomes and will coordinate and partner with other initiatives and agencies. This position can be complemented by the positions of Chief Academic Officer, Chief Technology Officer and Chief Operations Officer or equivalent. States could have similar positions.
5. Completely revamp and promote the use of edTech starting with all open and distance learning institutions, teacher education institutes, departments of education and institutions like NCERT, NUEPA etc.
6. Ease regulations to use of online learning for credit, subject to an accreditation mechanism to prevent misuse.
7. Start small and grow organically
8. The policy goals could also be based around the following major aspects:
   1. Infrastructure: Energy, Computing and Network
   2. Community
   3. Content
   4. Innovation and Entrepreneurship
   5. Policy
   6. Education Technology and R&D

Note: These are further detailed in the Appendix II.

Expected Outcomes

Conceived and implemented properly, the mission level focus could deliver on many fronts such as:

1. Designated stakeholder entities/institutions reliably connected, trained and supported
2. edTech champions (teachers, administrators and experts) trained to harness the network potential across India that can handle Higher Education, VET and School Education teacher capability building
3. Aggregation and implementation/deployment of all past and current technology and content initiatives for Technology enabled learning or ICT enabled learning
4. Development of rich interactive media content as necessary
5. Cutting edge IP in administration, collaboration, learning, content and assessment technologies (among others)
6. Teacher certifications and the building up of Teacher Assessors and Mentors
7. Awareness generation and capability building across all HE
8. R&D centres dedicated to evolving edTech
9. Internationally recognized PhDs
10. Highly productive and cutting edge global partnerships
11. Many Ed Tech startups incubated
12. A large number of disadvantaged individual or small scale businesses granted funds and supported by the mission
13. Inclusive and equitable strategy, tuned for excellence

This is a scalable approach from which we can derive a high quality, continuously adaptive & improving growth engine for India.

Appendix I

ICT Vs. edTech

So far Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have been treated as the most important focus in education. It is obvious to appreciate how digital technology can help connect people, disseminate information and empower people and processes with necessary tools. This is our idea of ICT, which is a widely recognized paradigm since the late 90s.

But ICT for Education (also called Technology Enabled Learning) and education technology (edTech) are two very different domains.

Key Differences

To understand why education technology is so different from ICTs, one needs to understand the limits of ICT. ICTs are mainly concerned with the following:

1. Establishing networks – developing physical and Wireless networks like the NKN and NMEICT (also underlying newer and wider initiatives such as Digital India and Smart Cities) to enable people and devices to connect, communicate and share data and voice services.
2. Building Applications – conceivably every area of operations needs applications for automation to bring about large scale efficiencies, decrease response times and increase accuracy. ICTs enable these and we have made significant progress using ICTs for automation, even in education. Apart from automation of public services, the other significant uses include analytics, research & development and public security.
3. Content Creation and Dissemination – a large effort arising out of ICTs is in the creation and dissemination of information. For public or private use, using ICTs for content dissemination is a necessary tool.

However, edTech is concerned with not just the specific applications of ICT for the Education system, but more importantly, the development of altogether new techniques and methods specific only to the education system. Some of these very specific areas include:

1. Course creation – establishing content taxonomies, re-usable learning assets, metadata, building adaptive content, reusable competency definitions are all activities in the edTech domain but find no similarities in the ICT domain.
2. Course delivery – learning paths, personalized learning, mentor and coaching models, proctoring, andragogy and self-directed heutagogical learning, badging & certifications, gamification, Augmented Reality – are all terms not to be found in any ICT vocabulary
3. Analytics – academic analytics, learning analytics, social network analysis, sentiment analytics, digital identity are all specific to edTech, but often conflated with business intelligence paradigms. In fact, Learning Analytics models have been proven to identify at-risk students (sort of an early warning system that can help us much more than post-facto PISA type of analytics)

Digital courseware content is usually clubbed with ICTs (e.g. the largest content development initiative is the National Mission on Education using ICT). However, edTech champions would strongly differentiate the type of content, its developmental process, tools, delivery techniques and quality assurance to the point where it has no resemblance to the same types, processes, tools, delivery and quality assurance of other forms of ICT driven content.

To give an example, creating a video and posting it on Youtube would be classified as an ICT skill. When imparted as a skill to educators, they would be trained in creating videos and pushed to generate Youtube (or other) video content for their students. However, a video does not equate to an educational experience without many other pedagogical components such as interactivity, student progress tracking and analytics of various kinds.

This is the reason why, in the rush to create content since the NPTEL started, we still do not have any way to know how students and teachers are in fact interacting with and using the content, and to what outcomes. We just know video views and unique users, which are important ICT based statistics, but not significant enough if we want to understand if the students actually learnt something using the videos. The same holds true for almost all the components of the 4-quadrant model created under the NMEICT/NPTEL. Creating a Youtube channel for a course, is perhaps the most primitive and inaccurate step taken to disseminate the educational content.

In the area of MOOCs, a similar issue confronts us. When viewing the MOOC as a way to broadcast video lectures and objective tests, with or without facilitation (blended models of MOOCs), we are in fact doing great injustice to how MOOCs were initially conceived and implemented – the early MOOCs showed that education technology could be harnessed to help learners learn via networks and to regain control over their own learning through community interaction and reflection. However, the ICT view of courses is so widespread that MOOCs have become only a wellspring of static content, not interaction.

There are many other examples that can be taken that show how mistaken the conflation of ICT with edTech really is. This conflation is also visible in funding decisions by the government and in government policy. While there is a significant infrastructural investment in ICTs to be made, there is negligible effort in promoting edTech, and an even more fragile appreciation that edTech also requires research and development investment.

We must have a clear focus on edTech. This is crucial given the path-breaking initiatives for a digital and self-reliant India, the problems of access, quality and equity, the problems of governance of education and the diversity inherent in our education system.

Appendix II

Infrastructure: Energy, Computing and Network

1. Provision of affordable and reliable power, computing and network services to selected entities involved in education.
2. Provision of and integration with existing technology, content repositories and other services on a nationwide network (aggregate all existing efforts in technology, content and R&D) by a core team of 50 Ed Tech professionals over 5 years with support from existing initiatives
   1. Identity Management: The ability to uniquely identify a stakeholder and reach out to through multiple identified channels
   2. Campus ERP: A minimalistic ERP system that is based on a SaaS model
   3. Knowledge and Community Networking Services: A mechanism for dissemination and sharing information for, by and of the networks
   4. Communication & Collaboration Services: A mechanism for collaboration

1. Virtual on-demand classrooms
2. Audio and Video Conferencing, including application sharing

• FM and Community Radio interfaces

1. Satellite based two-way interactive TV

Community

1. Creation of an elite cadre of 170,000 EdTech champions across the country that shall be certified to create awareness, build & grow educational networks, disseminate information and act as a strategic implementation arm of the MHRD.

Content

1. Creation of localizable, rich media advanced elearning and offline materials across subjects (including vocational, medical and agriculture, in close cooperation with those and other councils)
2. Integration of domestic community and Open content repositories through a process of academic, pedagogical and technical validation
3. Creation of Teacher and Student Resource Kits and kits for assessment of teachers for continuing certification in ET.

