From conventional teaching to online mode: How system is self evolving and regulator is responding

Last two years have seen many announcements and changing regulations in the higher education sector in India. Especially after announcement of NEP 2020 every week or fortnight we hear some big news coming from education ministry or regulators. Few days back AICTE chairman completed his term the whole power is now with UGC chairman, whether technical or general higher education. In this context couple of days back a new announcement came that 'Online degree and Distance Learning Mode will be treated on par with the conventional degrees'.

It was short hand teaching for which first time distance learning was used. With the help of parcel services teaching learning started and continued till now. After Marconi's invention, Radio became medium of education followed by education medium, TV. It was some 100 yeas ago when regulation related to radio was in place to use this as a medium of education.

In USA Phoenix University was first to launch Online Degree Program in 1989 before the world wide web even came into existence. And it continued to take the lead for the next two decades. In the beginning very few university understood how to implement online curriculum and one example is online degree program NYU, which was not very successful and even at a point of time in 2002, the online program was completely closed!.

The Online and Distance Learning Mode in India

In India two early milestones of the distance learning programs can be counted as: In 1962, Delhi University(DU) started program of Distance Learning and starting of IGNOU in 1985 when this Distance learning program became learning with face to face true alternative.

For the last ten years online education has grown very fast: Udemy, Coursera, edX has tied up with world top universities to provide various undergraduate and graduate degree programs. In India MOOC course NPTEL, by IITs and IISc provided some answer but the industry was growing so fast that it was no match to some better alternatives worldwide.

In 2014, DBT under UGC became single regulator for Online and distance mode education. And all the rules related to Online and distance mode education and affiliated university were updated.

Then in 2020, with the pandemic of covid-19 the incremental change became ineffective and the whole education system, from nursery to doctoral thesis defence, worldwide login to zoom.

In the peak of pandemic in 2020, when people were struggling for survival, Government announced New Education Policy 2020. Personally I was very surprised the timing has been chosen to bring this education policy. In due course we have seen that for the last 2years education system developed so many tentacles that it was difficult to keep track and take corrective measures. For example it was very common to see some startup coming with the new certification, degree course with premier institutes like IITs, IISc. The related advertisement was circulated in social media but it was very difficult for a common man to find the genuineness of such programs.

Taking advantage of not proper regulations in the online education, Universities based in USA and Europe have made some serious monies during this phase by providing online management degree and other professional degrees. Even I saw advertisement of one famous university in Europe coming up with online Doctoral degree! I am sure many top executives must have enrolled in these courses. In the midst of these, UGC kept itself in news with regularly announcing new policies. The latest few are related to : interdisciplinary curriculum, creating a new post of Professor of practice, changes in NAAC and NBA accreditation and finally giving indication that it will be NIRF only that will be solely indicator of the quality of a given institution.

Finally with the announcement that online and distance mode of the degree is on par with the conventional degree confused a large section of parents and students. Professional courses like : BBA, BCA, MCA, MBA, also offered in online mode by many universities with a fraction a fraction of fee compared to conventional mode in the same universities.

Problems with distance and online mode of educations

As after pandemic everyone knows that face to face education can't be the only solution. But these alternative mode has its own problems, the biggest problem I see is it is not reaching to the people who have been far from the brick and mortar Institutions.

For example according to government latest data only 58 institutes have power to give online degree. From the map below it can be seen that how distributions of HEIs has been skewed.

The map showing the HEIs in India entitled to offer online degrees (https://deb.ugc.ac.in/)

Its very difficult for parents and students to keep track of updated list of institutions in the UGC list. Even for people in education sector find it hard, leave alone common man.

For online diploma/certification program also there is hardly any regulation in place currently. In social media we find advertisements of almost all the IITs, IISc, and IIMs collaborating with some fledging startups for certification program. But I don't find any appropriate notification from the regulator till date.

Some private players even gone a step further and started full fledged Meta University. In Maharashtra's Wardha district one such university came into existence and even lining up several affiliated programs too. Similarly in Bangalore and in other cities also such Meta University concepts becoming popular. In such cases we don't find regulator is in sync with the technological development and it results in students paying the price for it.

Education sector is self evolving and biggest example is: zoom based schooling and higher education during Covid time. It was institutions' own decision rather notifications coming from government to start online classes.

Conclusion:

Government should have a think tank with representation from all the streams, the system should be dynamic in nature. Hybrid based education should replace conventional systems. In graduate level programs its quite possible to have system where students can complete the credits from MOOC courses and 2-3 months of face to face laboratory, practical programs can help in complete the degree program. Online degree providing universities representations and their study centre should be placed such that people from maximum area should be covered by the HEIs . Faculty members should be given training for the new technologies in teaching learning, LMS should be more user-friendly as not all faculty members are having computer science background. Research on Pedagogy and course curriculum and the screen time and its effect and other consideration is the need of the hour.

References:

https://www.ugc.ac.in/

https://www.livemint.com/education/news/ugc-warns-against-taking-admission-in-this-fake-maharashtra-university-details-here-11658291617823.html