Discursive Learning

The Social Impact of Open Education

2014-12-13T08:54:00.003-08:00

The Internet opened up knowledge like no other medium had ever done before. And if knowledge did open up, education as an organised discipline had no other choice but to follow suit. After all, organised education or academia used to have a dominant control over the dissemination of knowledge. However, the role of education is not just about the dissemination of knowledge. In its most radical form, education is about inviting local communities from across the globe to participate in challenging established knowledge, creating new knowledge and interacting with diverse groups of learners.

Education is essentially dialogic in nature, a constant engagement with general and specialised disciplines and with researchers, practitioners and amateurs. That said, open education as we know it today is still largely about access to quality resources, which is only the first step but a crucial first step in reaching these resources to millions in underdeveloped parts of the world.

Today, we are witnessing a further opening up of open education itself. For example, the massive open online courses (MOOCs) offered by prestigious universities like Stanford, MIT and the University of Edinburgh on platforms such as Coursera, EdX and Future Learn are distinctly different from our own certified open courses offered by the National Institute of Open Schooling (NIOS) and Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). MOOCs allow anyone from any part of the world to register for any course free of charge. These are undergraduate level short modular courses, typically in the range of six to twelve weeks. Although there is a paid option for those who are interested in certification through a closely monitored process, what makes these courses different is their invitation to anyone who is passionate about learning anything—no prior qualification, no age barrier, no geographical barrier, no class barrier.

But what is so radical about open education if the Internet had already managed to reach quality content across the world? Well, because a chaotic world of multiple knowledge resources is not the same as knowledge organised by subject experts and educationists. Where you start from the simple and move towards the complex. Where you break down complex information into logical chunks, with examples, stories and multimedia representations. Where you pose a question and allow learners to reflect on what they learned. Where you relate what you learn to how they matter in life, practically or aesthetically.

So, as learners, we now have the opportunity to engage with real experts and multicultural peer groups as opposed to interacting with static unverified content—an opportunity that is open to both the privileged and the less privileged. Not just that. It allows us to bring in more questions to the table, challenge assumptions about geographical or cultural stereotypes and provide feedback to the course designers and experts to further sharpen their perspectives. In this sense, open education is a great equaliser. It stands in opposition to the idea of charity in education, which reinforces the perception of free education as an act of benevolence. Open education reaffirms the universal right to education regardless of one’s status based on the accident of one’s birth.

The other advantage of modular open courses (that do not demand any prior qualifications from learners) is that they help break the barriers between academic silos. They allow us to move from an eight-week course in programming to a six-week course in poetry appreciation. This is not to denigrate depth and specialisation that demand rigorous study in a certain discipline but is about promoting breadth of understanding. It is about encouraging amateur enquiries into diverse fields of knowledge— especially the humanities (philosophy, literature, history, anthropology, etc.), which are generally considered non-utilitarian. However, in our obsession with relating education to creating skilled employees for the job market, we need to bear in mind that without a proper understanding of the humanities, there can be no engaged citizenry. It is the values that we derive from humanities that compel us to become involved participants in a democracy, critically examine the hierarchies of society and humanise the dehumanised.

The opening up of quality education certainly has the potential to raise the critical consciousness of people at large—a critical consciousness that helps us see that the poor are not destined to be poor and that one of the sharpest weapons for eradicating poverty is the power of literacy.

However, there are several barriers that stand in the way of widening access to open education. The first of course is inadequate access to technology devices (such as laptops, tablets and smart phones) for those who can’t afford them. Then there is lack of quality courses in local languages and a certain American and Euro-centric slant in course design. Also, since participating in open learning is highly dependent on self-motivation, learners, especially first generation learners, need lots of encouragement from their family and peer groups to actively participate in these courses till the very end. In fact, shorter duration courses might work well for such learners and increase completion rates, provided there is a certain balance in the complexity of content and the evaluation framework. Perhaps, the courses should focus more on demanding meaningful discussions and the creation of digital artefacts from the learner community than on traditional quizzes and assessments. The idea is to treat curriculum content as a stimulus and real learning as active engagement around it.

