Re-imagining education in an India at 100

Re-imagining education in an India at 100

Context:

• In the backdrop of the recently announced National Education Policy (NEP), the article discusses critical design principles for the transformation of the educational sector in India.

Aspects of autonomy in the NEP 2020:

• Greater autonomy for the educational institutes would entail greater leeway for the institutes in terms of regulations imposed by regulators like (UGC and AICTE) in these following four key dimensions:
  • Academic
  • Organizational
  • Financial
  • Staffing
• Academic autonomy is intended mainly to decentralize decision making and create an enabling environment to improve the teaching-learning-evaluation process.
• Autonomy would also imply greater learner autonomy as well.
• There would be autonomy of the learner in creating his/her own curriculum at his/her own pace.
• This could allow the customization of the learning process as per his/her needs and capabilities. This could play a critical role in improving learning outcomes as well.

Need for greater autonomy:

• Autonomy of higher educational institutions/universities (HEIs) is often acknowledged as a necessity for excellence and improvement.
• The experience of educational institutes from the western world have shown how higher autonomy can help improve the level of education and research.

Efforts made in this direction:

• Premier institutes like the IITs and IIMs have been granted autonomy in their day to day functioning.
• One of the major provisions of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has been the phasing out of the system of affiliated colleges and the grant of greater autonomy in academic, administrative and financial matters to the top-ranked colleges and universities of the country thereby envisaging a graded autonomy model for the educational institutes.

Issues:

• Despite the best intentions of granting autonomy to the higher educational institutes, these efforts have yielded limited returns due to practical limitations.
• The granting of autonomy to the premier institutes in India like the IIMs and IITs has resulted in no dramatic variation in the nature of autonomy of these institutes.
• There continues to be the role of the government in the appointment and functioning of these institutes.
• The institutes continue to remain dependant for the capital resources on the government.

Solutions

1. Technology driven education

• Given the ubiquitous nature of technology and the advantages it offers there needs to be a greater emphasis on technology-driven education.
• Technology-enabled education while helping ensure affordable education to a larger number of students spread across a larger area while also helping ensure better learning outcomes.
• Disruptive innovation like virtual reality will enable technology to give greater access to hitherto exclusive knowledge and fulfil unmet learner needs.
• For example, a leading global engineering company, ABB, is using virtual reality to simulate a factory experience inside a school. Such technology-led innovation will take learning from cognition to immersion.

- Efforts being made in this direction:

• The integration of technology in the teaching-learning process for enhancing teaching-learning outcomes is an important policy prescription of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
• An autonomous body called National Educational Technology Forum (NETF) is proposed to be formed and entrusted with the task of advising institutions on the use of technology, and capacity building.

2. Trans-disciplinary education:

• Trans-disciplinary learning is the exploration of a relevant concept, issue or problem that integrates the perspectives of multiple disciplines in order to connect new knowledge and deeper understanding to real life experiences.
• Trans-disciplinarily is about creating a coherence of intellectual frameworks beyond the disciplinary perspectives.
• In a world that is going to be more complex and volatile, expertise from multiple disciplines will be required to construct an understanding of the real life problems.
• The current situation of the pandemic induced crisis is a case in point of the significance of a trans-disciplinary approach.
• Overcoming the crisis induced by the pandemic would require medical scientists, economists, , health workers and political scientists and more experts to bring their disciplinary depth to the table.

- Efforts being made in this direction:

• The new National Education Policy (NEP) roots for multi-disciplinary institutions rather than standalone schools.
• The NEP 2020 proposes a multi-disciplinary higher education framework with portable credits, and multiple exits with certificates, diplomas and degrees.
• By 2040, all higher education institutions (HEIs) shall aim to become multidisciplinary institutions, each of which will aim to have 3,000 or more students.
• By 2030, there shall be at least one large multidisciplinary HEI in, or near, every district.

3. Value based education:

• Education should not limit itself to knowledge enhancement in the students but must also aim at nurturing minds with values and global mindsets based on three classical values of India: Satyam (authenticity), Nityam (sustainability) and Purnam (wholeness).