Education Technology and R&D

1. Development of cutting edge technology and EdTech pedagogy by a core team of Ed Tech professionals over 5 years with support from existing initiatives
   1. Personal Learning Environments for every connected person
   2. MOOC based learning environments on demand for community learning initiatives
   3. Social Networking tools for learning, recruitment and professional collaboration
   4. BIG Data Capture and Analytic Services: Provision for data collection services for each node, type of data and type of network. This will involve designing and implementing a single framework for organizing and assessing data, closely integrated with initiatives such as the UID and ERP for HEI. Create the systems for collecting and analysing educational data in ways that make the teaching-learning process adaptive and responsive
   5. Creation and implementation of cutting edge learning content management systems that will allow mass generation of authentic rich media content
   6. Web 3.0 and Semantic Web based development of educational services and applications
   7. Mobile Learning solutions
   8. Offline solutions
   9. Adaptive Learning and Personalization systems
   10. Content Security
   11. Virtual Labs, Simulations and Serious Games frameworks development/procurement
   12. Research and Development in edTech: Establish a mechanism to develop and integrate increasing amounts of intellectual capital/ human resources that can facilitate the network effect and lead & extend the state of the art; development of 500 international level PhD holders in 5 years

Innovation and Entrepreneurship

1. Provide seed funding of 5 cr for 10 entrepreneurs each year in the field of edTech
2. Provide 1,000 small scale women, disabled, socially and economically weaker sections INR 5 lakhs grants per year for supporting HEIs with products and services; provide easy loan schemes or microfinance initiatives for this audience
3. Provide a support system (ET Labs and other institutions) for these ecosystems for design-through-adoption cycles

Policy

1. Implement edTech certification in teacher career progression (and pay scale) systems; reward performers with more incentives
2. Process to renew certification (not in terms of the licensed practitioner model that the policy proposes) every year that requires teachers to demonstrate project experience (employing ET in teaching practice evidence) and conform to ET guidelines
3. Policy for creating champion teachers and teacher assessors
4. Setting directives and guidelines for the use of funds and for the cooperation between and across MHRD, industry and academia.

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Reclaiming SWAYAM

Today’s news article on the SWAYAM MOOCs and open-ness by Anil Sasi of the Indian Express raises some very important questions about the future of MOOCs in this country.

The facts of the matter are as follows. A proprietary rather than open source approach has been adopted because open source seems not be open after all. Choosing EdX, for example, they believe compromises intellectual property and requires a big fee to be paid to MIT (even after EdX, at the behest of IIT Mumbai and MHRD gave over the full source code and support to India in 2013 and assured that all IP will remain with India). Secondly, it seems they believe that open source systems do not have the depth of being able to handle enterprise grade learning environments. Third, this is the conclusion of expert committees of the government after in-depth deliberations, I assume, with a wide range of industry, technical and MOOC experts. Fourthly, the RFP itself built by PwC and the government, the basis of the INR 38 cr project award to Microsoft, is in itself plagiarized and deficient.

This defies logic. A really large part of the world runs on open source. The open source movement has shown that enterprise grade, mission critical applications can be made to work with community support. Total cost of development ownership is lower with use of open source. And open source, by definition, fosters collaboration and innovation.

At the risk of repetition, instead of manufacturing large systems, the government should invest in building API and making integration possible between systems. They should fund edTech startups to build MOOC based learning environments. They should enable an open architecture, not just in technological terms, but also in terms of an open architecture of participation.

How would that work?

On the technology front, let us assume we are API focused. Then we must openly build the following API sets (and more):

1. User API – API that allows users of different types and institutions to be managed, for different stakeholders and their roles
2. Identity API – that allows users to be uniquely and securely identified through the course of their life, with probable integrations with other systems like Aadhar
3. Curriculum API – API that enables metadata and classification systems for content and pedagogy, that brings Corporate, VET, School and Higher education taxonomies together
4. Assessment API – API that enables taking online assessments of different types, enables proctoring controls, provides secure test-taking and great analytics
5. Certifications/Badging API – that allows certification/degree providers to create online badges and certificates that can be awarded; secure lifelong eportfolios and linked certificate depositories
6. Authoring API – that allows quick and easy authoring, review and collaboration
7. Content Delivery API – API that allows video streaming (live and VOD), CDN-grade access, shared folders and cloud distribution
8. Network API – that enables social discovery, network and group formations, sharing and amplification and social profile aggregation; building both social and learning graphs
9. Services API – that enables tutors to connect to students, mentors and coaches to their mentees, institutions to parents and so on, and provide services such as fee payments, digital and offline educational content, tutoring, adaptivity, virtual classrooms and so on.
10. Andragogy/Heutagogy/Pedagogy API – that enables different techniques to teaching-learning to be used as desired by teachers and students, e.g. blended models or SPOCs.
11. Learning Analytics API – that provides new ways of deciphering engagement, learning and interaction.
12. Language API – that enables multi-lingual content and internationalization

(Remember that technology and all this talk about API is merely the greasing in the wheel. The real work is in exploring new paradigms of teaching and learning, especially online and blended. And this does not mean building online courses and calling them MOOCs.)

These API sets (and others I may have missed) would need to be supported by a strong developer program, funds allocated for several incubation initiatives with participation from private funds, R&D labs, education programs to build engineers and architects of future learning environments and many more. important aspects known to us from the experimentation & learning of the open community in discovering what works at scale.

Now imagine a time when these API are available (in fact a large number already are available in the open domain, they just need to be contextualized in some cases) for use by indigenous developers. They are not starting from scratch. They are not restricted by a monolithic RFP or scope. They are not constrained to be this one very large proprietary solution (although some may want to build such systems on top of the open stack, which is just fine). If things go well, a number of people will focus on developing alternative solutions to pieces of the puzzle, while others will integrate them into solutions that can be used in different contexts. No one size fits all.

This will give a boost to indigenous development, which at the current time is laboriously trying to build each component. It will bring about that strategic 10x inflection in edTech in India enabling thousands of providers, who are operating mostly in isolation, to get a framework around their efforts and build for scale. Strategic funding for R&D will help us achieve breakthrough innovations in teaching and learning at all scales. Private sector funding of edTech will find a purpose.

This is what the government should do. And only a government can achieve this at strategic scale, tying up all the piece of the supply and demand chains, particularly in a system so dominated by public education.

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The corruption of the SWAYAM RFP

It seems the SWAYAM RFP dated 21st November, 2015 is actually inspired from previous RFPs made for other contexts. You have to only compare the SWAYAM RFP with two earlier RFPs:

1. National Career Services Portal RFP dated  13th August 2014
2. A JNU RFP on eLearning Development dated 5th February 2015

 

To give a sense of the malaise, here are indicative architecture diagrams from the NCSP and SWAYAM RFPs. Try and spot the differences.

You don’t have to be an expert to recognize copy/paste. A simple Google search is enough to lay bare the blatant plagiarism. The consultants for this RFP in turn may have been inspired by others across ministries and their appointed consultants.

But there are deeper issues here.

Firstly, the very respected Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) has been hired as the consultant to draft the RFP, select the vendor and monitor the implementation. It is possible they acted in similar capacities for one or more RFP consultations. To find PwC indulging in cheap copy and paste goes against the very reason they were selected.

Second. PWC is not doing this free of cost. The entire exercise is expected to cost MHRD about 30 lakhs with NICSI also getting a slice. With the efficiency that comes from copy and paste, one would think the effort would be far below proposed.

Third. It may also be okay, to copy and paste certain generic specifications. But would you propose the same technical architecture for two very different contexts? Worse, would you ignore the advances in technology over the past two (or more) years and be content with copying older ideas?

Fourth. Even while doing a copy and paste job, would you at least take care not to repeat earlier mistakes made by the earlier authors. The mere act of a copy and paste indicates an intellectual vacuum. When done improperly, it indicates the complete absence of intellect and intention. Take for example the following diagram (look at the circled phrase). Laughably, see how Sentiment Analytics, the subject of much excitement in the recent past has now become Sentimental Analytics!

Fifth. It is not very clear if PWC was the perpetrator of the earlier RFP or other similar ones in the past. And whether they were paid similar astronomical sums for their obvious consulting expertise to copy and paste.

Sixth. While the government can take a hands off position and blame PWC for these acts of omission, there is no way be not held accountable for their choice of consultant, for their inadequate review process and for other errors of their act of commission. The MHRD must explain how this travesty has occurred with full internal and vendor accountability. It is scary that we are going to invest so much public money and effort in an initiative which seems so flawed from the word go.