Open courses today are mostly limited to higher education content. So is it time to shift its focus to school curriculum and vocational courses? Or is there a contradiction in making a demand to classify open learning into school, vocational and higher education curricula? Maybe we should start perceiving open education as critical dialogues around multiple fields of academic disciplines. And governments, employers and the public need to start recognising those who engage with open learning and provide them the right opportunities to become active social and economic agents.

This article was originally published in the Financial Express on July 28, 2014

The MOOCs Are Rising

2013-07-17T07:00:00.003-07:00

Unlike other forms of e-learning, MOOCs have brought the faculty back at the center of instruction. The content is not impersonal anymore. There is a human face, a voice that brings out a certain passion for the subject, and a mind that understands the subtle nuances of the content. The better the faculty, the higher the student participation. But as Allison Morris sums up in The Minds Behind MOOCs, an excellent infographic: MOOCs have certainly caught the eye of the academia, but they still need to prove their worth and credibility.

http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/minds-behind-moocs/

A Lecture as Tentative

2013-04-05T05:44:00.003-07:00

"The best lectures have always been those that deal with "tentative materials" that result from the professor's research. If they cease to be tentative, don't include them in the lecture; print them. The main teaching function has to be interactive." Martin Meyerson

Coursera: E-learning That Works

2012-08-04T10:07:00.000-07:00

"Committed to making the best education in the world freely available to any person who seeks it", Coursera is bringing quality teachers from elite universities right onto our laptops and tabs. As of today, there are 116 courses from multiple disciplines -- courses that typically last from 5 to 10 weeks.

The format is simple: Video lectures followed by weekly assignments and a final assessment at the end of the course. The assignments mostly constitute objective-type questions, but cracking them is no easy task.

I've taken a couple of courses (Model Thinking and Introduction to Finance) and have come to realize that when it comes to explaining concepts with clarity and perspective, there is no substitute for a good teacher. No fake scenarios, no "trying to be cool" or stilted writing (the kind you see in conventional self-paced e-learning) -- just reasonably good teaching using "technology-enabled chalk and talk", healthy discussions and some amount of retrieval practice. And unlike in a real classroom, you have the freedom to pause the video at any time, replay it any number of times, and take notes at your pace without having to worry about what you missed.

Does this mean the trivialization of education, with access thrown open to the "masses"? Or is this some kind of commercial stunt? Or is it the death knell for that holy cow called institutional education? Only time will tell.
Listen to Daphne Koller, one of the founders of Coursera, discussing the vision behind this venture.

And do check out the catalog of courses on Coursera.

The Purpose of Educational Institutions

2011-12-15T07:15:00.000-08:00

At a time when utilitarian views dominate the sphere of education, Gary Gutting, a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, says a college is not just meant for the education of students. And I agree.

He says in an op-ed piece in the New York Times: “… the raison d’être of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture; that is, a world of ideas, dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically. In our society, this world is mainly populated by members of college faculties: scientists, humanists, social scientists (who straddle the humanities and the sciences properly speaking), and those who study the fine arts. Law, medicine and engineering are included to the extent that they are still understood as “learned professions,” deploying practical skills that are nonetheless deeply rooted in scientific knowledge or humanistic understanding. When, as is often the case in business education and teacher training, practical skills far outweigh theoretical understanding, we are moving beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education.”

“Teachers need to see themselves as, first of all, intellectuals, dedicated to understanding poetry, history, human psychology, physics, biology — or whatever is the focus of their discipline. But they also need to realize that this dedication expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications. This is why a discipline requires not just research but also teaching. Non-experts need access to what experts have learned, and experts need to make sure that their research remains in contact with general human concerns. The classroom is the primary locus of such contact.”

But what is the reality?

Banishing the Thinking, Questioning Mind from Classrooms

2011-11-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

Information is static. It is thinking that transforms information into something worth pursuing. So in this information age, are we equipping our students to think or are we just directing them to more and more information? To more facts, more opinions, more nonsense.

