The future of learning...

It was a great opportunity to listen to and interact with Pramath Sinha, Founding Dean of Indian School of Business, and a highly accomplished educator, over a fireside chat so well moderated by @Gagandeep Singh.

Here were some of the things that struck a chord with me:

1. There are 40 million students enrolled in 1,000+ universities in India. How many of them get quality education? And what about the remaining ones who are not even getting that? Our gross enrollment ratio is 1:4, i.e. 3 out of 4 are not entering the colleges, and that number for women and further for rural women is even more embarrassing. Please go out and teach...we need every educated Indian to teach. #EachOneTeachOne. Providing quality education to such large number of people is an unsolved problem. Technology is the only way to solve this. Even if you take 2 hours each week and teach someone over zoom, that could help solve this country's problem.
2. We are now in the age of lifelong #learning. We need to think of a 60-year curriculum and not just for 8-10 years after the schooling. The age of degrees is over. It is all about learning in blocks as and when you need it. Similarly, disciplines are gone. We are seeing massive inter-disciplinaries in every field. For example, computer science is now part of everything. There are no boundaries. Our idea of education must change accordingly.
3. As human beings, we are all inquisitive and motivated from birth and childhood, but we have killed that curiosity in our education system. You have to start with the premise that people are curious, people are motivated....and how can we give them opportunities to build on it.
4. If you give me a boring professor, you will kill my curiosity. If people don't know how to teach, they should not be allowed to go into the classroom. We have to address the poor quality teaching problem.
5. Onus of learning has to be on the student...and part of the learning / education is to figure it out. If the student is confused...that's the part of learning. Let them make mistakes..that's part of the learning. If they don't know, that's ok.
6. I can't think of any example that doesn't need to be a learning organization. You don't have a choice. Things are changing so rapidly.
7. Don't do research for research sake. doing research is a huge privilege...but not everybody needs to do it.
8. Great institutions are collectively owned and not by one person, so you are not at the whims and fancies of that one person. Distributed ownership.
9. The dharma of the institution is to unlock the potential of student...let them discover themselves.

These were but some of my key takeaways. I would invite my fellow #EFPM cohort to share additional thoughts that resonated with them.