Seventh. I have not yet even talked about the actual content of the RFP itself. It is so obviously incompetent that I can only sigh with frustration at this phenomenal display of MOOC and technology expertise. And I am not talking about the Microservices vs. SoA kind of higher level technological debates either – just very simple things that I daresay most MOOC technology people would be happy to point out are missing, erroneous or irrelevant. It would be superb to place the panel of experts who edited or wrote the original version of the RFPs in a public debate, asking them to substantiate their proposals.

More galling than any other thing is the obviously brazen attitude that anything they do will pass public scrutiny. There is perhaps a babu-consultant-OEM racket in here which I hope someone takes the pain to uncover. Perhaps they genuinely believe we are idiots who will not really care.

I sure hope we are not.

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2015-Slow year for edTech

This past year has been very eventful. Here are some of my impressions of 2015.

xMOOCs have strengthened this year. The major players have received lots of new funding, added 1800 new courses, 100 new credentials, doubled enrollments to 35 mn students and co-opted many new partners from academia (over 550 universities in all) and industry.  Class-Central’s report talks about 5 emerging trends.

• Rise of self-paced courses (20% of the course listings on Class-central are self-paced)
• Death of the free certificate (average per course costs are USD 50+ for providers such as Coursera and edX)
• MOOCs for High schoolers (to bridge the college readiness gap)
• Sharper business model (with paid credentials) – also aligning to the for-credit model, which has the required scale if endorsed by university partners, although “Just one specialization from Coursera makes 10x the revenue, in ten months, that the entire university of Harvard makes with 60+ courses. The numbers tell a clear story: students don’t care if the certificate is id-verified or not.“. There is also a revenue model in tying financial aid/loans for these courses.
• Huge funding (nearly USD 200 mn between just Coursera, Udacity and FutureLearn)

All in all, xMOOCs have started looking rather like Lynda (which LinkedIn, very sensibly, acquired) and so many other online course providers who have established business models in traditional online learning. What is different is scale and hype, but the rest remains essentially the same. In fact, it is a well rehearsed strategy to grow the numbers using a free approach and segue into a paid marketplace, the runway being the patience and appetites of investors.

India, too, has joined the bandwagon. With early experiments by the IITs and other institutions, now the focus is on converting existing content into ‘MOOC-compliant’ (whatever that means) offerings from existing content and the building of an indigenous platform called SWAYAM. SWAYAM is supposed to be a “Single Window, centralized, integrated, multi-lingual, user-friendly platform enabling module based efficient learning” and will integrate central and state universities, training providers, educators, students, examination partners, internal platforms etc. and will feature Enterprise CMS, CRM, Analytics and eCommerce and other supporting modules; available in offline modes and on any device (Volume 2).

Meanwhile, policy changes are towards more open-ness in sharing resources and textbooks for free/paid online access. There are several new initiatives like ePathshala and eBasta (which I never really could get my arms around; in any case it has no more that about 6,500 downloads in the past 6 months) that aim to bring free and paid digital versions of textbooks and learning materials to the mobile devices in online and offline modes. Government continues to exercise muscle power in online learning, being the main funder and the largest scale provider, probably to the angst of private players. A realization also seems to be seeping in that offline versions are key (look at what Khan Academy Lite is trying to do) and so is multi-lingual content (Khan Academy Hindi). Be that as it may, these are moves that utilize technology for some kind of dissemination, hardly moves that are going to improve education. Elsewhere, government is also waking up to the fact that it needs to put information systems online, such as Saransh.

The unregulated Indian PreK12 market seems to be consolidating. Zee Learn and Treehouse have merged to create the largest player with over 2000 pre-schools, with Eurokids (884 centres) and Shemrock (425 centres) following behind.

EdTech funding this year has touched a new high. Over USD 3bn was invested worldwide with nearly half that in education finance companies Social Finance and Earnest.The rest mainly in online edTech providers, xMOOCs and tutoring. In India, edSurge reports, there were 27 deals valued at about USD 60 mn. Audrey Watters is doing a great job at putting some of this information together.Top areas of investor happiness? Test prep. Tutoring. Private student loans. Learning management systems. Online “skills training.”

More detailed figures on Indian edTech reveal a total investment of USD 66 mn in India. This is compared to USD 60 mn in just one of many edTech investment in China. Indian investment looks to follow a similar pattern – Test Prep. Online skills/training/curriculum. Tutoring. And this is less than 1% of total private investment deals in India in 2015.

I can’t recall, sadly, innovative ed-tech in 2015, perhaps apart from some work in adaptive learning by companies such as Knewton. Perhaps it is just that I have not kept up, but nothing stood out really.

Atleast I had fun being part of Dave Cormier’s Rhizo15. The great part of a cMOOC is that you get to meet some incredible people who expose you to some really mind-blowing thinking around learning and education. You learn to renew yourself through the experience of being connected with others and discussing new ideas. I hope that good sense will prevail in India and we will start experimenting with some of these models instead of aping the xMOOCs and building learning management systems.

And I cannot but mention the most impressive post of 2015 for me. Audrey Watters wrote The Invented History of ‘The Factory Model of Education’ and questioned popular rhetoric. Not merely is the analogy anachronistic, but it is also not very relevant. However, the big revelation to me this year, is that there is an organized system out there whose outcomes are not very educational after all! More on that later.

Inexorably though, in 2016, the online courses and tutoring juggernaut will keep progressing and the space is going to be of the more of the same variety. Hopefully India will see increased traction – it is just a matter of time.

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Delhi’s Syllabus Haircut

The most amazing thing has happened in Delhi. Something that I have been advocating for the past few years has actually seen the light of day. Delhi’s AAP government has cut syllabus upto Class VIII by 25%, with the promise of doing that for Classes IX-XII by next year!

Director, education, Padmini Singla explains that no part of the syllabus that is crucial to the children’s understanding of concepts has been removed. “They weren’t completing all the chapters in the book anyway. We’re just reducing them. The sections were selected by an internal committee which had members from the SCERT as well,” she says.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Lighter-bags-for-kids-as-govt-to-cut-syllabi/articleshow/48839917.cms

For generations, the weight of the textbook, the amount of time and energy spent on memorizing useless information, the burden of studying for its sake, stands diminished at one stroke.

It will increase the time children have to connect with subjects through fun, real life explorations, explorations through performing arts and generally time off to spend on play.

There are the critics though who lambast this decision as retrograde, and one which will further degrade the quality of education, particularly as the cumulative cut up to Class VIII will result in a severe dissonance when the student reaches advanced levels.

But this is a creative dissonance, one that shall force curriculum designers to think anew, give time for teachers to develop new thinking and teaching skills and students to focus on the absolutely necessary (something that they have perhaps anyways been doing by default through choices their teachers make on how much they actually cover through the year).

I think it is a welcome move, though I would push for a far greater reduction in the formal syllabus and a far greater increase in the informal syllabus.

But as with other initiatives, although the change should be effected expeditiously, I would recommend a few other things to reduce the ensuing chaos and support the longevity of this change.

First, I recommend that the State put forward its combined might to support the informal learning process. This means resources of physical and virtual kinds – from playgrounds to theatres, from digital explorations to collaborative sense making through networks.

Second, although teachers may have been already interpreting the syllabus in reduced terms for years, it is time to look at cuts that are uneven and strategic across the early school years, not by the fiat of a uniform 25%. By this I mean we should look at ways to prune directed instruction to the minimum possible levels with each subject following its own logic of progression over the years.

Third, we must push the Boards to follow suit, and then the universities and colleges (starting with our Teacher Education programmes themselves).

Fourth, the reduction must be accompanied by a proportionate (not equal, because in any case the syllabus was too vast to start with) increase in teacher training and community building initiatives.

Fifthly, this is also a good time to start innovating the curriculum. The more we realize the role of informal learning in the curriculum, the better it will get.