And how about the need to understand questions. As R. G. Collingwood argued, we can understand a text only when we have understood the question to which it is an answer. In a sense, the text gives us "possible" answers to only those questions that have been asked. And the same text will vary based on the angles from which questions are posed.

However, a majority of our classrooms are not at all capable of infusing this spirit of enquiry. Despite all technological advances we still seem to be pathetically conservative in our understanding of education. It is still all about exams, professional courses, career and survival. Yes, survival. How to survive the competition and how to focus on self-centered growth. And for this we need measurable outcomes--outcomes that are already determined. And if outcomes are already determined and education is just about measuring where the student stands in relation to the expected outcomes, then what is the role of thinking and questioning (despite all this talk about higher-order thinking). If you already know what someone's higher order thinking will result in, it's not higher order thinking. Let's modestly call it problem-solving.

Education is not just about gathering knowledge. It is not even just about learning to apply this knowledge in some practical context. It is also about learning to question knowledge, methods and accepted wisdom. This sense of questioning and thinking is not to be mistaken with some corporate terms like "out-of-the-box" thinking--which is just another nicer term for problem-solving. Yes, education is not just about problem-solving. It's also about learning to pose new problems which may not have a neat solution. It's not just about learning to reason or accepting truth based on evidence. It's also about about being compassionate to fellow human beings and being open to other ways of thinking, other ways of living and other faiths and beliefs. It's about coming face to face with the ephemeral nature of human life. It's about asking stupid questions like "What is the meaning of life?"

Use of Multimedia in Indian Classrooms

2011-01-21T00:33:00.000-08:00

Here is an ad that has been playing on TV for the last few months: The ad opens with a traditional classroom, with a teacher talking and students sitting looking bored out of their skull. Cut to an interactive whiteboard with multimedia visuals. Pan to students who are suddenly energised and eager to learn.

What does one read from this? That a teacher’s monotonous voice will put the class to sleep while a multimedia demonstration with its colourful illustrations, sound effects and voiceover will keep the students awake? However, both the lecture and the multimedia mode seem to share the same assumption—that education is nothing but the transfer of information. That it is a one-way traffic: it either flows from the teacher to the students or from the smart-board to the students. The student remains a passive body whose only responsibility is to assimilate information and answer questions during tests.

If this is the way ICT is going to be adopted in schools, then there is nothing much in it for students. Except that they now get to see a few concepts in visual form. First we used chalk and talk; now we move to observe and listen. Follow this up with drill and test, and we think we have done our duty. While it is a practical necessity for students to score good grades in exams, most of us would agree that it is not the only purpose of education. We still seem to be stuck in the old behaviourist approach of teaching to achieve predictable learning outcomes. If the aim of education is to equip students to set goals for themselves (not just to pursue given goals), then this approach to education is regressive.

Children are natural learners. They learn through experiences and by tinkering with things. They learn by observing things and asking questions. They learn in ways we can’t even imagine. Technology alone will be able to do precious little, if it is introduced without concern for the way children learn and make meanings. We need an adoption model that integrates technology with effective teaching-learning practices and provide scaffolding and space for students to learn on their own.

As a start, classrooms should promote an environment of inquiry, experimentation and dialogue. We should lay bare the porous borders that compartmentalise different subjects. We should acknowledge the differences in aptitude and provide room for each child to build on his or her strengths.

Education and Politics

2010-07-27T06:11:00.000-07:00

When I was in school, Civics was considered the most boring subject. Full of constitutional and legal details, all effort was made to make this subject as dry as possible! So, I was delighted when I read this bit in the National Curriculum Framework:

“It is suggested that instead of Civics, the term Political Science be used. Civics appeared in the Indian school curriculum in the colonial period against the background of increasing 'disloyalty' among Indians towards the Raj. Emphasis on obedience and loyalty were the key features of Civics. Political Science treats civil society as the sphere that produces sensitive, interrogative, deliberative, and transformative citizens.”