Sixthly, we have to leverage the possible shift in the loci of control from the teacher to the student, parent and community. Textbooks are the fulcrum of academic dialogue today. And the teacher is the sole arbiter of that fulcrum in the student’s learning lifecycle.

As we move towards more of informal learning, that fulcrum will become less important, teaching less a loci of control and more a shared experience. Perhaps sometime in the future, the textbook will solely act as a reference for teachers, while students shall mediate/interpret/construct/connect content and build their own learning journeys, collaboratively. To leverage that shift, we must shift towards a “maker” culture in some ways, with increasing responsibility of learning & personal growth on the student.

Without these accompanying initiatives, the fate of the CBSE CCE and the OTBA will surely be repeated. And in some years, perhaps the same or another minister will have the chance to exclaim surprise and happiness that students and parents want the cuts to be reversed!

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East or West: Their rhetoric is the best

George Siemens vents in a post that describes his emotions upon coming out of a consultation on Innovation and Quality in Higher Education at the White House recently where he was invited. He sees many key things happening:

2. Higher education generally has no clue about what’s brewing in the marketplace as a whole

3. No one knows what HE is becoming.

4. I was struck by how antagonistic some for-profits are toward public higher education.

5. Title IV is the kingmaker.

6. Expect a future of universities being more things to more people.

7. Expect a future of far greater corporate involvement in HE.

8. Expect M & A activities in higher education.

9. The scope of change is starting to settle somewhat in HE.

10. Higher education is a great integrator and subsumer.

11. I was stunned and disappointed at the lack of focus on data, analytics, and evidence. In spite of the data available, decision making is still happening on rhetoric.

12. I’m getting exceptionally irritated with the narrative of higher education is broken and universities haven’t changed.

George has, in fact, exposed the big tensions and rhetoric in the education system, whether in the West or here, in the East. I have experienced the same, without having to go to a White House. It is amazing how the same problems systemically appear in such diverse contexts.

There are changes happening in Higher Education due to technology advances, changes in awareness, student response to online learning in recent times, growing awareness of scale and chinks in the armor of the existing system getting exposed.

Even here, we have mistrust between the private and public systems. Each one thinks, perhaps, that it alone is the future custodian of the education system. Vast amounts of effort and investment are being put in to discredit the public share of the system, while great suspicion is being heaped on the motivation of the private sector. Entrepreneurs are being mostly destroyed by or merged with larger, older, hungrier players, who themselves share a mutual disrespect, if not contempt, for each other. The government and the corporates have very little understanding about the changes and how they will impact education, but their passion suggests either misplaced enthusiasm or pre-meditated greed.

There are reasons that I write so.

One of the biggest learnings of the past 10-15 years has been the abject failure of elearning to scale reliably, with quality. However, we continue to reinvent that same wheel. George bemoans the lack of focus on data and analytics, I bemoan many others.

Like we are also going to, in the name of quality, scale and affordability, push antiquated elearning models backed by blatantly obsolete and irrelevant formal degree & certificate systems, within the next six months or so through the SWAYAM initiative.

Ironically, I helped coin most of the full form of the name – SWAYAM stands for Study Webs of Active learning for Young Aspiring Minds. The “Active Learning” bit was not mine, but the rest was. And the rest was actually inspired by Ivan Illich’s vision of educational webs – which perhaps is lost on the makers. SWAYAM will make high quality teacher videos and other digital material available as part of curricula backed by 500 proctored test centers.

Well, as we unleash it on our millions, who are hungry for these certifications, we will soon figure how inadequate this form of elearning is at scale without webs & networks, collaboration, adaptive learning, learning analytics, new age assessments, gamification and so on. Or perhaps they never will. Even as recently as a couple of years ago, a senior, respected and influential academic figure asked me to spell “gamification”.

Then there is the private sector which thinks they have the wherewithal to succeed where governments have failed and perhaps looking for the equivalent of a Title IV themselves. What better assured profits than infusing corporate management practices over “ailing” public schools – so long as parents can pay more and government can fill in the rest. And therefore they need to create national frameworks and public-private partnerships for everything – assessments, accreditation, curricula, entry and exit – if their model is to succeed – something that is basically untrusted by government.

Then there is this entire brouhaha over skills, a national skills framework, easy bridges between vocational and formal education, money to throw over the fence for just about any scheme – if we really want to build a skills framework at a scale that help 500 mn of our working population, are we audacious enough to believe that a handful of sector skill councils and some tens of partners will be able to handle this? And that too using the same methods for teaching and learning that have proved so inefficient at scale?

Mind you, I am not making sweeping generalizations nor is this generic discontent, and there is some really great work also happening and some very well-intentioned & knowledgeable people in the system and outside it. I am merely laying bare the gaps as I see them in the hope that we start looking at these things before they collapse on us.

I am as staggered as George is – caught in a conflict and witnessing the tensions of the existing system as it struggles to retain its control and coherence in the face of rapid change and massive scale. At this point, it is ours to make or break, or to break something in order to make a better world for our children.

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Did someone just learn?

Most of our education system is geared towards a particular conception of a student and her specific way of learning. Let’s face it. We give our children the same amount of time to learn every day. It is the same time in the day for learning. It is mostly the same cohort with which you learn. The same methods applied to each student. The same subjects to learn. The same textbooks to read. The same boundaries of what you can or cannot do. The same metrics to judge performance. The same number of years to study. The same choices each year until they leave, and then precious little choice of what to learn afterwards. Day after day. Year after year.

On the other hand, we struggle with this sameness. No two students are the same, we say. Learning should occur outside too, through real life applications and experience. It should probably also be flipped. We should use digital content and technology to give students more choice and exposure. We strive to be different each day, try to negotiate their individual complexity within these constraints.

It is almost as if these are two different things – schooling and learning. The end results are fairly predictable. Our children learn to cope with the system. Some manage to master it. And some give up.

Does each student take away enough to be all that we desire them to? Are they really equipped to be responsible citizens and family?

The sameness of our system is a dramatic simplification of teaching and learning. Our struggle against it, a Sisyphean challenge. Our success, partial at best. Thousands learn , but millions don’t quite get there. A scorecard we would not and should not find acceptable.

Do we know any better? Perhaps we do know a bit more than we did. We know it is far more important to push and extend the limits of what our childen can do, like athletes preparing for long hard days on tracks they aspire to reach. We know of more ways to reform or beat the system.

But the system stays, inertial and unyielding,  perhaps we collectively do not believe in our own hearts that the any struggle against it can possibly succeed. Perhaps we believe that it is our fault that the system does not work. Perhaps there is a hope that it can still overcome the contradiction between the simple and the complex, the sameness and the diversity.

We can change it if we really want to, if we really care. We can start by making a commitment to all our children that we will help them learn – that we will not have them bear what we had to.

How can we change?

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Faculty shortage or learner shortage?

People keep on going on about there being so much shortage of good quality faculty. That, they bemoan, is the most important factor behind the problems that we face in K12 or Higher Ed today. It is definitely true to an extent.

I believe the bigger challenge is to find learners. Not students. But learners. Or capable students who take greater responsibility, initiative and interest in their own education as well as the education of their peers.

If we flip the problem, we can perhaps leverage the scale of learners to overcome most of the problems in education. To do this we have to break from the belief that students have to be led. They don’t. They need to be helped to become more capable of learning in an environment mediated by social and technological networks.

This can reshape how we think about teaching and learning. Teachers then need to make sure that students become more capable (instead of becoming more knowledgeable) and that they have help and facilitation when needed. Students have to acquire critical literacies (and heutagogical capabilities) to transform into Learners. The Government needs to reshape the ability of these new generation of capable learners to acquire credentials that can be interpreted (and later perhaps even replace) at par or higher (or differently) than existing credentials. Our institutions and employers need to reshape structures and practices to allow all this wonderful learning led by the ones that are most impacted by it.

This is why, in the FICCI Vision Paper on MOOCs in Higher Education that I co-wrote, my vision for MOOCs (and in general the educational system) was:

Learning through Massive, Open and Online courses (MOOCs) will enable all Indians who want to learn, earn, teach or innovate, the capability to realize their true potential and transform our country.

The vision talks about building capability, not creating trained engineers or research scientists. Replace “MOOCs” with “our Educational System” and the vision would hold, really.

Are we really chasing the wrong problems?

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A Strategic Inflection Point for Indian Education

I think we are at an inflection point in online education in India the way Andy Grove from Intel had nicely framed in his book, Only the Paranoid Survive.

Andrew writes of how a 10X change in any one force, namely:

• Power, vigor and competence of existing competitors
• Power, vigor and competence of existing complementors
• Power, vigor and competence of existing customers
• Power, vigor and competence of existing suppliers
• Power, vigor and competence of potential competitors
• Possibility that what your business is doing can be done in a different way

can result in profound changes to our business.

Why do I say this? In the past 2-3 years, there have been several interesting things that have emerged.

MOOCs have arrived on the Indian education scene in an informal way gathering unprecedented response from our students. We have the second largest country presence in MOOCs globally with over 2+ mn registrations. This is important to note in the context of total enrolment in open and distance learning in the country which stands at around 4.5 mn. Although the two are different models solving different needs (at this point), it is a far cry from year 2002 when at egurucool.com we were happy having 20,000 subscribers to our online K12 products. This amazing student response to MOOCs has been fueled by social media and networks. Although we have yet to see business models emerge, but they will. And surely this marks a 10X change in the power, vigor and competence of existing customers.

The Government has invested (and is investing) heavily in the creation of open education resources, software and technologies for eLearning for a while now under the NMEICT. For many streams of education such as Engineering (NPTEL) and humanities, arts and social sciences (CEC), a large corpus of open resources have already become available at the under-graduate level (post graduate level work has also been initiated). The NPTEL Youtube channel has now accumulated over a 100 mn hits and over 290,000 subscriptions. Similar efforts by the NROER team are going to make huge amounts of content available for school educators. High quality content becoming available for adaptation and delivery (under the CC-by-SA license), open software for live classrooms and learning management, research in haptics and many other such developments are definitely set to increase the power, vigor and competence of existing suppliers and potential competitors. Early movers such as MyOpenCourses & ClassLE and many traditional players (such as the publishers) are now starting to leverage these resources. The Government too is investing in building up new platforms and content for MOOCs.

In parallel, complementing technologies such as those for gamification, big data analytics, mobile apps, 3D printing and others are finding their way into the Indian expertise lexicon. We can already witness, for example, the power of data analytics used by school performance evaluation tools.

In what may constitute a tipping point, among other possibilities, if the government legitimizes MOOCs by offer credit transfer, recognition and other measures reserved for the traditional degree and diploma courses (and for vocational education), or if the body corporate or professional associations decide to put their stamp on nanodegree like non-formal learning and employment pathways or if universities (including distance education) adopt MOOCs as part of their curriculum, it will catalyze and harmonize these 10X changes. Business models will emerge, quality and scale challenges will be mitigated, and problems of faculty skill & shortage will be ameliorated.

I believe the inflection point, if we are not there already, will be reached fairly soon, catalyzed by some of these possibilities. What do you think?

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India MOOCs and eLibrary

Massive Open Online Courses  (MOOCs) and OERs have captured the imagination of our polity.

The new Government’s election manifesto clearly specifies MOOCs, although not under school or higher education, but under Vocational Training as a means for “working class people and housewives to further their knowledge and qualifications”. Further, there is a firm push, although under the section of School Education, on establishing a “national eLibrary to empower school teachers and students”.

Although, framed under different heads and not explicitly and universally correlated with the underlying issues facing our education system, these two are important areas of focus for the new HRD Minister, whose own enviable background in Media and Communications provide her with some of the necessary insights into how to create engaging media based experiences for our students. I do sincerely hope that this background also translates to many of our teachers who need to enhance their communications effectiveness as also inspires more teachers to use popular media or innovative performing arts led approaches to education (e.g. Theatre in Science or dance in Mathematics education).

National eLibrary

A high quality national eLibrary backed by the right capability, technology and open-ness, can dramatically transform both teaching and learning effectiveness. If these are accompanied by permissive Creative Commons licensing terms that make it possible for any entity to use these materials (like for the NMEICT materials), then this will act as a great stimulant for uptake of these resources.

School OER initiatives such as the National Repository on Open Educational Resources (NROER), NIOS, Karnataka OER, Gyanpaedia, TESS and other national/international OERs like Gooru and MERLOT can be aggregated in the eLibrary. On the other hand, similar OERs for Higher Education and Vocational Education sectors through the MHRD NMEICT projects (NPTEL, CEC-NMEICT, ePG Pathshala and many others across the world like Saylor and edX) can also be combined into the same repository.

Along with these, as NROER and Gooru are fast demonstrating, external data from agencies like NASA or the Indian national archives can really add tremendous value if they are made publicly available.

However, we will suffer since there is no underlying content management architecture or content development (including metadata) standards framework at all. Ultimately, these different initiatives may not be able to inter-operate, quality will not be uniform and scarce expert resources will not be efficiently utilized. Both are solvable existing problems, but need urgent and immediate attention if the national eLibrary is going to succeed in intent and execution.

We shall also suffer if we are unable to decentralize content development and quality review across the board, training both teachers and students to contribute high quality instructional content. We shall also start feeling the pinch very soon for skills such as Instructional Design, which are scarce in the country.

MOOCs

On the MOOC front, we clearly are at a precipitous juncture. On the one hand, the focus on MOOCs and the intent to spread them across sectors makes me really feel that we are on the right path. But, on  the other hand, we need to appreciate the transformative potential of MOOCs as originally conceived.

Also called cMOOCs, these original MOOCs were started in 2008. The term MOOC was coined by Dave Cormier during the Connectivism and Connective Knowledge 2008 (CCK08) MOOC. CCK08 and subject cMOOCs were based on the theory of Connectivism coined by George Siemens and of Connective Knowledge posited by Stephen Downes.

These experts believed that eLearning was at an inflection point – that traditional online learning had utterly failed because of it’s design and execution and that we needed a new way of thinking about eLearning. So they forged a new path that would help learners and teachers to revisit their roles in the context of fast changing information and social landscapes.

It is a path that the later MOOCs (like edX, Coursera etc.; also called xMOOCs) have not leveraged, being content to perpetuate the ills of traditional elearning. Only this time, the scale is massive and that has reflected in the massive dropout rates and low engagement ratios on these platforms. In fact, they simply seem to have missed over two decades of insights from the evolution of open & distance learning and e-learning.

In India, we can still make a more informed choice and perhaps evolve our own MOOC methods and models. Hopefully  they shall be ones that are based on learning from the mistakes the world has already made, rather than porting models from the West as-is.

MOOCs and eLibrary – Connecting the dots

These two initiatives – MOOCs and the National eLibrary (or OER) are more deeply connected and pervasive than is generally realized. A strong and efficient eLearning system is one where the content management process connects seamlessly with the learning delivery systems using standards based inter-operability and metadata.

This inter-connnection helps in many ways. Predominantly, it enables resources to be published and re-purposed into multiple formats for different devices & form factors – mobile, tablet and PC. But it enables production and delivery efficiencies to the tune of almost 30%. At scale, this translates into savings of hundreds of crores of rupees. Significant thought must go into designing these systems and their inter-relationships.

In Conclusion

The focus on technology enabled education is indeed extremely good for India. Going forward, we should fill the obvious gaps in capability, technology and pedagogy, so that we are able to fully leverage education technology for the nation.