Layers of Learning

2010-02-17T21:30:00.000-08:00

A Counterview on Preservation

2009-12-07T22:16:00.000-08:00

Adoor Gopalakrishnan, an award winning Malayalam film director, in one of his interviews talks about improvisation and contextualisation of performances in the context of Kerala's art forms. According to him no performance is a repetition of an earlier performance regardless of the sameness of its theme. He adds that the modern obsession with preservation (recording, documenting, etc.) is a western import.

This can be rubbished as the romantic view of an artist steeped in nostalgia. But there is some merit in this argument even in the context of education. At a time when one section of the e-learning fraternity is constantly arguing against the repetition of live lectures and replacing them with recorded ones, we tend to forget the fact that a great lecturer is also a great performer. She improvises and works on her argument each time she talks about the same concepts. Being a great fan of the TED lectures, I'm obviously in favour of recording, too; it's just that recording is not a replacement for a live lecture.

Excerpts from the Adoor interview:

“The problem with recording is that it would be taken for the norm. One of the great qualities of our culture is that nothing is staged or performed with a view to be preserved. Every performance is for that evening. Tomorrow it will be created again.

Once I went to Kadammanitta to watch Padayani. In the late evening they were all busy painting makeshift masks and making the costumes and those huge and spectacular headgears. All that is done on fresh arecanut sheaths and tender coconut leaves lending the make-up a certain ethnic authenticity. They take on a special glow in the light of the oil torches. Once the performance is over, those headgears and perishables are simply discarded. That night, when I came away I brought some of the masks with me. But after a day or two, they just withered and shrank. A Padayani performer doesn't have to create anything for preservation. He is confident that he can always create it anew, anytime, and always afresh. It is a great concept. Take our 'kalamezhuthu' for instance. We draw this colourful and wonderfully intricate Kalam only to erase it at the end of the ritual. This obsession with preservation is totally western--this idea of plucking something from its natural context and keeping it. For us it is part of a continuum. Our climate is not quite kind to the idea of preservation either. These torrential rains and sultry summers don't allow any kind of preservation. It destroys and in turn replenishes too. A summer would dry up everything. But rains would give everything a rebirth.”

Knowing

2009-11-24T22:36:00.000-08:00

Knowing is the act of appropriating knowledge as one’s own. It’s a more nuanced term than learning. If educational environments start paying more attention to the nature of knowing, we would probably see some drastic changes in the way we approach teaching and learning.

For one, knowledge is presented as hard, concrete, and incorruptible by individual minds. And the way to reach this hard substance and acquire it is often laid out on a unidirectional map. On the other hand, imagine knowledge as malleable, clay… and knowing as the act of playing with it, making models of it.

Look at what happened to computers and why there has been an explosion of ideas in the field of computing. From intimidating codes and scary looking interfaces, the computer evolved as a friendly plaything for the average user. Playing (not necessarily in the sense of playing games) leads to experimentation and new ways of using things.

What is missing in educational curriculum is this sense of play, this sense of tinkering.

The Production of "Truth"

2009-11-10T06:14:00.000-08:00

Here's an article by Marcus Munafò and Jonathan Flint on how scientists end up publishing papers that does not represent truth, pressed by financial interests and the pressure to publish in prestigious journals.

An excerpt:

"Outright scientific fraud is rare, but less deviant behavior may be much more common. For example, researchers may run multiple statistical tests on their data: they keep analysing the results in slightly different ways (known as "data mining") until they get a P-value less than 0.05. This is tempting because it is much easier to get one's research published if the findings are "statistically significant" (i.e. the P-value is less than 0.05) – a phenomenon known as "publication bias".

With enough data, and by running enough statistical tests, it is easy enough to find a significant effect, given the probabilistic nature of the statistical methods used. And with enough people trying, this effect might even be found more than once, giving the appearance of replication. The problem is that the results almost certainly won't be true."