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Blended Learning in India

There are many positives happening in EdTech in India. A government led mission called the National Mission on Education using ICT (NMEICT) has created massive amounts of content for engineering, arts and humanities, social sciences and natural science. It has also delivered the under 50 USD tablet, Aakash and a slew of innovations including Virtual LABs and the A-View web conferencing tool (that seems to work better than Skype). The school sector is running alongside nicely with initiatives to build content (NROER, K-OER) and delivery systems (Virtual Open School, NIOS). Teacher Ed is also getting the necessary focus from a content perspective (though the technology pieces are still being conceptualized). The Vocational Ed sector is running behind yet (although I have word of some level of content development), but one hopes it will catch up sooner than later.

The writing on the wall is pretty clear – India seems to be moving quickly towards a blended learning strategy that relies on platforms such as edX, existing physical infrastructure & “facilitator” faculty, and video lectures. Learning Analytics and Badging seem to be getting a mention (only just).

It seems an obvious response to scarcity of quality teachers, also exacerbated by the remoteness of interior locations. But interestingly these seem to ignore some of the learnings of the past 20-30 years and even some current work such as Sugata Mitra’s SoLE research and pilots in government schools.

Carefully crafted models of blended teaching and learning can definitely impact the system. However, systems designed to “spray and pray” will cause more harm than good. The current approach to virtual schooling seems to be to provide technology to broadcast lectures by the expert teacher and leave the local facilitator to do the support job. Blends are far more involved than that simplistic view.

Blends place a larger demand on students capability to learn with the help of technology. Learners need to build the capability for self-discipline, self-motivation, self-organization, peer learning, higher levels of exploration & discovery and even how to overcome technical constraints of under-reliable hardware, software and connectivity. 

Blends also place a heavy demand on the local facilitators of such instruction. The “distance” between the teacher and student needs to be filled by the facilitator. This distance is on the emotional plane as well as on the planes of knowledge, coaching, mentoring. contextualization and organizing the process of learning. In that sense, the facilitator needs to work very closely with the remote teacher and needs to understand the very intent and idiosyncrasies of the remote expert.

On the other hand, the remote expert needs to understand the limitations imposed by “distance”, and work to the capabilities of the facilitator. The expert also needs to cope with diversity, since it is obviously a much larger class than before and very diverse. The expert needs to be able to design learning paths that the facilitator can effectively implement. Especially in cases where the facilitator is also a competent and experienced teacher, the expert must allow for some level of creativity & local insight to be exhibited by the facilitator. Additionally, the remote expert must learn how to leverage data – about classrooms, facilitators and learning patterns – to make the blends iteratively more effective.

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The Learning Revolution is Here

I didn’t know it at that time, having been born just a few months later, that the revolutionary Open University, UK was born in January, 1971 with 25000 students. Of course, my parents didn’t know that either when they named me Viplav (my Sanskrit origin name literally means “revolution”). It’s just one of those weird coincidences.

The OU was born amidst great opposition as a “University of the Air”. The concept was being discussed from the early 1960s. Touted as “an experiment on radio and television: a ‘University of the Air’ for serious, planned, adult education”. It was revolutionary also because it did not ask for prior qualifications and placed a premium on students acquiring the skills to study in this medium.

Although the first correspondence (read Distance Education by local mail) based course was organized in India by Delhi University in 1962, Andhra Pradesh Open University (now Dr. B R Ambedkar Open University) was the first Open University in India when it opened in 1982, 3 years before the famous government-owned Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) that opened its doors in 1985. IGNOU has now about 4 million students and serves 20% of Indian Higher Education students.

There are many parallels to the growth of the two systems (UK and India), and the UK OU’s trajectory was a pivotal influence on what our policy makers envisioned. In fact, I have direct evidence that this is so.

Between 16-19 December 1970, there was a seminar organized by the Ministry of Education and Youth Affairs, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and the University Grants Commission (UGC). The Seminar’s focus was on an open university.  J C Aggarwal chronicles the event in his book, Landmarks in the History of Modern Indian Education, and states:

In the United Kingdom the proposal for the establishment of an open university, originally called the university of the Air, took 4 years to take definite shape. Profiting by what has been accomplished in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and also by the experience of the correspondence courses conducted by several Indian universities, it should be possible for shortening the time that will be needed for planning and preparation.

It was proposed that a study group be established to work out the details so that an open university be created “at an early date”.

This open university was envisioned to make higher education available to those with “the capacity for it to benefit from the existing facilities.” It was meant for highly motivated adults lacking formal qualifications or means to join universities full-time. In their conception, the Open University could be used for:

1. providing education to capable, independent and mature learners
2. providing education to the masses at a reduced per unit cost
3. making higher education more effective by leveraging scarce resources
4. as a means of employing new and unconventional methods of instruction and exploiting new technologies

Very interestingly, they placed focus on ‘open-ness” to new ideas as fundamental to the open university concept. Perhaps they were prescient about the current xMOOCs when they wanted the  best in curricula from Indian and foreign universities.

It is interesting that the dominant paradigm (as Prof. MM Pant pointed out to me yesterday) was the television, and thereby video. I was told recently that we have many tens of thousands of hours of taped educational videos (between CEC, IGNOU and others). Supporting technologies included the radio, postal communications and localized study centres.

Aggarwal also points to an interesting government committee on Audio-Visual Aids in Higher Education (1967-69) set up by the UGC. Video was preferred because it provided “sight” and sound to enrich the learning process. They acknowledged that:

Films, filmstrips and transparencies are being increasingly used in educationally advanced countries as visual materials which can be used in any teaching situation when it becomes necessary to demonstrate a point, a fact, an idea or a process.

It is perhaps being inspired by these ideas that even today the government is commissioning advanced direct to home channels for education and have created NPTEL (Engineering disciplines OER repository) and NMEICT e-Content (by CEC and others).

Together, India must absolutely have the largest collection of educational material in the entire world. And I would wager that a large percentage of it is really good quality material suitable for leverage by everyone, if only the government would make it really open and accessible.

Over time, the confluence of developments in affordable technology as well as developments in educational theory, has brought many inflections on our policies and curricula. Our educational systems have time and again, faced up to these developments in an incremental fashion to various degrees of success.

Globally as well, when elearning came in, it was more of a response to standardize learning “packages” so that they could be uniformly consumed by a large number of people. Driven by the emphasis on cost reduction by Western corporates, eLearning quickly took off as a time and money saver. Traditional education systems too realized the potential, but were limited by available funds and perhaps a greater aspiration to quality than the corporates.

Now there is a point to which an existing paradigm can stretch and contort to keep up with surrounding developments in technology and learning theory. We passed that point about 10 years ago when dramatic changes in networks and social media started surfacing.

The current thinking is all part of an evolution that is now about 60 years old (perhaps more!). New thinking cannot be built on top of something that ancient. We have to start from scratch, re-envision the educational process and systems from the very ground up so that they reflect our possible futures that are in all honesty going to be dominated by intelligence brought to us by networks and data.

That work has to begin in earnest now. Very soon, we will be seeing the rear end of the demographic dividend (which shall move to Africa). What are we doing to prepare ourselves for that future?

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Design of Complex Learning Environments

This year I will focus my efforts on the design of learning environments that are complex – adaptive, emergent, self-organizing, chaotic and personal. As a project description at TU Delft states:

In these situations system content, system structure and system boundaries shift and evolve without any global or central coordinator. Instead, order and regularity emerge from widely distributed bottom-up interactions of subsystems, some with centralized control and others fully distributed.

I am particularly interested in complex adaptive systems in the context of learning because I think that is how learning really is. Somewhere in this area is hidden Illich’s “institutional inverse”, the need to combat Friere’s “culture of silence”, to think of learning as making connections and knowledge as the network. Somewhere in this exercise is the continued feeling of being “continually inspired to change”, the mnemonic for a revolution. Many memes will form part of this discussion.