Preparing for a "better" tomorrow

2009-10-28T05:42:00.000-07:00

ICSE has decided not to listen to Kapil Sibal—they will go ahead with a board exam in Class 10 and award marks instead of grades. Essentially, no change. The board probably prefers to be transparent in their belief in competition, differentiation (bright/not so bright, lazy/hardworking, etc.), and “performance”-based rewards—all of these against a set criteria on which students have no control. After all, students are being schooled to believe that if they perform, compete, and live up to the pressures, they can be achievers. If not, what awaits them is shame and disappointment—or, the acceptance of a mediocre life.

Educational Reforms - A Matter of Opinion?

2009-09-28T08:24:00.000-07:00

The considerations that go into making a public policy, especially on education which does not have a quantifiable economic output, is a complex one. But most times reforms are driven by things that are obvious to the reformer or the social class that the reformer represents.

Reforms should first be justified by the need for reforms--although there could be multiple versions of needs as well as reforms, at least we need a ground from where to start. Here are some fundamental questions: What are the ills that are plaguing our school system (school system, yes--not necessarily education system)? Should schools assess students’ progress and if so how? Is the school system in tune with the changing times? Is it necessary for a school system to keep pace with the times and if so how? Do we need a school system to begin with? Considering we have the answers to all the above questions, on what basis do we address them? I have my answers, you have yours and reformers will have theirs. But these answers mean nothing if these are not supported by hard evidence (is there such a thing as hard evidence in the field of education?).

On the other hand, reforms are most often the product of certain belief systems. When you have a belief system, you only tend to look for evidences that support your beliefs. But these beliefs or ideologies (if that word has any meaning left in it) are always shrouded by the articulation of good intentions and the evocation of some universal values (and these sound quite impressive when expressed in public school accents on English news channels in India).

Very simply put, educational reforms end up being a matter of opinion--worse still, the opinion of a few people.

Gaps and Silences

2009-08-11T23:41:00.000-07:00

Gaps and silences are essential in a world beset by information proliferation. Our sense of self is spread too thin across Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and Flickr. We are constantly contesting in a reality show, performing to an imagined virtual audience. Wisecracks, one-liners, personal existential statements which are of no significance to anyone else--anything for "five minutes of immortality". It’s the enduring charm of the published word, now played out as conversations in virtual space.

No wonder we consider simulations and games as high-value propositions today. It is not just because of their complexity or engagement factors but because they reflect contemporary life (where we've mastered the art of role-playing) far better than traditional media.

Writing dialogues for e-learning: The “typical” trap

2009-05-27T01:05:00.000-07:00

I’ve had a few e-learning writers ask me this question: What is the best way to figure out how “typical” Americans speak? My answer is “This is not the right question.”

Who is a typical American, or British or Indian? There is simply no answer to this question unless you want to open a cultural Pandora’s Box and insist on finding a mythical answer. You may find some commonalities in speech patterns in the people belonging to a certain community or living in a particular region or even a country. But try foisting these commonalities onto a “typical person” and what you get is someone who resembles no one. America and UK are countries with vast immigrant populations and none of these people speak like a “typical person”. In India we may not have many immigrants, but you cannot imagine someone from Andhra speaking like someone from Rajasthan (you may also find some things that are common). And it’s not just the difference in language (Telugu vs. Rajasthani) that I’m talking about but the differences in expression and the manner of speaking. Of course, this is not to say that everyone in a particular state speaks the same way.

You have the species (Homo sapiens), races, regions, nations, states, towns, residential areas, communities, sub-communities, families, educational institutions, factories, offices and real living individuals who belong to any of these spaces—who are different in many ways and common in some. So, instead of asking how a typical American, British or Indian speaks, we must start with figuring out our characters. What is her name? How does she look like? Where was she brought up (find the specific locality as opposed to just saying Bombay or New York)? What are some of her prejudices? How does she react when she is angry? Does she have any particular mannerism or an accent? What kind of humour appeals to her? Who does she hang out with? What is she likely to say in the context that you are building for your scenario?

A word of caution: Don’t just invent the answers to all of these questions (you can invent some but not all). The best way to do this is to spend at least a few days observing your target audience (assuming your characters resemble your target audience). But if you can’t do that, then the least you can do is to get answers to these questions from your client or from someone who’s been with them. If even this can’t be done, then go ahead and invent your characters using commonsense and imagination, and hope that your target audience will be able to relate to them! But by all means, avoid starting with the “typical” person.

Evangelical Positions

2009-04-27T00:42:00.000-07:00

An evangelist is not a seeker of truth. On the other hand, he considers himself the privileged possessor of truth. He will not engage with anyone from other camps as a partner but either as an enemy or an object of ridicule. A greater part of the history of colonialism, the cold war between America and the erstwhile USSR, and the rise of fascism are prime examples of evangelical positions and their consequences.

An evangelist often has nothing new to say—he is constantly packaging and repackaging the same arguments, the same rhetoric, and the same persuasions in order to convert (both enemy and friend) or decimate those who hold an opposite or different view.

Evangelists don’t come only from political and religious camps—there are Darwinian evangelists, intelligent design evangelists… even Web 2.0 evangelists. There is nothing wrong with having a conviction and better still supporting this conviction with evidences, proofs and logic. But that does not provide us the legitimacy to speak from a moral high ground when we engage with people who do not hold our convictions. Because a seeker of truth, however convinced he may be of a proposition, always leaves room for questioning the truths that he holds dear.

The least we can do is to be aware of the evangelist in ourselves.

Stories and Learning (Stories—Not Scenarios, Not Branched Simulations)

2009-02-02T03:46:00.000-08:00

If you judge learning through the lens of learning objectives and the measurement of behavioral outcomes, you might as well not depend on stories to aid learning. Stories move you. They make you think. They provide insights. They have high recall. However, emotions, thought and insight are ambiguous terms. And what you recall from a story are the things that moved you, that made you think, that laid bare some meanings. The recall is personal—not exactly what the “teacher” or “SME” wants. So, you can’t go back and tell your learners “That’s not what I meant at all. That’s not it, at all.”

Listening to or reading a story is not a passive exercise—the reader or the listener interacts with a story through the sheer act of interpretation even after the story has been told. For e-learning designers, interactivity mostly constitutes drag, click or text entry—and now game-play, collaboration and personalization. But that’s just a Web idea of interactivity. Interactivity also means interaction with characters, plot, theme, and ideas—without necessarily having to click on options and alter outcomes.

So, you can use stories to teach. But you can’t close their meanings.

The Sharpening Lines of Division

2009-01-27T01:29:00.000-08:00

Let’s face it: there are no equal opportunities in this world order. (In fact, there’s something wrong with the phrase “equal opportunities’; it should have been “equal access to opportunities.” But changing the phrase doesn’t solve the problem because there is no equal access either.) This is especially true when it comes to education. Opportunities are defined mostly by the fortunes or misfortunes of one’s birth. In India, it means that a poor child gets to go to a municipal school (regional language medium) with a high probability of an early dropout whereas a richer child gets to join a premium international school and from there goes on to study in any of the top Indian professional colleges or universities abroad. The middle classes, depending on where they are in the middle, choose between a government-aided English-medium private school and a private CBSE or ICSE school.

In the last 15 to 20 years, these lines of division have only become sharper (with a steady increase in the number of private schools) and no governmental policy has had any impact on bridging the divide. (The current Right to Education Bill has included 25% reservation in private schools for children from low income households; the bill has not yet been implemented.) As a result, the richer schools have managed to make poverty invisible inside school campuses. This is not just about reinforcing the class divide; it has more to do with shutting out the physical presence of poverty and replacing it with the glorification of charity. (Writing cheques for charity is a way of avoiding living in the presence of the “objects of charity”.)

A decade ago, state-funded schools, despite their deficiencies, enabled different economic and social classes to mix and learn from each other. These schools also placed more or less equal privilege on regional language—the language of local people and literature—and English—the language of commerce in today’s world order. However, today it is exclusive education (a stiff fee, posh infrastructure, teachers trained in the UK or the US, and little stress on regional language literature) that appeals more to the middle class parents, who as children most probably attended state-funded schools. Naturally, mainstream films, TV and the press are so interested in playing up these middle class aspirations that constructive debates around the growing divide are looked down up on as old fashioned debates of the 1970s.