One such meme shall be open-ness. This will relate to both the extent and nature of open-ness within the system as well that outside the system, and specific mechanisms to initiate, alter or transition to a state of “open-ness”. Another meme shall be self-organization. Equally important will be the meme of “evolution’ – of people, ideas and networks.

I shall also investigate the meme of “flexible boundaries” – boundaries that allow dynamic reconfiguration of the contours of, well everything. Closely related will be the memes of “control” and “structure”.

An important meme shall be that of “language” – the language of learning itself. I think a new vocabulary is definitely required if we are to think afresh. And there may be more that I may discover or abandon as I go along.

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Rhizo14 Week 3: Democratizing Uncertainty

Dave Cormier’s MOOC on P2PU, Rhizomatic Learning, in week 3 is focusing on the topic Embracing Uncertainty. He says:

At the heart of the rhizome is a very messy network, one where not all the dots connect to all the lines. No centre. Multiple paths. Where we have beliefs and facts that contradict each other. Where our decisions are founded on an ever shifting knowledge base. Our challenge this week… how do we make our learning experience reflect (and celebrate) this uncertainty?

Uncertainty exists in all forms of education and learning. It is not mostly celebrated. In fact, it is suppressed. Or attempted to be. In traditional education, it is systematically constrained by the dimensions of time, network boundaries (class/batch), regulatory requirements and pedagogical biases. It is even systematically constrained in other (non-traditional) environments, even informal ones at most times.

However, it underpins these environments in dramatic ways, so much so that it is a wonder that any intended outcomes are even met. As an example, even the understanding of what a degree program in any subject should contain (content, pedagogy, assessments) is not shared or common across the world. It is therefore uncertain, at least to me, what an MBA degree really means!

Let us talk instead of democratizing uncertainty. That implies thinking of uncertainty as by, for and of learning (and its stakeholders).

Uncertainty by learning is the adoption of certain uncertainties  by learners, teachers and administrators. It is their ability to practice those uncertainties.

Uncertainty for learning is the “framework” or the ecology for uncertainty to flourish and where the participants of the educational system are encouraged to embrace certain uncertainties.

Uncertainty of learning is the uncertainty that society owns and celebrates, and that is what change is all about anyways. This is the most important change that can happen to learning – when there is purpose to driving certain uncertainties through the system.

Not all certainties may be “good” or “appropriate”. What is good or appropriate may differ widely, but no uncertainty can be good if it does not result in the “overall” good (atleast directionally and democratically speaking). There could be more consensus on bad and undesired uncertainties – those that result in (directionally) negative consequences such as high unemployment or obstacles to (say) scientific development.

Some people would then argue that uncertainty should be harnessed in certain ways, and this could progressively lead us to the same traditional paradigm that exists today. We shall also need to “prove” in many ways, that more “good” uncertainty in the system will impact social outcomes positively. We may even need to “prove” that either this is an articulate and cogent alternative to the existing system or stands as an important option in a pluralized education system.

What may happen as well (as with the xMOOCs) that these positive uncertainties may be usurped, distorted and made to work within traditional environments in a manner that is ineffective and diluted (e.g. you want 21st century skills to be “built”, so why don’t you create a new subject called “collaboration” and assign it graded assessments and specialized new content & teaching). In fact, I think we need to see uncertainty as culture, as a way of being rather than a specialized skill or value.

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The Unacknowledged Crisis of Indian Higher Education

The Sunday Times with this provocative byline (Indian higher education: 40% of college teachers temporary, quality of learning badly hit) has brought a hidden burning issue to the forefront. But not sufficiently.

It is true there is a caste system in Indian Higher Education, this one brought upon not only by administrators, but also by permanent (tenured) teachers on ad-hoc and contractual teachers. Here is how the system works.

Appointment & Renewal

The ad-hoc teacher is contracted with a fixed time contract, renewable periodically. Selection to all posts (it gets exponentially worse in permanent selection) is heavily biased through petty politics played by departmental heads, principals, observers, college governing body members and even the vice chancellor. To get appointed is one challenge, and to keep getting their contract renewed is another challenge. In fact, for senior teachers (teachers who have been ad-hoc for several years, they still need to go through interviews for selection.

The contract letter is a couple of paragraphs with information on the appointment. The ad-hoc teachers are not provided a rulebook or any intimation of what their rights are in the system, presumably because they don’t have any.

Clearly, a short term renewal based contract can not garner the teacher’s allegiance to the institution or students, does not allow her to make significant contributions to the department or college, places acute financial and emotional pressure and perpetuates a feudal system wherein the ad-hoc has to suck-up to the tenured teachers & administration in order to build some  longer term relationships. Equally scary, on the other side, is when an ad-hoc teacher, who has been consistently renewed over years, suddenly finds herself at the brink of penury, because the system refuses to renew any more contracts.

Operational Issues

The ad-hoc suffers many discriminatory practices at work.

It starts with the time table. The senior and tenured teachers get the first preference in figuring out how they would like their days of the week structured and when they would get a weekly off (that is, those teachers that do come to college or school in the first place). The ad-hocs come in last and have to bear with what is handed out to them. This is not an unimportant affair.

Then it comes to official and unofficial duties. The official duties are laden heavily on ad-hocs and they are expected to do things like data entry, staying in late and on weekends, and running small errands for tenured teachers. The junior ad-hocs are the worst treated, since they are fresh and scared. When it comes to official exam duties, for example, tenured teachers end up getting fewer exam duties than ad-hoc teachers. I wouldn’t be surprised if ad-hoc teachers also double up for taking regular classes that tenured teachers were supposed to take.

There are many “unofficial” duties. These may include personal errands for administrators or senior teachers, sometimes sexual favors (someone told me recently of colleges where it was impossible to get a contractual job without sleeping with an influential teacher) and many other uncalled for activities.

Ad-hocs don’t have the ability to garner government funds for research or for going to conferences. They are not provided any academic up-skilling or any of the UGC courses either. It is almost as if they do not exist for these purposes. I am pretty sure that is what happens at the school level as well.

In fact, Ordinance 19 of the UGC clearly does not regard ad-hoc teachers as teachers of the University

a) Teachers of the University means Professors, Associate Professors, Assistant Professors and such other persons as may be appointed for imparting instruction or conducting research in the University or in any College or Institution maintained by the University and are designated as teachers by the Ordinances.
b) A teacher of the University shall be a whole-time salaried employee of the university and shall devote his / her whole-time to the University and does not include honorary, visiting, part-time and ad-hoc teachers.

This is the caste system personified. Obviously, ad-hoc teachers cannot sit on a panel that is constituted to select tenured teachers. It would be poetic justice if that could have been allowed.

Voices and Rights

Clearly, in a feudal system, the rights of ad-hoc teachers are non-existent. They cannot afford to go against anyone or voice their opinion openly for fear of the greatest reprisal – termination or non-renewal. This, according to the newspaper article, applies to 40% of teachers in higher education or about 400,000 teachers. No ad-hoc teacher is willing to speak out for fear of reprisals, and none of the tenured teachers are willing to speak out for them in any concerted manner. The system is blatantly exploitative. and the worst part is that it is the academic system, where knowledge and wisdom are the cornerstones.

In summary, the crisis of teachers in India is as great as the crisis of teaching or the crisis of competence in Indian higher Education.

It was refreshing to hear the Minister of State for Education Mr. Jitin Prasada yesterday at the Founders Day celebration of a prestigious school. He was candid enough to say that he was not an expert at the domain, but he wanted to ensure that he could take the voices of ordinary people and use it to influence policy and decision making.

Well, Mr. Prasada, here is your chance. Enable 400,000 teachers in India to walk with their head raised high, proud to be part of an education system that is responsive to their needs and motivated to your vision of quality education.

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The Outcomes of our Educational Systems

Does a particular type of education system tend to produce the same outcome irrespective of the underlying environment?

Or is it that the underlying social, economic and political environment will cause pretty much any educational system to tend to produce the same outcomes?

Or is it that the outcomes emerge as a result of the interplay between the educational system and the components of the ecosystem it lives in?

The reason I am asking is because everywhere I look (at least in democratic societies), the problems of education are pretty much the same, although the scale does vary. I hear people across school, university, professional and vocational education mulling over the same problems with as much inertia or angst, in India or in the UK or the USA or Australia or elsewhere. In the case of democratic, market driven countries, there may be a stronger set of patterns as well (as the case may be for authoritarian regimes or other sociopolitical structures).

Common refrains include ones such as teachers are not trained enough, children are not getting 21st century skills developed in them, employers don’t feel happy with the levels of employability of students that graduate, not enough e-Resources are available, there is an issue getting learning to remote and economically weaker sections of society, and policy makers are slow and bureaucratic. And then there are people who proclaim variously that the education system is broken, or that it is obsolete and cannot be “fixed”.

If it is indeed true that educational systems  are invariant to the underlying environment, then there are obvious design faults, that when rectified should cause the systems to improve dramatically. Perhaps the current educational systems may be replaced by new designs instead of being redesigned or “fixed”. The aim then becomes to understand the elements of design of the educational system and overlay them with the current and estimated future contexts, to arrive at new constellations of those design elements.

If the conclusion is the reverse, that educational systems don’t have much to do with outcomes, rather the outcomes are really driven by the underlying ecosystem, then perhaps the answer lies in reforming or redesigning other structures that provide inputs or receive outcomes and outputs from the educational system.

The possibility that outcomes are emergent (i.e. they emerge out of the interplay between the networks of our education system with the rest of the socioeconomic fabric) exists. People will say that the educational system shapes and is shaped by the underlying ecosystem in which it operates. But that does not explain commonality of outcomes observed globally.

I have also started feeling that traditional educational systems are far more chaotic than Connectivists would like to believe. As an example, a degree is given the same level of recognition in most countries, however the conditions of obtaining that degree, whether it is the curriculum, the quality of teachers, the infrastructure or any other design element, vary hugely from University to University. I did this exercise recently when I tried to compare the same named courses across multiple Indian and Foreign universities, and could not find more than a 20-30% similarity in most cases between the syllabus and teaching method of one university versus that of the other.I don’t think two universities would really agree on what (say) a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics should really contain, but they will still award the same degree! The traditional systems seem very chaotic, but are also very highly constrained (duration, method, engagement, assessment…) and designed towards very fixed goals – like closed loop systems – they do not present much opportunity for non-linearity.

So it is really an interesting question to try to answer, at least for those who are looking to engineer the next generation education system(s).

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Educational Analytics in India: FICCI HES

Finally got the video recording for a really interesting session that I had the privilege of steering at the FICCI Higher Education Summit in November, 2012.

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MOOCs as instruments of democratic politics

Democracy requires intellectually armed political activism to succeed. MOOCs (cMOOCs) provide an unprecedented occasion to demonstrate the power of connective learning for democracy, just as much as they demonstrate the democracy of connective learning.

The four letters that make up the MOOC abbreviation are as apt as a stage for political protest as for our education system. The Massive, Open and Online aspects of the MOOC lend themselves well to democratic deliberation. It is the “C” which provokes this post and fuels my hopes of leveraging MOOCs as instruments of democracy.

The C in MOOCs stands for “course”. It is rather loosely and controversially defined, because the MOOC looks nothing like its traditional namesake – the closely bounded, rigidly structured component of a curriculum. Perhaps that it why it requires the first three letters to qualify it. Of course, there was much deconstructive debate about this in 2008, particularly around the notion of the “un-course” which did gain some momentum.

What if democratic debates were structured as MOOCs? So far, most democratic conversations end up as inaccessible and lost footnotes to a blog post or a FaceBook like. Frequently they are tokenised into signature campaigns or opinion polls, as a measure of democratic discourse.

Most of the current instruments suffer from severe deficits. They do nothing to promote connectives of citizens who engage with vast linked networks of “knowledge”. They do not allow sustained, visible conversation. Nor do they allow citizens to build the necessary level of competence to understand the complexities of any issue being discussed. They do not scaffold citizen learners in ways that promotes their own learning. And they certainly do not reflect much more than the immediate, surface reactions in any debate.

MOOCs as political instruments would overcome deficits such as these and promote democracy. They would act as opinion-shapers, citizen-competency builders and massive hubs that collate the huge amount of information being generated today by individuals and the mass media.
The mechanisms of the MOOC will ensure that the networks these MOOCs create will result in credible outputs – something no xMOOC or traditional course can ever dream of achieving, placed as they are in the traditional system of education.

What will these credible outputs be? Firstly, any one passionate or interested in building an independent thought-competence over an issue will instantly be exposed to networks that has diversity of thought, opinion and conversation. Next, these networks will allow smaller networks of people to coalesce based on their thinking and capabilities, leading to  cohesive multi-faceted thinking and learning on various aspects of an issue. Thirdly, and most tangibly, these networks with their (ideally) open nature, will not sport specific political agendas, making them a strong force within democracy.

And why stop here? Why not consider MOOCs for health, poverty and many of the ills that surround us today, locally and globally? Thoughts?

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Old Wines in New Bottles: New frontiers in Learning

I just visited StraighterLine, got a demo login and went to the course demo. The name StraighterLine suggests that it is a more direct, efficient, economical way to get to what you need – a degree credit. The website has great messaging, good graphics and a slew of the mandatory big brand names as partners, and an impressive array of subject coverage. Do not miss the money back guarantees.

But take a look at the content, please. Take a look at the learning experience. Do people, in this age, really think that good packaging is more important than learning outcomes? When do we wake up and realize that we need to evolve learning experiences so people actually learn effectively online? And build a business plan around that.

It is the same with the (now boring and regular) announcements in the xMOOC space. Every new announcement (witness the last one on student verification/credentialing services by Coursera), seems to be extending the state of art in a revolutionary manner. All it is, is an extension of business models for revenue making opportunities. When was the last (or first) time you heard the xMOOCs making an important pedagogical announcements – “we have built an ABC engine/technique/interaction that ensures XYZ learning skills are encouraged in students”?

The trends for monetization in this “industry” are so boring to watch evolve, that I am tempted to write my own list and watch it pan out over the next two years. There are 7 players – student, teacher, institution, government, employer, providers and for profit company. These 7 players each need a variety of services based on the interactions between them.

A large part of the services are entrenched in offline ways in the existing system and need to be converted online (for a fee mostly). Some of the services that are monetizable are because they exist as part of the new online space itself (i.e. they would not have existed if the medium was offline).

It does not need a rocket scientist to figure out what services can be digitally automated or created anew, and it does not require more than a board room confabulation (with accompanying opportunistic or trial and error based thinking) to figure out which service to monetize first in a disaggregated (and later consolidated) fashion.

Yeah, right. Learning innovation will be counted in terms of business metrics – on how many students placed, on how many dollars made and saved by universities, of how many numbers of people you aggregated on your site so you could monetize irrespective of whether you contributed to learning (apparently Facebook is now charging to send targeted messages, so may be the xMOOCs should learn from them). No wonder the universities are frightened and want part of the bull-rush.

And as Joshua Kim states, providing a more holistic perspective, “Simply grafting a MOOC or an online program or online course on to the existing structure of course development and delivery will prove to be an inadequate an ineffective response to the changing higher ed market.” Like this post on Adjunct Faculty.

I am swiftly coming to the conclusion we are creating a monster. This is our second monster, the first being the current industrial age education system. Except that this new monster will reach a phenomenally large number of people (some of who, from less advantaged groups and countries will have no choice but to accept a lower quality alternative) because of the same reasons it will be made powerful – open-ness, cost efficiency and accessibility. Even in India, we seem to moving policy towards (ahem) institutionalizing this new monster.

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