Even the so called alternative schools that pride themselves on innovative curriculum and teaching methods have priced themselves so high that they too ensure that the vast majority of children from low income households are kept out of their premises.

Basic education is a right and not a commodity to be purchased. It’s not about making education accessible to all—it’s about ensuring access to well-trained teachers (who are capable of not only transmitting knowledge but who can also enable students to question what they learn), sound educational curriculum and content (which includes technology-supported learning), a decent infrastructure (clean toilets, working libraries, well-maintained playgrounds, and easy access to the Internet among others), a sensible student-teacher ratio, and access to a social network (school mates) that cuts across different economic classes. I’m not advocating the nationalization of all schools—variety in curriculum and teaching methods can make the field of education richer. However, providing variety in educational experiences is not an excuse to strengthen class divisions (the fee structure of elite schools automatically excludes the poorer sections of society).

Implementing 25% reservation in private schools for economically disadvantaged children will be a good start. However, all schools—be they private or government funded—need to address the issue of bridging the class divide and ensure that the field of education remains a level playing field. I know this sounds naïve in the absence of workable alternatives, but I believe that alternatives can only emerge if we start seeing education as part of the collective, public space and not just as a means for individual success stories.

Corporate E-learning Rules for 2009

2009-01-19T23:38:00.000-08:00

1. Don’t bring down your prices; rather, strip down your solutions.

2. Think about how stripped-down solutions can produce the right outcomes. (Therefore, innovation in 2009 will be about coming up with price-sensitive solutions that produce results.)

3. Focus on outcomes before thinking about formats (a multimedia game is only a format—the outcome is performance).

4. When you select formats and develop methodologies, focus more on workability than on packaging. (Packaging is a kind of mask. In times like these, we need more honesty and fewer masks. In fact, one of the reasons for the current crisis is the use of too many masks. Remember collateralized debt obligations (CDO)?)

5. Test your solutions and see if they work. What doesn’t work doesn’t have the right to exist. We have a collective responsibility to ensure that the money spent on learning produces the results that it is supposed to produce. If everyone in the learning profession had insisted on this aspect at all times, we wouldn’t have witnessed learning budgets being cut drastically even during lean times.

Computer Penetration in Schools in India

2009-01-19T02:07:00.000-08:00

“Despite India being an IT superpower, barely 14.25% schools have computers, with a huge gap between states. In Karnataka and Andhra—seats of big IT companies—only 11.44% and 13.46% schools, respectively, have computers. In Delhi, Chandigarh, Kerala and Puducherry, computers are available in 60%-70% schools. In Bihar, the figure is less than 1%, West Bengal 1.79% and UP 3.3%.”

As reported in The Times of India on Jan 16.

Shouldn’t educational technology professionals in India be talking something more fundamental than games and gadgets?

Plans, Challenges, Predictions

2009-01-05T05:05:00.000-08:00

Response to LCB's Big Question for the Month

Plan

Avoid going with the flow of trends. When a new trend or a new tool is being announced almost everyday, it is something to be skeptical about. So much has been written about the changing use of media and millennial preferences that we have probably failed to see what was really changing. Web 2.0 cannot wish away formal learning in the foreseeable future—the idea is to make learning richer using technology, not poorer. (It’s a poor strategy to play the wisdom of crowd against the wisdom of specialists—both have their place).

A question to think about: Why do people leave corporate jobs to join graduate programs when they could have just picked up those skills informally at the workplace?

Challenge

Finding answers to the following questions:

1. What are we in this profession for? Are we genuinely interested in helping people learn or are we just peddling our beliefs and pet fads as what constitute good learning? Or, is it just about sticking to the client brief even when we instinctively know it's an ineffective solution? If we are genuinely interested, how much do we push our clients to figure out whether people really learn from our solutions, how significant those learnings are for them, and whether they get to apply that learning at work?
2. Do we really matter as a profession? What happens if our kind disappears and we are not replaced?
3. At a very practical level, what impact will the R word have on us?

Prediction

Opportunities to sell learning will reduce. However, opportunities for learning will increase.

On Collaborative Learning

2008-12-22T00:19:00.000-08:00

Collaborative learning seems to be a much misunderstood term. This is my take on it: Collaborative learning is not about achieving mastery in a certain subject; it’s about learning to collaborate. The topic or project for learning is only the context within which collaboration takes place.

If learning is only about processing information related to a specific subject, retaining this information and being able to apply the principles of the subject in multiple contexts, then probably collaborative learning is a distraction. Because what you get in collaboration are multiple foci, active and passive players, relevant as well as non-relevant conversations, dominance and reaction, and the many things that group dynamics bring to the fore. Therefore, in a sense, even collaborative learning helps one process certain type of information, except that this information may not strictly be about the subject in question but about how each person in the group was approaching this subject in the presence of a group.

In short, the focus of collaborative learning is on collaboration rather than on “learning” in the brain science sense of the term. And because collaboration is a critical life skill, students will need repeated and spaced practice, context (which is provided by the learning topics and projects), practical application (instead of learning about collaboration in textbooks, collaborate in real situations), and a greater understanding of peer groups.

Watch that Hate

2008-12-05T02:54:00.000-08:00

The live TV coverage of the terror attacks on Mumbai that lasted from November 26 to 29 has exposed our children to the horrible face of real terror like never before—unlike the kind they see in cartoons and movies. Children are sensible enough to distinguish between fiction and reality. So we, as parents and educators, cannot avoid answering their questions on terror and the people who unleashed it. But we need to be careful with our answers and admit our lack of certainty, instead of getting caught in our own hate theories.

Emotions have been running high in this city. There is anger, frustration, fear and helplessness. In the process, you also see a lot of hate building up. Hatred towards politicians, towards a country, towards a community. But we need to watch this hate before we pass it on to our children and poison their impressionable minds.

When an event of this scale happens, our immediate response is to react against something. We want the government to act. Tighten our security measures. Do something. This is natural because we fear for our lives. And we want to bring the guilty to justice. That's why we have a government, which is supposed to act and protect the lives of its citizens and visitors. When a government or a system(meaning not just the ministers or the political class but the law enforcers, bureaucrats and other administrators involved in the affairs of the state and central government) fails to deliver, its citizens are usually left with only limited options—talk, write, complain, take out protest marches, express solidarity and hope someone will listen. While it is extremely important for us to react, we must also make an attempt to understand why all this is happening—not to excuse or justify terror, but to avoid jumping to conclusions, to avoid jingoism and communal hatred.

Things are magnified based on which area we focus our attention on. And truths are altered based on the prism we choose (or have access) to look at the world. So much depends on where we are born, where we grew up and where we think we belong—in addition to the various things we have allowed ourselves to be influenced by. This is all the more reason for us to behave responsibly and not hand out our assumptions as certainties to our children.

The Public Space of Education

2008-07-27T09:27:00.000-07:00

Democracy is shaped by politics and public opinion. Our politicians don’t have PhDs in political science or public administration. A majority of our political columnists and correspondents are also not “academically qualified” to write on politics. But democracy has survived despite the lack of specialists to run the field of politics. This is because politics belongs to the public space. And debates in the public space are not directed by specialised educational qualifications but by ideological beliefs and leanings, commonsense and practical decision making, memory of events and interpretations, and the ability to read subtexts and make connections.

Education belongs to the public space, too. Because the most important aim of education is not just to provide students with knowledge and skills and make professionals and entrepreneurs out of them; it is to help shape responsible citizenship in a civil society. Education, like politics, has a role to play in reacting to terror, global tensions, deprivation, consumerism and depleting natural resources. And this debate cannot afford to be restricted to the boardroom of academics. We need more public participation to decide school curricula, to provide students with analytical tools that take human emotions into account and to let them know that puzzles far outnumber the answers that we know.